Overview Questions - Unit 1: Native Voices
• What is the relationship
between Native American identity and American identity?
• How does Native American literature reflect or help create a
sense of what it means to be Native American in the United
States?
• What does this literature help reveal about the experience of
having a multicultural identity?
• How does the conception of American Indian identity depend
upon the writer's identity?
• What is Native American literature?
• What makes Native American traditions from different regions
distinctive?
• How has Native American literature been influenced by politics
on and off the reservation?
• How are Native American oral traditions shaped by the
landscapes in which they are composed?
• What role does the land play in oral tradition?
• How does the notion of time in American Indian narratives
compare with notions of time in Western cultures?
• How does the chronology of particular narratives reflect
differing notions of time?
• How do Yellow Woman stories and the Nightway or Enemyway chant
influence Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and Storyteller?
• How do Navajo chantways influence the poetry of Luci Tapahonso?
• How does the Ghost Dance influence the vision of Black Elk?
• How does the Ghost Dance challenge nineteenth-century European
American notions of Manifest Destiny?
• How do Yellow Woman stories subvert the genre of captivity
narratives?
• How do the poems of Simon J. Ortiz challenge the notion of
what it means to be an American hero?
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Overview Questions - Unit 2: Exploring Borderlands
• What is a mestizo/a? How has mestizo/a
identity and consciousness altered and developed over the past four centuries?
• What kinds of relationships did European explorers and colonizers have with
the Native Americans they encountered in the New World? What stereotypes and
conventions did they rely on to represent Indians in their narratives?
• How did European colonizers use their narratives to mediate their
relationships with authorities back in Europe?
• How do writings that originated in South America, Mexico, the West Indies, and
Canada fit into the American canon? Why have writings in Spanish, Dutch, and
French been absent from the canon for so long? What responsibilities do we have
as readers when we read these works in translation?
• How do concepts of writing and literacy differ among cultures? How did these
differences shape the colonial experience?
• How does bilingualism affect mestizo/a narratives?
• What characterizes a "borderland" or "contact zone"? What boundaries are
challenged in a border region? How have conceptions of borderlands and contact
zones changed over time?
• What differentiates assimilation, acculturation, and transculturation? Which
of these terms seems most appropriate for the colonial experiences described in
the texts for this unit?
• How did the Spanish, French, Dutch, and English approaches to colonizing the
New World differ? How did those differences affect European-- Native American
relationships in different regions of the Americas? How did differences among
native cultures in Mesoamerica, Florida, Virginia, the Middle Atlantic, and New
France affect contact between Native Americans and colonizers?
• How did the first European explorers envision the New World? How did their
preconceptions affect their experiences in the Americas?
• Why do early narratives of the New World so frequently invoke the language of
wonder? What narrative strategies did explorers and colonizers use to describe
their experience of wonder?
• Most of the texts discussed in Unit 2 can be characterized as belonging to
more than one genre. Why do texts that represent border and contact experiences
so often combine different genres? What is the effect of this genre blurring?
• How are early mestizo texts influenced by the oral tradition and
pre-Conquest literary styles?
• What kinds of images of America did the European writers featured in Unit 2
construct to promote colonization and settlement? What kinds of natural
resources and environmental factors did they extol in their accounts of the New
World?
• How did European writers justify taking over Native American lands and
resources?
• How are Native American women characterized in colonizers' and mestizos'
narratives? What archetypes and legends have developed about relationships
between native women and European colonizers?
Overview Questions - Unit 3: Utopian Promise 1620-1750
1. What different European and Native American groups inhabited the eastern
shores of North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? What kinds
of strategies did they adopt in order to forge community identities? What and
whom did they exclude? What and whom did they embrace? How did their respective
visions and ideals undermine, overlap, and compete with one another?
2. What qualities characterize the jeremiad form? How do jeremiads work to
condemn a community's spiritual decline while at the same time reaffirming the
community's identity and promise?
3. How did the Puritans use typology to understand and justify their
experiences in world?
4. How did the image of America as a "vast and unpeopled country" shape
European immigrants' attitudes and ideals? How did they deal with the fact that
millions of Native Americans already inhabited the land that they had come over
to claim?
5. How did the Puritans' sense that they were living in the "end time" impact
their culture? Why is apocalyptic imagery so prevalent in Puritan iconography
and literature?
6. What is plain style? What values and beliefs influenced the development of
this mode of expression?
7. Why has the jeremiad remained a central component of the rhetoric of
American public life?
8. How do Puritan and Quaker texts work to form enduring myths about
America's status as a chosen nation? About its inclusiveness and tolerance?
About its role as a "City on a Hill" that should serve as an example to the rest
of the world?
9. Are there texts, or passages in texts in this unit that challenge the
myths created by the dominant society?
10. Why are the Puritans, more than any other early immigrant group,
considered such an important starting point for American national culture?
Overview Questions - Unit 4: The Spirit of Nationalism 1710-1850
1. To whom was the ethos of individualism available? How did this exclusivity
change over time?"
2. What literary strategies did American writers develop to distinguish
themselves from British writers? How successful were they?
3. What virtues and values emerged as foundational to the American character?
How did they change over time?
4. Why did fictional genres such as the novel and drama seem morally
questionable to so many Americans? How did early national novels and plays
attempt to make themselves seem wholesome and productive of national virtues?
5. How does "auto-American-biography" enable writers to construct themselves
as ideal American citizens?
6. What different spiritual beliefs influenced eighteenth-and
nineteenth-century American writing? How did Americans' spiritual beliefs change
over time?
7. What is Transcendentalism? Who took part in the Transcendental movement
and how did they influence later generations of writers and thinkers?
8. What relationship to nature did the Transcendentalists promote? How did
they see the landscape as a resource for spiritual transformation?
9. Why and how did natural history come to be linked to national identity?
10. How did the aesthetic of the "sublime" shape American representations of
and relations to nature?
11. What is neoclassicism? How did this aesthetic movement influence American
art and literature?
12. What is Romantic Individualism?
13. What did early national writers and artists mean when they conceived of
America as a "new Rome."
14. What is the "self-made man?" Were opportunities for self-making open to
all Americans equally?
15. Why did Americans represent their nation through the allegorical figure
of "Columbia"? What values and beliefs informed portraits of Columbia?
Overview Questions - Unit 5 Masculine Heroes
- American Expansion: 1820 - 1900
• How did racial tensions complicate and challenge the expansionist goals
articulated in many American texts of the nineteenth century?
• How did gender impact immigrants' experiences and opportunities in the
American West?
• How do texts by African American, Native American, and Latino writers expand
and transform concepts of American citizenship, identity, and masculinity?
• What are the distinguishing characteristics of the epic? How do writers in
Unit 5 draw on and transform the tradition of the epic?
• What characterizes the historical novel? What historical periods or events did
nineteenth-century historical novelists see as appropriate subjects for their
books? Why were historical novels so popular among nineteenth-century American
readers?
• What genres count as literature? How do letters, memoirs, and songs challenge
the traditional borders of "the literary"?
• What is a "frontier"? How have American ideas about the frontier changed over
time?
• What kinds of attitudes toward nature and the environment were prevalent in
nineteenth-century American culture?
• How did the concept of Manifest Destiny impact nineteenth-century American
political policies and literary aesthetics?
• What kinds of ideals and values do corridos advocate? How did corridos
influence the development of Chicano literature?
• What are the distinguishing characteristics of free verse? How did Whitman's
development of free verse influence subsequent American poetry?
• What ideals of masculinity helped shape the nineteenth-century figure of the
American hero?
• How were symbols and language usually associated with Anglo-American
"patriotism" borrowed, appropriated, and transformed by African American, Native
American, and Latino writers and artists?
• How have American attitudes toward landscape and the environment changed over
time?
• How were the figures of the bandit and the outlaw represented in popular texts
of the mid- to late nineteenth century? What kinds of myths came to surround
these figures?
Unit 6:
Gothic Undercurrents
• American
gothic writing tends to question and analyze rather than offer helpful
answers. How do these texts critique the common nineteenth-century
assumption that America stands as the unique moral and social guiding
light for the world (that it is, as John Winthrop said in 1630, "a City
on a Hill")?
• If the gothic explores what we might call the "dark side" of American
life, what cultural fears and anxieties do we find expressed here? How
does the form of this literature (especially narrative voice and point
of view) help convey these anxieties?
• Gothic writers addressed key nineteenth-century cultural trends, such
as westward expansion, technological and scientific progress, romantic
individualism, the cult of true womanhood, and the debate over slavery
and abolition. How can you see some of these trends reflected in the
texts of this unit?
• Who are the inheritors of the gothic mode today? Do they share similar
concerns with these writers or are their concerns new to the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries?
• How do these writers explore and critique the ideas of self-reliance,
free will, and the self-made man that you saw expressed by Franklin and
Emerson in Unit 4?
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UNIT 7: Slavery and Freedom
* How do racial divisions in nineteenth-century American culture exclude African
Americans and Native Americans from American ideals of liberty and inclusion?
• How do texts by African American and Native American writers expand and transform concepts of American identity and citizenship?
• What are the distinguishing characteristics of the genre of the slave narrative? How was the genre developed, adapted, and modified by the writers included in this unit? How does the slave narrative compare to the captivity narratives written in the seventeenth century (Mary Rowlandson's narrative, for example)?
• How do ideals of domesticity, femininity, and sentimentality shape nineteenth-century American literature and reform movements?
• How do the regional differences between the American North, South, and West (geographic, economic, and demographic) influence antebellum literature?
• What is the relationship between oral expressions such as Sorrow Songs and printed literature? How did African American oral traditions influence American music and literature?
• What is the relationship between slave narratives and captivity narratives? How did the genre of the slave narrative influence the development of autobiographical writing and the novel in America?
• How does abolitionist rhetoric expand and transform the ideals set out in foundational national documents such as the Declaration of Independence?
• How do black writers revise the myth of the "self-made man" to include African Americans?
• How do both abolitionist and pro-slavery writers use biblical imagery and Christian ideals to support their positions?
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