Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

by Suzy Hansen

“American studies” departments were popping up to establish America as a distinct civilization, an endeavor that grew out of the era of Cold War attempts to counter the popularity of Marxism. Similarly, the University of Iowa writing program’s patrons were Luce-like conservatives crusading for the United States in the Cold War. They wanted to design a literature program that “fortified democratic values at home and abroad.” To start, the University of Iowa founders sought out specific types of American writers. They disregarded people who were devoted to social justice and leftist causes that, in their view, were juvenile. They encouraged, instead, those writers whose work was “preoccupied by family and self.” Once in the classroom, University of Iowa professors taught their students to avoid politics in favor of composing literature that would illuminate the human and smaller moments of life. As Bennett observes, a specific sensibility spread across America’s landscape of fiction, one that celebrated beautiful sentences and quiet observations, suburban malaise and inward-looking anxieties, a literary form that would naturally tend toward the domestic. “Today’s creative-writing department specializes in sensory and biographical memory,” Bennett writes, “such as how icicles broken from church eaves on winter afternoons taste of asphalt.”