Fall 2010    English 343

American Literature Survey
oral beginnings
to 1865

T/Th 12:30 - 1:45   Niccol 006

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Requirements
5 Guiding Questions
Unit Titles
Unit Overview Questions
Reading Schedule
Campus Events
Essay Topics
Writing Guide
Glossary Unit 1
Glossary Unit 2
Glossary Unit 3
Glossary Unit 4
Glossary Unit 5
Glossary Unit 6
Glossary Unit 7


Essay 1 Topics
(see Reading Schedule for due date)

Choose one of the following topics (or ask me to okay a topic of your own creation) and write a 5-6 page analytical essay in which you discuss at least two of the primary selections we read from either Unit 1 or  2. I encourage you to use secondary sources from The Norton and the American Passages site (you would cite these as Norton 10 or American Passages). In addition, incorporate terms from the Glossary for these Units (see buttons at left) to the best of your ability--they are important concepts.

The essay must be typed, double-spaced and in MLA format, with your name, our course name and number and the date at top left of page one. Be sure to give your essay a strong title reflecting the thesis of the essay.

I encourage you to make an appointment to meet with me (janjohn@uidaho.edu) as you brainstorm and compose your essay. Working with a tutor at the Writing Center in the Commons (for free) will undoubtedly create a stronger essay and raise your grade (I know this from experience). Call 885-6644 for an appointment.
 

1. How are Native American oral and written traditions shaped by the landscapes in which they are composed?

2. How do contemporary American Indian writers draw upon and transform the oral tradition in their written works?

3. What are some differences between the values, beliefs, and assumptions of Native North Americans and Europeans at the time of first contact during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries?

4. 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?

5. Explain the commercial, political, and religious structures and goals that underwrote European colonial ventures in the New World.

6. 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?

 

 

 

Essay 2 (see reading schedule for due date)
Write a 4-5 page essay in MLA format plus a Works Cited page on either Unit 3,  Utopian Promise, or Unit 4, Spirit  of Nationalism. Use 2-3 primary sources as well as background critical material from American Passages, The Norton Anthology and other research. Create a powerful, effective title for your essay that reflects your thesis.

Utopian Promise

How did the image of America as a “vast and unpeopled country” shape European immigrants’ attitudes and ideas? How did they deal with the fact that millions of Native Americans already inhabited the land that they had come over to claim? Be sure to quote from the readings.

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? Quote from the sources we read.

Read American Passages Core Context “Souls in Need of Salvation, Satan’s Agents, or Brothers in Peace?: English Settlers’ Views of Native Americans” and create a topic on the complexities of Indian-white relations based on it. Be sure to quote from primary sources.

Spirit of Nationalism

Read Core Context “Every Man for Himself: American Individualism” and create a topic that explores the growth of the ideal of individualism and the myth of the self-made man (or woman). Who was included in this ideal? How do texts by Phillis Wheatley and William Apess respond to and challenge traditional ideas of individualism? Do you see the myth of the self-made man (or woman) persisting today in news programs, novels television shows and movies? Be sure to include quotes from primary sources.

Read Extended Context “Miss America: The Image of Columbia.” Create a topic based on the questions provided. What is the significance of the image of Sacajawea on the new coin? If you were to create a female image to represent current America, what would she look like?

Explain the relationship between eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideals and nineteenth-century Romanticism, using quotes from literature we read to illustrate your ideas.
 

 

 

Essay 3: 4-5 pages, MLA plus Works Cited page, using at least 2 primary sources from Units 5 and 6.

Masculine Heroes

What ideals of masculinity helped shape the nineteenth-century figure of the American hero? How do texts by African Americans, Native Americans and Latino writers expand and transform concepts of American citizenship, identity and masculinity?

Explore how authors in this unit constructed ideals of American masculinity and American expansion that are marked by tensions and contradictions. How did they celebrate Manifest Destiny and industrialization while also writing nostalgically about the people and cultures destroyed by American expansion? How did they create a complex portrait of the American frontier and the American hero that continues to shape popular culture in this country?

Explore the controversial nature (in the mid-nineteenth century) of Whitman’s poetry both in formal qualities and subject matter.  Do his poems still seem controversial? In what ways? Where do you see Whitman’s influence in later developments in American poetry?

What is Manifest Destiny and how is it operating in this time period and texts included in the Masculine Heroes unit? Is it still functioning today in American society and governmental policies?

Read Core Context “Paradise of Bachelors: The Social World of Men in Nineteenth-Century America.” Explain the homosocial-homosexual continuum and create an essay based on this background material (see questions at end of context). E.g., How did social reactions to unmarried men differ from social reactions to unmarried women in the nineteenth century? Did single women enjoy the same kinds of opportunities that single men did? How do you think cultural ideas about unmarried individuals (both men and women) have changed over time in America? Or, Eve Sedgewick has argued that portraits and records of Whitman acted as a kind of code for men to convey homoerotic feelings to one another. Why do you think they chose Walt Whitman to represent their identity? Can you think of any groups that use images or personalities in a similar way today? What kinds of material objects circulate as “code” today?

You have been asked to design an amusement park with a “frontier” theme. While your goal is to make the park fun, engaging and accessible to children and families, you are also concerned that your representation of the “frontier” be accurate. How will you interpret the idea of the frontier? What will you call your park? How will you portray the history of American expansion and westward migration? What activities and exhibits will you provide for visitors to the park?  

American Gothic

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 a s 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?

Read Core Context “Swamps, Dismal and Otherwise.” Why was the swamp important in mid-nineteenth-century life and culture?

Read Core Context “The Spirit is Willing: The Occult and Women in the Nineteenth Century.” Why was spiritualism threatening to some men? What did the social empowerment of women have to do with spiritualism? What different emphases are provided by a reform movement that focuses on spirits, rather than one that focuses on traditional Christianity? Why would women have a particular interest in social reform movements? In what sense could you say all gothic literature is interested in social reform?

Read Extended Context “Sleeping Beauty: Sentimentalizing Death in the Nineteenth Century.” After exploring and explaining this phenomenon, can you spot the use of sentimental death-scenes in literature or film today? How do they function in films like Titanic, Steel Magnolias, and Terms of Endearment? Why are films like theses sometimes called—sometimes with affection, sometimes with disdain—“chick flicks”?

 

Essay 4: Write a 4-5 page analytical essay, MLA format, on a topic from Slavery and Freedom. Use at least 2 primary sources and one secondary source. See syllabus/class schedule for due date.

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 Americans and Native Americans expand and transform concepts of American identity and inclusion?

What is the relationship between oral expressions such as the Sorrow Songs and printed literature? How did African American oral traditions influence American music and literature? (Do you know a song today that reflects the stance of a 19th century spiritual?)

Discuss the different strategies slaves adopted to resist white authority and to develop their own distinct culture.

Explain the importance of sentimentality and domesticity with the nineteenth-century literature of social reform.

Read Core Context “The Radical in the Kitchen: Women, Domesticity, and Social Reform.” How does Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl participate in the tradition of domestic literature? To what extent does Jacobs idealize domestic and traditional femininity? How does her narrative also work to critique these standards?

In disguising herself as a man and escaping from slavery, Ellen Craft seems to transgress many of the ideals of “True Womanhood.” How does William Craft’s account of his wife in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom work to reinscribe her within the confines of domestic ideology?

The racist, stereotypical image of the African American “Mammy” has been a stock character in everything form novels and films to the packaging of pancake mix. Why has this image been so frequently reproduced? What kind of fantasy about African American women is at stake in this image? (See the documentary film, "Ethnic Notions" and use google and Ferris State University's Jim Crow Museum).

Read Core Context “Resistance, Rebellion, and Running Away: Acts of Defiance in Slave Culture.” Explore the various strategies of resistance in this era and texts. Why has the exploitation and enslavement of Native Americans in California in the nineteenth century received so little attention?

Read Extended Context “The Plantation: Cultivating a Myth.” Given that only a small percentage of white southerners lived on plantations, why do you think this image became so culturally dominant? Why do you think stereotypes of plantation life continue loom large in the American imagination? Consult Moscow writer Doug Wilson’s recent article “Slavery as it Was.” Why are real estate developers creating communities called “plantations”?

Read Context “Beyond the Pale: Interracial Relationships and “The Tragic Mulatta.” How were mixed-race people legally categorized in the antebellum South? Why do you think southern laws took the position they did with regard to mixed-race individuals? How did the laws protect the institution of slavery and white hegemony? How do you think attitudes toward interracial relationships in the antebellum period affected subsequent portraits of interracial relationships in American literature and film?

Read Context “Stirring Things Up: Slaves and Creation of African American Culture.” Explain the creation, growth and richness of the culture that grew out of the institution of slavery. How has it influenced contemporary dominant American culture?