Fall 2006 Courses

English 370-01: American Literature of the Early Republic: Writing "America" in English (Hurley)

M/W/F 9:40-10:40am, Old Main 010

This course considers the ways that literature up to the early nineteenth century takes up and formulates the very idea of America. We will pay particular attention both to the concept of America, as it comes to be embodied in the fledgling nation of The United States, and to the literary dimensions of this concept. The first third of this course will take a long view of the matter, extending back in history and across geographical space to examine writings from as early as the sixteenth century, in English, French, Italian, and Spanish literary traditions - including texts by Aphra Behn, Amerigo Vespucci, and Thomas Hariot. By doing so, we will establish a context for thinking of America’s emergence out of complicated global political and literary investments. This long view will set us up to think quite concretely about what changes (and what doesn’t) with the rise of republicanism and the increasing desire, among intellectuals in the newly United States throughout the nineteenth century, for a recognizably American literature. This context will, in turn, help us to think about the complications that attend not just the rise of a nation, but the emergence of a national literature.

The remainder of the course will be devoted to examining the dimensions of the debates concerning the construction of that category "American Literature." What is American about American literature? Does it have peculiar forms? How does it reconcile itself with and draw upon its polyglot, multinational history? What are the contexts in which it even makes sense to think of "American literature?" The texts we will read offer us a series of case studies for considering a range of possible answers to these questions - some more explicitly than others. The course readings will, on the whole, be fairly canonical. The syllabus includes writings by Washington Irving, Hannah Webster Foster, Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, and Henry David Thoreau. The research project for this class will, however, require that you read beyond this list in more adventurous ways as you attempt, first, to articulate a problem that complicates the rise of the category "American literature" and then, later, to discuss that problem in a research paper.

Of primary interest to us will be questions of literary form and their relationship to American literature. Why, for instance, does Hawthorne distinguish between novels and romances? What does Emerson assume about the status of poetry for the new nation? You will be expected to pay close attention to the textual strategies at play, line by line, in the text in your class participation and preparation as well as in the assignments you generate for this class. These assignments include one short paper, an oral presentation, one longer research assignment, and a take-home examination.

Fall 2006 Course Listings