Valletta (King's College)

General Information

Abstract:

This course introduces American literary traditions. Each group of readings gives some idea of historical contexts, ongoing conflicts, styles, and recurrent themes. Alternative interpretations of these points allow for a dialogic study, sometimes guided by the ways that later writers reconstructed earlier American experience. Somewhat like the writer, interpreters try to comprehend meaning through the process of evoking it. Native and Colonial sources represent cultural forms of orality, myth, and belief that writers of the Enlightenment learned from and critiqued in quasi-scientific terms. Certain literary and rhetorical issues seem to persist, however, as if America were a scripted nation since the Revolution. Later writers have often shaped a democratic aesthetic out of diverse, changing materials in hopes of completing what the Revolution had begun. The course tries to develop means of reconstructing if not participating in that complex, some believe, unfinished, task.

Population

This is an earlier American literature course, serving about thirty sophomore and junior English majors and is run in a combination lecture and discussion format.

Bibliography and Texts:

Lauter, et al., Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume I.

Herman Melville , Moby Dick, on library reserve.

General Writing and Pedagogy:

Students are required to write three essays, one in dialogue format, and to give an oral report. Students already have a stock of impressions and beliefs, including ones about individuality and diversity, that just about all writers challenge. Writing and speaking become ways of defining identities. The early oral report gives the class a sense of themselves as a community. They are encouraged to take any position that they can support and defend. We develop evaluation criteria as a group and try to encourage one another to make insightful connections and to recognize motifs, ongoing issues, heteroglossia, dialogic resources.

Readings and Annotations

Unit #1

DISCOVERY, PROJECTIONS, AND MYTH

Myth and culture, orality and literature

Colonial period to 1700: Overview 3-21 Native American traditions 22-25 Navajo 40-52 Iroquois 56-59 Tsimshiah 64-66

Discovering a "New World" 67-69

(2 class sessions) Columbus 69-80 [Quincentennial] Virgin of Guadalupe 81-89 Pueblo Indian Revolt 52-55 Spanish Reconquest 431-40

Quiz 9/10

Assignments 1 and 2 (written and oral components)

Unit # 2

SETTLING AND REIMAGINING NEW ENGLAND

(Five class sessions) Augustinian and other beliefs 146-48 Bradford 218-27 Mather 408-20 Winthrop 188-99, 204-10 Williams 232 Bradstreet 256-61 (Father), 269-73 Hawthorne Scarlet Letter "Young Goodman Brown", "Mrs. Hutchinson", "My Kinsman, Major Molineau" Edwards "A Divine and Supernatural Light"

Quiz 10/1

Assignment A-2; written and oral components

Unit #3

INVENTING AMERICA

World of change, women's sphere, Enlightenment

Great Awakening, Cultural diversity 448-69 Jefferson , Declaration 952-64, Slavery 970-7, Natural Aristocracy 990-94 Wheatley 712-28 Franklin Autobiography 857-81 Douglass Narrative 1640-1700 Jacobs Incidents 1726-51 Melville Billy Budd

Quiz 10-27

Assignment 3: written component

Unit #4

AMERICAN STYLES, IDENTITIES, DIVERSITIES PERSONIFIED

(11 class sessions)

Crevecoeur, "What is an American?" Irving , "Rip Van Winkle" Cooper fr. Pioneers 1282-92 Crockett , "A Pretty Predicament Poe , "Ligeia," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Purloined Letter," Selected poetry "Philosophy of Composition" Apes, "Indian Looking Glass for White Man" 1753-59 Emerson , "The Poet," Nature, "Circles," "American Scholar," selected poetry Fuller 1580-90 fr. Woman in the Nineteenth Century 1604-26, Letter XVII Truth 1908-1915, Stowe 2384-93 Thoreau from Walden, "Walking," "Resistance to Civil Government" Whitman , 1855 Preface, Song of Myself "Vigil Strange," "When Lilacs ..." Melville , "Bartleby the Scrivener," From Moby Dick (library reserve) chs. 36, 41, 42 American Art, nineteenth century

selected poetry from 21, 49, 67, 84, 211, 249, 258, 288, 301, 308, 315, 322, 435, 448, 632, 640, 668, 670, 754, 1129, 1400, 1461

Quiz 12/3

Assignment 4: Creating a Dialogue/Conversation Among Writers

Final Examination