Pt. 1. Lecture 1. American fiction and the individualist creed
Lecture 2. The American self : ghost in disguise
Lecture 3. What produces "nobody?"
Lecture 4. Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio : writing as the talking cure
Lecture 5. Winesburg, a new American prose-poetry
Lecture 6. Hemingway : journalist, writer, legend
Lecture 7. Hemingway as trauma artist
Lecture 8. Hemingway's cunning art
Pt. 2. Lecture 9. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the night : Fitzgerald's second act
Lecture 10. Fitzgerald's psychiatric tale
Lecture 11. Dick's dying fall, an American story
Lecture 12. Light in August : midpoint of the Faulkner career
Lecture 13. Light in August : determinism vs. freedom
Lecture 14. Light in August : novel as poem, or, beyond Holocaust
Lecture 15. Zora Neal Hurston's Their eyes were watching God, canon explosion
Lecture 16. Their eyes were watching God, from romance to myth
Pt. 3: Lecture 17. Flannery O'Connor, realist of distances
Lecture 18. O'Connor, taking the measure of the region
Lecture 19. William Burroughs, bad boy of American literature
Lecture 20. Naked lunch, the body in culture
Lecture 21. Naked lunch : power and exchange in the viral world
Lecture 22. Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse five : apocalypse now
Lecture 23. Vonnegut's world : Tralfamadore or trauma?
Lecture 24. Robert Coover, postmodern fabulator
Pt. 4: Lecture 25. The public burning : execution at Times Square
Lecture 26. Robert Coover : fiction as fission
Lecture 27. Toni Morrison's Sula, from trauma to freedom
Lecture 28. Sula : new Black woman
Lecture 29. Don DeLillo : decoder of American frequencies
Lecture 30. White noise, representing the environment
Lecture 31. DeLillo and American dread
Lecture 32. Conclusion : nobody's home.
