America Where Are You Now?: Comprehensive Instructor's Guide

Course Description

This course conducts an intensive study of S.A. Pieper’s America Where Are You Now? as a work of literary architecture that operates simultaneously as political thriller, cultural satire, and sustained meditation on American self-invention. The novel follows Ascher Kane—whose surname deliberately echoes Citizen Kane—as he transforms from conservative golden boy to viral political revolutionary, only to discover that his rebellion may be as hollow as the systems he opposes.
What distinguishes this course is its emphasis on discovery. The novel contains a sophisticated network of embedded literary references—to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” Welles’s Citizen Kane, and Steppenwolf’s “Monster/America”—that function not as decoration but as structural DNA. Students learn to read at multiple levels simultaneously, developing skills in close reading, intertextual analysis, media criticism, and political theory.