Midwestern Stories

Midwestern Stories is a two-course series that has taken place in the Department of English in the fall and spring semesters of 2020-21. It has focused on student investigation of representations of Midwestern identity in various types of media. Indiana Humanities’ One State/One Story novel pick for 2020, Jean Thompson’s The Year We Left Home, has been central to Midwestern Stories’ thematic core. The novel engages and challenges popular narratives of the Midwest, including 1) that of a past in which agriculture and industry thrived and people were fulfilled by their participation in building America and 2) that of the contemporary Midwest as a stagnant milieu with little to offer the next generation. Paralleling these two popular narratives of the Midwest, the first course of Midwestern Stories focused on representations of the Midwestern past while the second focuses on the Midwestern present.