How Foreigners See America: Does America Have Any Culture? Chuck Klosterman goes to Germany to teach a class. His students teach him a lesson about how the world views us.
Due to the size of the classroom, I was forced to immediately reduce this number to twenty. I was unsure how to do that fairly, so I decided to give them a competitive online essay test before the first day of class. The question was this: “Who do you consider the most interesting twentieth-century American — not necessarily the most historically important, but the individual you find most personally compelling?”
Kurt Cobain was not selected by anyone. Dave Grohl, however, was. Cobain was also referenced — somewhat negatively — in a paper focused on Taylor Hanson.
Perhaps the most provocative essay argued for a tie between Ernest Hemingway and O. J. Simpson. The author’s point seemed to be that Hemingway was “not the typical American,” but that Simpson sort of was.
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