Course details

Name: ENGL - 228

Title: AMERICAN LITERATURE: BEGINNINGS TO 1890

Section: 01

Semester: Spring - 2023

Credits: 3

Description:
This course will review the literary record of the rich imagination of the American peoples, beginning with the original Native inhabitants and ending after the cataclysmic Civil War. It's a lot of imagination, and many different cultures and languages contributed to it. We will focus on English-language documents, in some cases translations.
American Literature is the first of the great post-colonial literatures in English, inheriting the long history of English writers but, following a successful revolution and liberation from the Empire, needing to find its own voice to express the realities of its own history and identity: "Dorothy, We're not in London (Canterbury, Kent, Yorkshire, Salisbury, Stratford) any more." Or in Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Italy or Ireland.
The English were not first in our region; The Lenape were here for some 1000 years at least and their ancestors much longer. The Iroquois dominated territory from French Canada to Illinois and Tennessee in the 17th century. The first Europeans in New Jersey were the Swedes followed by the Dutch. Many Germans settled all across the colonies. For 200 years the French occupied and traded--when the Natives allowed them--across a long arc of territory through the middle of North America from the mouth of the St. Lawrence river, across the Great Lakes and down the entire Mississippi river to New Orleans. And the Spanish and Mexico claimed and occupied all the far western territories until 1848--and Florida until 1821. West Africans were coerced immigrants in all the colonies beginning in 1619. All these cultures contributed something to the imagination, to the "imaginary", of what it would come to mean to be "American"--or "Norteamericano" as everyone else in the western hemisphere calls us.
We will read some of the inspiring, tragic and harrowing stories of discovery, conflict and conquest: the Shipwreck of Cabeza de Vaca, the History of New Mexico (1610!) by Perez de Villagra, We will read some of the most influential and enduring texts of the pre-independence period (before 1783)--John Smith (the Pocahontas story), Wm Bradford, Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor, Ben Franklin, Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Olaudah Equiano--stories of conflict and concession with Native Americans (Mary Rowlandson, Samson Occom, Tecumseh), the arguments about slavery and its eventual abolition after a great war. We will follow the emergence of truly unique, and diverse, American voices and writing forms and styles as they emerge in the 1830s, '40s and '50s--Washington Irving, R W Emerson, H D Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, among others. We will dedicate some time toward the end of the course becoming fully acquainted with the two greatest poets of the 19th century: Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. We will develop our skills in the analytical reading of texts, the ability to articulate personal engagement with that reading, and capability to write evidence-based commentary on those texts.

Last updated on 2022-10-28 By Gingerich Willard (gingerichw)

Schedule: Monday,Thursday From 2:15 pm To 3:30 pm

Graduation requirements:

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

Teaching Faculty: Gingerich Willard (gingerichw)

Is course canceled: No