Course details

Name: ENGL - 326

Title: EARLY AMERICAN LITERATURE

Section: 01

Semester: Fall - 2017

Credits: 3

Description:
ENGL 326: Early American Literature: Stranger Neighbors

This historically-oriented course, organized around three tests and one paper, emerges from the provisional premise that a hobgoblin of sorts haunts the earliest writings of Anglo-American settlement, the monster of mutual dissatisfaction. These early documents encouraged and normalized sympathetic feeling among settlers, and occasionally between settlers and natives. These writers thought strenuously about why such sympathy was important, and speculated frequently on the dangers of failing. Focusing on shorter works like poems, sermons, and personal anecdotes, we will see in more vivid detail how settlers aspired to achieve transcendent experiences of feeling. Even when those texts succeeded, however, the ongoing struggle of settlement would be the unrelenting and vague possibility of not liking your neighbors all that much. Ambivalence and aggression, we will see, persist throughout these texts, which were written across the course of a century and a half of settlement. In them, many writers aspired to prevent dissatisfaction from congealing into hostility, yet they still howl, like ghouls, “I don’t much like you.” Three and a half centuries later, Americans of all origins ought to be interested in the ways that we are not the first to respond “likewise.”

Instructor Bio:
Ana Schwartz is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania; before that she completed her undergraduate degree at the University of California at Berkeley. Her dissertation describes how colonial settlers in the seventeenth century tried to make sense of different, perhaps new emotions, as well as different ways of experiencing and talking about emotions. In addition to composing new interpretations of early modern and colonial texts, she writes about contemporary Latin American literature, and movies about outer space. Her favorite book might be Moby-Dick.

Last updated on By Harrison Kim (harrisonk)

Schedule: Monday,Wednesday From 10:00 am To 11:15 am

Graduation requirements:

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  • Any Literature (1e)
  • Genre Study (Poetry)
  • Pre-1900 American (TE 1c)
  • Other American (TE 1d)
  • Pre-1700 (1a)
  • Pre-1800 (1b)
  • Pre-1900 (1c)
  • Ethnic Studies (3b)

Teaching Faculty: Schwartz Ana (schwartzan)

Is course canceled: No