Blog for December 5: Emily Dickinson

For this blog assignment, please write an interpretation of Emily Dickinson's poem "I dwell in possibility" (#466). But here's the catch: the interpretation must be based on the functions of the em-dashes within the poem. Of course, you're still writing on diction and poetic devices, but they must be presented in concert with her em-dashes.
300 words or up. Please post by 10am Monday.

Detective Fiction Evolution and Market Forces

Follow this link to a truly fascinating and original piece of literary scholarship by Franco Moretti, in which he assembles research on and subsequently hypothesizes about the evolution of detective fiction.

The article title is "The Slaughterhouse of Literature."

Blog for Friday, November 18th

With Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe, we have two of the most significant American literary figures writing the way out of slavery. Yet, these two texts are very different in their literary mode, authors’ life experiences of slavery, and intended audience. For this blog, I want you to focus just on how the texts work and not discuss biography. Please write 250-300 words to make two comparisons. Each comparison should have one passage from Douglass and one from Stowe. Each comparison will do close reading work on both passages involved. This is not a preference exercise of one over the other, but an articulation of divergent approaches to the same issue. (As an example, you might pick passages that engage with gender, family/children/parents, Christianity and slavery, and, yes, animals…)

Post the blog by 10am Friday.

Frederick Douglass, retold

Here's the Funny or Die video of Frederick Douglass

Drunk History Vol. 5 w/ Will Ferrell, Don Cheadle & Zooey Deschanel from Will Ferrell

Yelping with Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy is one of the most important living American novelists, and really one of the most important American novelists of all time. More subjectively, I recommend Blood Meridian as his best. The Road was popular, but cannibals roasting babies isn't really my deal. And his novel Child of God was recommended to me by a female scholar from the Czech Republic--she told me she reads it every Christmas day. Now, I would not recommend that...

Follow this link to a humorous writer imagining if Cormac McCarthy wrote Yelp reviews.

Nimble, lithe fingers

I also wanted to draw attention to Harding Davis as part of a tradition of social reform literature and thought that focuses on industrialization's marks on women, children, and the family structure. We noted the absence of a functioning family, and in this story Hugh and the other men do have work, but in different areas than the women. Note how the men work on the fires, but the women work on the production side of the mills. As industrial machinery became increasingly self-governing and alternately powered, men disappeared from many industrial scenes. We'll take this up more on Friday.

Knickknackery

I really do like the book-ending of these objects--the soot-coated angel and the korl woman kept behind a curtain--and had hoped also to attend to the bit at the story's end where Harding Davis writes, "The gas-light wakens from the shadows here and there the objects which lie scattered through the room...homely fragments, in which lie secrets of all eternal truth and beauty. Prophetic all!"

Quaker ex Machina

Your responses to the end of Harding Davis's story have stuck with me this afternoon.
I wonder if another way to think about the abruptness and lack of details when the Quaker woman intervenes is that these factors contribute to the stunning ease with which she does something. She decides to act on behalf of someone and acts--granted, as some of you pointed out, too late for Hugh.
Any more thoughts?

Was Thoreau a cat-person?

In response to Dyani's query, you might want to check out this nifty book called Bonds of Affection: Thoreau on Dogs and Cats. Some editors combed his works and assembled the excerpts in which he talks about dogs or cats.

Perhaps we should inquire with the experts at Writers and Kitties.

"Invert your head" Movie Reviews

I'd like to hear your head-inverted movie analyses!

All you have to do is to articulate the apparent message of the film and then start thinking about how the film, in fact, says the opposite. This isn't about being clever, but about close reading Hollywood film to see how the explicit ideology is often undermined by deeper structures of ideology.

Avatar: It's about reconnecting with the local and being environmental, but the film was primarily advertised and celebrated for its digital technologies, which meant it was shot in a green screen studio and its local places are digitally invented. In other words, there's no there there.

Monday as told through LOTR...

If our class was a sort of Lord of the Rings adventure (and, really, what would be cooler than that?), we have just wandered the pastoral landscapes of the Shire, but we saw how Thoreau could feel a tremor (is this becoming Star Wars too?) of the industrial influences of Sauron creeping in via the railroad.

This is not far-fetched; recall what Treebeard said, "There was a time when Saruman would walk in my woods. But now, he has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment."

So, with Rebecca Harding Davis, we're about to enter the Mines of Moria.


As you read "Life in the Iron Mills," please consider the following questions for our class discussion:

What do we learn about the narrator? What do these details signify? And what effects does the depiction of the narrator have on how the text moves the reader?

The environment: Obviously it's grim, but think about how and what Davis does with this wrecked place? How does it speak to you compared with Emerson and Thoreau's environments in which people live and may seek their soul or spirit?

Contemplate Davis' story in conversation with Thoreau's famous quip: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation."


Please keep these questions close as you pass through Moria, and I'll meet you Monday in Mordor.

Size matters

Here's a cool bit on the culture of long, long, long, long, long fiction.

This Week's Word: Pantisocracy

Yes, Pantisocracy!

Wordsworth Vector

I've been noodling over our discussions on Emerson and Thoreau, books and thinking and walking and doing, and I wanted to send your way this pair of poems by William Wordsworth (who along with Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the Lennon and McCartney of the Romantic Era).

First is "Expostulation and Reply"

"Why, William, on that old grey stone,
Thus for the length of half a day,
Why, William, sit you thus alone,
And dream your time away?

"Where are your books?--that light bequeathed
To Beings else forlorn and blind!
Up! up! and drink the spirit breathed
From dead men to their kind.

"You look round on your Mother Earth,
As if she for no purpose bore you;
As if you were her first-born birth,
And none had lived before you!"

One morning thus, by Esthwaite lake,
When life was sweet, I knew not why,
To me my good friend Matthew spake,
And thus I made reply:

"The eye--it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where'er they be,
Against or with our will.

"Nor less I deem that there are Powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness.

"Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?

"--Then ask not wherefore, here, alone,
Conversing as I may,
I sit upon this old grey stone,
And dream my time away,"


Then, "The Tables Turned"

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?

The sun above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless—
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

A very bearded day in American Literary History

William Cullen Bryant was born

and

Walt Whitman politely declined an offer of marriage from Anne Gilchrist, a literary critic who fell in love with him simply by reading Leaves of Grass and included in her proposal that she was still of a suitable age to be his Baby Mama, though she may not have used that exact phrasing.

Lit Crit Bday

Today we mark the birthday of one of the great literary critics. Many know of Edward Said's genius in relation to Orientalism and more specifically to U.S./Palestine politics and representations, but I like to celebrate his first book that brilliantly focuses on what the title suggests: Beginnings. Now you know where I get my obsession with the frames of texts...

Thoreau blog for Weds, November 2nd

You know you're relevant to the American literary tradition, especially in terms of ecological literature, when you are being quoted on shopping bags for sale at zazzle.

For Wednesday, please write a 200-250 word blog on 2 of Thoreau's life-prescriptions. Choose one of his recommendations with which you agree and explain why using text bits and your own thinking; then, choose one of his recommendations with which you do not agree and explain using text bits and your own thinking.

Please post to your blogs by 10am Wednesday.

The Raven, Simpsonized

A Halloween Birthday poem

The British poet John Keats was born on October 31st.
Here is what I consider one of the creepiest poems in English literature:

"This Living Hand"

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d–see here it is–
I hold it towards you.

Bond meets Voodoo

Here's a little clip that begs for analysis of its performative Voodoo as well as cultural encounter...From Live and Let Die to Angelheart and more contemporary films and literature, Voodoo has a strong presence in the U.S. social imaginary--a nice prospect for a senior project.

a dictionary day

Happy birthday to Noah Webster, the dictionary dude.

Charlotte's Web, 1952

Fifty-nine years ago today, that favorite of so many kids, Charlotte's Web, was published.

Blog Writing Due Friday, October 14th, by 10am

250-300 words.
Sex, Voodoo.
Write.

Some Boston Tea Party Week Links

Here's the recent story in which Joe Biden compares the Occupy Wall Street movement with the tea party.

Here's the Facebook Group: The Boston Oil Party. Their own discussion of environmental concern remind us that the seminal event of 1773 also was an overt act of darkening the waters.

And, here's the 2009 Clip from The Daily Show on Tea Party Activists.

On The Daily Show, I could not help but think of it when reading Whitman's "Democratic Vistas" for tomorrow: "We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout...A scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim of all the litterateurs is to find something to make fun of" (10). Is The Daily Show actually an especially insidious form of entertainment that enables us to enjoy crises in such a way that we sit at home smugly laughing at others (presumably not as smart as we are) rather than consider potential actions to take??

Thoughts?

Whitmanian Democracy: blog writing due Monday, October 10 by 10am

Walt Whitman wrote more than just compelling content for Levi's ads.
He also wrote "Democratic Vistas." We're reading a selection of this text, and we've just finished talking about the Boston Tea Party, the American Revolution, and principles. For this blog writing, please use 200-300 words to articulate what you see as Whitman's core principles for democracy in the U.S. context. Please cite passages to support your claims.

Not tea, Johnny...

"Seems as though everyone in Boston's interested in tea."

"Not tea, Johnny, the principle [or is it principal] behind it."

Ben Franklin meets Facebook, etc.

Before class on Wednesday, October 5th, please post your Ben Franklinian epitaph for yourself leveraging the social self-producing text technologies of today (facebook, twitter, texting, autocorrect and autofill...).

Jack Black as Ben Franklin...

As the "Drunk History" series goes, we'll work with the best one, which is on Frederick Douglass.
But, I suppose it's worth watching the Ben Franklin one...not for the faint of heart, though...So, it's not required viewing...

Drunk History vol. 2 - Featuring Jack Black from Jack Black

It's all about the Benjamins

What do we see of our BFF BF's textual self-construction in Puff Daddy's 1997 song "It's All About the Benjamins?"

Hobbit homes

You can follow this link to Hobbit homes as a new design choice.

monkeys, typewriters, shakespeare

Do you recall the commonplace hypothetical question about whether a million monkeys in a room with a million typewriters would recreate Shakespeare's oeuvre due to the finite possibilities of our 26-letter linguistic system?

Well, they're doing it!!! But virtually...
Here's a link to a story about a computer programmer simulating monkey-hands on typewriter keyboards, and so far the program has churned out 99.99% of Shakespeare.

Banned Books Week!

Follow this link to a U.S. map of book censorship cases.
While you're at it, why not pick up a banned or formerly banned book and dip into a few pages? Maybe Joyce's Ulysses, Henry Miller, or some Harry Potter...

Like candles etherized upon a cake

Happy Birthday, T.S. Eliot!
This recent issue of The New Yorker has a great article on Eliot's personal life and its intersections with his major influences upon poetry and literary criticism.

Contemporary Captivity Narratives

Hi LitBloggers!
Thanks for bringing up all sorts of contemporary captivity narratives that captivate us, particularly in the U.S. narrative-consumer market.
Here's the Wikipedia entry for Jessica Lynch. It has several links to various articles that discuss the multiple inaccuracies that were built into her own captivity narrative mythology.

An Extra Opportunity: Sigmund Freud

In our discussion of Wigglesworth and his Day of Doom, we talked about his loss of the father and Freud's connection between religion and the power of the father and the absence of the father. If you're interested, one of Freud's most famous lectures on this topic is called "The Question of a Weltanschauung." I'm going to email you a PDF of this text--it's not long and quite readable. Next Wednesday after class, anyone who'd like to discuss it can walk over to the cafeteria for a late lunch and Freud.

This is not at all required. It is simply an opportunity to read some theoretical material and talk about it informally if you like. So, watch your email inbox for the text coming soon.

AssignmentS for Wednesday, Sept. 21

First, the blog writing: For Wednesday, we are reading Mary Rowlandson’s genre-founding autobiographical account of her captivity narrative as well as other writers’ depictions of Hannah Dustan’s captivity and escape narrative. For this blog, please write about 2-3 points of difference you discover between reading an autobiographical account and an account written by others. For example: do they use different narrative strategies? How do their powers of persuasion differ? Do they give different representations of the captors, the captives, and/or the lands through which the captives are taken? 200-300 words, posted by 11.59pm Tuesday night.

Second, to change up the class format, I want each of you to bring one passage from the texts and present a close reading analysis of it. Please pay attention to the language in the brief passage you choose and, if you choose a passage in Rowlandson pay attention to its relation to the whole text—if you choose a passage from the Dustan selections pay attention to it in comparison with the others. You are entirely free to choose any passage that catches your attention.

Kafka Up Your Mind!

That's right, reading Kafka builds your mind and not just for literary thinking!

Follow this link to a study about brain activity under the influence of K.

Here's another link to a journalism article about the study that you might find more accessible.

Dr. Johnson's Birthday

On this day in 1709, Samuel Johnson was born!
Please take careful note of the image and how he absolutely devoured and eviscerated literary text with his eyes. This intensity of reading practice is what we as English literary scholars aspire to achieve. (Perhaps without the wigs though)

Empire State of Mind includes the ENG 352 LitBloggers!

We'll be reading selections by James Fenimore Cooper soon. While in Manhattan, I snapped this picture of his one-time home at 145 Bleecker Street.

Anne Bradstreet

Today we're discussing Anne Bradstreet's poetry on the anniversary of her death. It's almost like that was planned or something...

William Bradford and Quentin Tarantino?

As we were discussing Bradford today, there was one passage we didn't get to--a passage that makes me think of Quentin Tarantino:

"Thus it pleased God to vanquish their enemies, and give them deliverance; and by His special providence so to dispose that not any one of them were either hurt, or hit, though their arrows came close by them, and on every side thme, and sundry their coats, which hung up in the barricado, were shot through and through." p.119, from Chapter X of Book I.

Does this not remind you of the scenes in Pulp Fiction, first when Jules and Vincent kill Brett, after mis-quoting a Bible verse with some language very close to Bradford's, and then they are amazingly not hit by a gun-full of close-range shots--then later in the film when they discuss this "miracle?"

Clearly the discourse of providence co-mingled with violence is still part of American/U.S. culture today.

Today's writer birthday...

Today in 1921, one of the all-time great science fiction writers was born: Stanislaw Lem. Years before the "Gaia Hypothesis," Lem wrote Solaris, a novel featuring a planet-as-single-organism.

A Project Gutenberg Passing

You can follow this link to a story about Michael Hart, the inventor of the e-book and founder of Project Gutenberg, who passed away last week.

Today: The Stono Rebellion

September 9th, 1739 was the largest slave rebellion in the colonies before the American Revolution.

In response to the uprising, colonists temporarily halted slave imports and tightened the laws regarding slaves.

There are a number of ongoing historical-literary projects to make accessible slave narratives and thereby to open up previously unknown events and ideas, such as insurrections.

Here's a link to one.

An Important Site!!

Do you like literature and kitties?

Blog for Sept. 8 and John Smith update

Hi LitBloggers!

Two items here:

1. Your Blog Assignment: Due Thursday night, Sept. 8th by 11:59pm
One of the ways we study literary and film texts is character analysis. Tambien la Lluvia (Even the Rain) provides several complex and compelling characters. For this blog, please write about Costa and Daniel as characters. You may approach them according to what you found compelling and/or problematic about them, but if you like, you might think of which ways Costa is a modern-day Casas and consider Daniel’s actions in relation to his conversation with Costa at the very end of the film. 200-300 words.

2. To get a little more out of this week and make Monday more manageable, let’s read and prepare to discuss the John Smith selections from the Anthology, pp. 55-72. That way we can focus on Bradford on Monday and talk then about Puritans and Pilgrims.

Sanitizing Mark Twain?

Follow this link to a story about the new "sanitized" edition of Huckleberry Finn. The creators argue that sanitizing the novel makes it accessible to many people who would otherwise be too uncomfortable to read it. Opponents argue that it is wrong in any case to modify a writer's text, but that in this case one of the benefits of the novel is that it does make people uncomfortable so they will think and talk about race dynamics in the U.S. past and present.

Thoughts?

First LitBlogging: Due by Sept. 5

This week we'll be working on Spanish Conquests and Encounters. In the readings for Monday's class, Columbus, de Las Casas, and de Vaca all write impressions of their contact with new places and peoples. Please select either places or peoples for your focus, and write a 200-300 word piece that puts all three writers in conversation on the topic. You might write about the similarities and differences in attitudes towards the beauty or fertility of these places across the writers, and even within their own accounts for the matter. Or, you might consider the various attitudes towards the cross-cultural contacts all of these writers not only witnessed but in which they participated.

Please post your blog writing by 11:59pm September 4th so I have a chance to read them in the morning before we meet for class.

Our Collaborative "America" List

Yesterday, you collaboratively generated a list of qualities that come to mind when asked what makes America America and Americans American. We'll use this occasionally in class to think about our texts and to expand the list as the semester proceeds. Feel free at any time to add via comments to this post.

Here's the initial version:

America: Place, Culture, People

Freedom
Patriotism
Human Bodies
Self-concerned—Insular perspective
Wealth and opulence
Elitism, Exceptionalism
Cultural superiority
Religion and Spirituality
Imperialism
Opportunity, social mobility
Cultural icons: Cowboys, etc. (Cultural fusion and/or appropriation)
Music and arts: Again, cultural fusions, appropriations, innovations
Low culture (in relation to European high, aristocratic culture)
The American Dream
(Protestant) work ethic
Celebrity culture and fame
Land-ownership
Landscape as natural resources and as symbolic of good/evil, etc.
Travel and transportation
Consumerism, Industry

Midnight in Paris-ish

September 1st, 1933: Gertrude Stein published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

That book describes much of the lifestyle Stein and other American writers lived in Paris, and I'm wondering if any of you have seen the latest Woody Allen movie that taps into that literary history, Midnight in Paris?

ENG 352 American Literature to 1860

Greetings LitBloggers!

It was a pleasure to meet you today and I look forward to a semester of engaging discussions and writings on our ventures through early American Literature.

Below, I've pasted the syllabus for reference:

Required Texts:
The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Package 1 (Volumes A & B), 7th Edition.
isbn: 978-0393929935
&
The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
isbn: 978-0374530112

Catalog Description:
American writers since the very beginnings have inscribed the natural landscape and crossed frontiers of the human heart and soul. We will explore these frontiers and the authors who transcend boundaries into uncharted space in stories of Spanish conquistadors and Native Americans; the narratives of English colonists, African-American slaves, and explorers Lewis and Clark; nature essays of Emerson and Thoreau, illustrated by the Hudson Valley School; poetry by Bradstreet, Wheatley, Whitman, and Dickinson; fiction by Hawthorne, Melville, and Beecher Stowe. Offered alternate years. Prerequisite: PAID 111, 112 or transfer equivalents. (HEPT, Hist)

Course Description and Objectives:

In the episode “Extra Large Medium” of The Family Guy, Chris and Stewie chase a butterfly and get lost in the woods. Chris justifies their wandering off, saying, “I came out here to observe nature. What did you come out here for?” Stewie responds, “I came to the woods because I wished to live deliberately and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Then, Stewie interrupts the narrative flow by looking at the camera and asking us, the audience, to log on and take a quiz of who said this. The quiz appears on the screen: (A) Robert Frost, (B) Henry David Thoreau, (C) Thornton Mellon. When the “results” appear, it’s 15% Frost, 18% Thoreau, and 67% Mellon. To which, Stewie remarks, “This is why the other countries are beating us you know.”

I start with this little scene because it reminds us that cultural knowledge is relevant even in what many people consider low-culture productions like The Family Guy. But more importantly, the joke is based on the idea of a national literary tradition. [As a side-note, Thornton Melon is a character in the film Back to School, which is considered low-culture, but they got the very famous author Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. to do a cameo appearance.] Bracketing the jokes now, the idea of a national literary tradition is a complex concept that raises a lot of questions regarding its three components, all of which are also matters of AMERICAN FRONTIERS.

Nation: Is there a split between American colonies literature and U.S. national literature? Is U.S. literature postcolonial? If America includes the North and South, why do we limit American literature to the U.S. borders?

Literature: What is literature? How do we know it when we see it as opposed to other, non-literary texts? How do we decide which literature to read amidst the volumes and volumes of it? What does literature do for individuals and societies? What does literature contribute to your liberal arts education?

Tradition: How and why are these old literary texts still relevant? What aspects of them haunt us? How have later U.S. writers written in conversation with these texts, and, for that matter, how were early American/U.S. literary texts written in conversation with European literary traditions? Finally, what fates do these texts face in our increasingly digital era?

This course engages with these and other questions. While you will finish the course with answers, they will likely be provisional answers that can be refined the more you read and contemplate.

To that end, this course is a survey of major literary writers, movements, genres, and themes in the literature of the American colonies and the United States to 1860, just before the Civil War. The course structure includes 4 basic units:

I. Indigenous Culture and Spanish Encounters;
II. Puritans: History, Theology, Poetics;
III. Independence;
IV. Issues and Authors: Nature, Women’s Rights, Slavery & Abolition, Poetics; Poe, Whitman, Dickinson.

This course takes as its main objective acquiring a core set of skills required to analyze, appreciate, and enjoy works of literature with an interest in content, form, and context. You will develop these skills through close reading a wide range of literary works in a variety of genres, writing responses and formal essays about those works that pique your interest, and by completing 2 projects that might even be fun! =]


Throughout this quarter, you should strive to obtain and cultivate the following abilities:

• Develop a thoughtful, informed, and sophisticated perspective on the field of “American Literature” on any given text within that field.

• Situate your perspective in the context of the college, the field, and/or the specific literary studies conversations at hand.

• Communicate your perspective clearly through writing to the appropriate audience, though a digital-media project, and through in-class discussions.

Course Assignments:

Regular Attendance and Rabid Participation:
You are expected to attend class having read the assigned material and prepared to participate in active discussions. Since we are a small group, most class days will include significant discussion in addition to my occasional and short lecture presentations on key topics related to the day’s readings. Significant absence or late arrivals will lower this portion of your grade.

Blog Writings:
You will create and maintain your own blog for this course. There will be regular writing assignments to be completed and posted on your blog by the deadlines indicated—typically your blog writings will be due the night before class meetings. These writings will range from informal to formal in style and will be evaluated based on the requirements established for each assignment. They will help you chew over readings with focus, arrive at class with something in mind to discuss, and they can be very useful when it comes time to write your essays!

Boston Tea Party Project:
We hear a lot about Tea Parties today, but we don’t often hear much about the actual events of 1773 that came, eventually, to be known as the Boston Tea Party. This project calls for reading and research into that particular historical event. Specific instructions will be handed out in class, but the project does consist of research and an in-class round-table discussion in which you’ll draw upon your findings to advance everyone’s knowledge of the BTP.

Digital Media Group Project:
In this project, you and your group-mates are going to put the “Book” back in Facebook. More precisely, you will create and present a digital media homage to one of the texts from our syllabus as a way of thinking about its literary forms and themes and about what opportunities we have for literature in the age of Facebook. Specific instructions will be handed out in class, but this project might entail re-telling a story through character Facebook profiles or other digital formats and tools.

Two Formal Papers and Draft Workshops:
You will write two evidence-based, thesis-driven essays this semester. One is a close-reading analysis of a single text. The second essay synthesizes close readings of 2-3 texts along with research. Your essays will go through draft workshops aimed at helping you revise the final versions. Attendance is required at the workshops—failure to attend or failure to bring a substantial draft will result in an automatic 1/3 reduction of your grade for that paper (i.e. a B becomes a B-). These assignments will be handed out well in advance of the due dates so you can start planning and drafting early. You will receive your graded essay one week from turning it in to me.

Midterm and Final Exams:
The midterm exam is Friday, October 21 during our regularly scheduled class meeting. The final exam is scheduled for December 14th, 1:15-3:15pm. I will distribute review suggestions in advance of both exams.

Grading/Evaluation Policies:
Blog 20%
Boston Tea Party Project 5%
Digital Media Group Project 15%
Essay 1 15%
Essay 2 20%
Mid-Term Exam 10%
Final Exam 15%

Submitting Your Essays:
Your essays must be submitted to me on the assigned dates (see schedule below). In case of medical or other emergency, contact me before the due date to discuss an extension; extensions are granted only under highly exceptional circumstances. Late papers will receive a 1/3 grade reduction for each day past the due date, and no papers are accepted after the final exam.

Office Hours:
You are greatly encouraged to use my office hours early and often! I have found office hour meetings significantly productive, whether in the brainstorming phases of writing, working through a challenging literary work or idea, or in the midst of essay revisions. I have listed office hours, but I will often work in my office and usually with the door open so please drop by.

Academic Honesty:
With regard to plagiarism, don’t do it! Whether the work of others is submitted through purposeful mendacity or for lack of familiarity with what constitutes plagiarism, it is a serious academic offense that you will do well to avoid. I am happy to help you avoid this issue, so bring any questions to class or office hours before the assignment is due.


Modifications:
Course schedule subject to change with notification from instructor. Course policies will be modified only if absolutely necessary.

ENG 352: American Literature to 1860: Fall 2011
Schedule of Reading and Writing Assignments

You are expected to complete assignments for the day on which they are listed. You will be notified of any changes to this schedule well in advance both in class and electronically.


Wed., Aug. 31 Course Introduction

Fri., Sep. 2 Indigenous Narrative Flows
Native American Trickster Tales: Winnebago, Sioux, Clatsop Chinook, Navajo, pp. 72-86; 91-103

Mon., Sep. 5 Spanish Conquests and Encounters I
Christopher Columbus, Bartolome de Las Casas, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca pp. 31-47

Wed., Sep. 7 Spanish Conquests and Encounters II
Screening: Tambien la Lluvia (Even the Rain)

Fri., Sep. 9 Spanish Conquests and Encounters III
Film Discussion, Preparing for the Puritans

Mon., Sep. 12 New England History: Puritans, History, Theology I
John Smith; William Bradford Of Plymouth Plantation Chapters IX-END, pp. 55-72; 114-138

Wed., Sep. 14 New England History: Puritans, History, Theology II
Thomas Morton The New English Canaan, John Winthrop A Model of Christian Charity, pp. 138-158

Fri., Sep. 16 Puritan Poetics
Anne Bradstreet Poems, Michael Wigglesworth from The Day of Doom, pp. 187-234

Mon., Sep. 19 Puritans Reflected
Nathanael Hawthorne “Young Goodman Brown” “The May-Pole of the Merrymount” and “The Minister’s Black Veil”
(1289-98; 1304-20)

Wed., Sep. 21 Captivity Narrative: An American Genre
Mary Rowlandson Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson; Hannah Dustan’s Captivity and Revenge, pp. 235-267; 343-353

Fri., Sep. 23 American Frontiers I
J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur from Letters from an American Farmer, pp. 595-616

Mon., Sep. 26 American Frontiers II
James Fennimore Cooper from The Pioneers, William Cullen Bryant Poems, pp. 985-1002; 1044-51
Essay Draft Workshop

Wed., Sep. 28 Transition Day: From Settling the Frontiers Toward the Nation

Fri., Sep. 30 Benjamin Franklin “The Way to Wealth.” “Rules by Which a Great Empire May be Reduced to a Small One,” “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America,” “Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America,” Autobiography [Part I], pp. 449-518

Mon., Oct. 3 Boston Tea Party Week
Readings To be distributed
Essay 1 Due

Wed., Oct. 5 Boston Tea Party Week
Readings To be distributed

Fri., Oct. 7 Boston Tea Party In-Class Discussion

Mon., Oct. 10 Whitman, Federalist Papers
Walt Whitman “Democratic Vistas” (pdf file)

Wed., Oct. 12 The Deleted Revolution I
Alejo Carpentier The Kingdom of this World, Part I pp. 1-47

Fri., Oct. 14 The Deleted Revolution II
Alejo Carpentier The Kingdom of this World, Parts II-III pp. 49-150.

Mon., Oct. 17 The Deleted Revolution III
Alejo Carpentier The Kingdom of this World, Finish the Novel

Wed., Oct. 19 Midterm Exam Review

Fri., Oct. 21 Midterm Exam

Mon., Oct. 24 Fall Break—No Class

Wed., Oct. 26 Fall Break—No Class

Fri., Oct. 28 Transcendentalists I
Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature, “Self Reliance”
pp. 1106-38; 1163-80



Mon., Oct. 31 Transcendentalists II
Ralph Waldo Emerson “The American Scholar,” “The Poet,” “Each and All,” “Brahma”, pp. 1138-51; 1180-95; 1244-45; 1251

Wed., Nov. 2 Transcendentalists III
Henry David Thoreau Walden Chapters 1 “Economy” and 5 “Solitude” pp. 1872-1914; 1940-45

Fri., Nov. 4 Transcendentalists IV
Henry David Thoreau Walden Chapters 2 “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For” and 9 “The Ponds,” pp. 1914-24; 1963-77 and the Map on p.2022

Mon., Nov. 7 Women and “The Spheres” I
Rebecca Harding Davis Life in the Iron-Mills, pp. 2599-2625

Wed., Nov. 9 Women and “The Spheres” II
Margaret Fuller from The Great Lawsuit, pp. 1640-59

Fri., Nov. 11 Women and “The Spheres” III
Herman Melville “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids”
pp. 2389-2405
Digital Media Group Project Due

Mon., Nov. 14 Writing Lives out of Slavery I
Frederick Douglass Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
pp. 2064-129

Wed., Nov. 16 Writing Lives out of Slavery II
Harriet Beecher Stowe from Uncle Tom’s Cabin Chapters III, VII, and IX pp. 1708-32

Fri., Nov. 18 Writing Lives out of Slavery III
Catching up on Reading and Discussion

Mon., Nov. 21 Labor and Alienation
Herman Melville “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, pp. 2363-89

Wed., Nov. 23 Thanksgiving Break—No Class

Fri., Nov. 25 Thanksgiving Break—No Class

Mon., Nov. 28 Putting American Literature on the European Map
Edgar Allan Poe “The Raven,” “The Cask of Amontillado”
pp. 1536-39; 1612-16
Essay 2 Draft Workshop


Wed., Nov. 30 Inventing the Detective Story
Edgar Allan Poe “The Purloined Letter,” pp. 1599-1611

Fri., Dec. 2 Pillar of Poetry I: Walt Whitman
Song of Myself, pp. 2210-54

Mon., Dec. 5 Pillar of Poetry II: Emily Dickinson
Poems on pp. 2558-80

Wed., Dec. 7 Mapping Our Literary Peregrinations
Essay 2 Due

Fri., Dec. 9 Final Exam Review


Wednesday, December 14th Final Exam: 1:15-3:15pm