Phillis Wheatley (c. 1754–84) |
Michael K. JohnsonEnglish 270: Survey of Early American Literature, Spring 2005Course descriptionMeets9:00–9:50 or 10:00–10:50 MWF/Roberts 205 Required text
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If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium is the title of a 1969 comic motion picture about a group of American tourists on a madcap 18 day bus tour of Europe. At times, these survey classes may seem a lot like a guided tour that goes too fast through too many of the tourist traps of American literature: If It's Monday, This Must Be American Transcendentalism. Well, get on the bus. Indeed, we'll be making a number of quick stops for photo opportunities on our journey from the Colonial period to the end of the Civil War: Native American Oral Narrative, Puritanism, Captivity Narratives, Songs and Ballads of the Revolutionary War, Early Feminism, the literature of Abolition and Slavery, and a quick look at such traditional canonical figures as Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Dickinson. Please form a single line as you exit the bus and don't linger in the gift shop!
The course will follow the philosophy of our anthology in emphasizing that American literature consists of a body of writing that is diverse generically (including everything from letters, sermons, speeches, songs, and folk tales to work written in such traditional literary forms as the short story and poem) as well as indicative of the multicultural nature of the United States. Although the readings for the course follow a roughly chronological order, we will structure our tour of American literature around a series of topics rather than by traditional literary periods. The topic for the first part of the course will be "Cultures in Contact," and we will examine the relationship between Native Americans and explorers and colonists from different nations (Spain, France, and England). This section will also look at Puritan writing and will pay particular attention to the way religious belief shapes the experience and representation of life in America. The last half of the course will concentrate on the relationship between literature and the key political and social issues concerning Americans during the period from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War. We will explore in particular the divisive, hotly debated, and controversial (at least in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) topics of "The Woman Question" and "Slavery and the Abolitionist Movement."
A central document in our discussion of these debates will be the Declaration of Independence, a text that articulates the foundational ideals of American political philosophy. Those ideals will provide important thematic matter for our literary writers as they explore the question "what does it mean to be an American?" from multiple perspectives. As we will see, literature provides an important critical forum for those Americans who do not enjoy the political and economic rights that the Declaration claims are "endowed by their Creator" to everyone. What does "independence" mean to a woman in America? to a free individual of African descent? to an American slave? If American history provides us with one Declaration of Independence, American literature provides us with many and varied declarations of independence. Oh, and if you must take photos of the Declaration, please, no flash photography.
For those of you who have completed English 181 (Literary Analysis and Interpretation), you will find that English 270 continues to emphasize the techniques of "close reading" and formal (or aesthetic) analysis that you were introduced to in the earlier course. As the course progresses, I will introduce several additional methodologies for interpreting texts. The field of American studies as it is configured here in the twenty-first century is notable for the wide range of methods that scholars, critics, and students employ as a means of making sense of the various texts that Americans have produced. We will use rhetorical theory to examine the way a writer's original audience influenced or shaped the literary text that he or she produced. We will use insights from feminism and ethnic studies to ask how the gender and ethnicity of the writer may have inflected his or her writing. We will also use methods drawn from new historicism, which posits that any piece of writing is thoroughly embedded in its historical moment. In order to understand a text, we must reconstruct the history surrounding its production. For example, early in the eighteenth century, over half of the white women in America could not read (compared to the 4/5 of white men who were literate), but by the end of the century more and more girls were being taught to read and write. What impact do you think this major historical shift in social practice (educating girls) had on the literature written in America after the American Revolution?
When you buy your copy of the very thick and very heavy Heath Anthology, you will realize that we won't be able to read all 3,000 pages over the course of one semester. Any syllabus creates only a partial picture of a field of study. To broaden our perspective, students will take part in a series of group presentations focused on authors in our anthology whose work has not been included on the syllabus. Each group will prepare a 2 page handout and make an 8–10 minute oral presentation about their author. You will receive both group and individual grades on the project, the equivalent of two bonus quiz scores. By the end the semester, our guided tour through early American literature will have touched on around 50 different authors. So, pack a lunch, load your camera, and don't forget to wear comfortable shoes!
Grades will be determined primarily by your performance on two short (1200–1500 words) papers and one final exam. Each paper will account for 30% of your final course grade, and the final exam will account for 25%. Such factors as attendance, quiz performance, participation, and preparedness will contribute to the final 15% of the course grade. As this class is process as well as product oriented, your participation in all aspects of that process (reading and discussing as well as writing) is essential to the completion of the course requirements. Excessive absences (more than three), excused or unexcused, will damage your course grade, and I reserve the right to lower any person's semester grade if that person has more than three unexcused absences. A legitimate emergency or verifiable illness will be considered excused, but only if you provide me with documentation. I will not ask you for such documentation; it is your responsibility to provide it.
Please be aware that the final exam is comprehensive and will cover all the material we have read from January 21–May 7. The final exam will likely consist of a take-home component as well as an in-class part to be completed during finals period. The in-class part of the exam will primarily involve identifying and discussing quoted passages from the literature. In order to do well on the exam, you should do what you should be doing in every class: taking notes during discussion and marking the passages we talk about in class.
There will be a quiz over the reading material almost every class period. Quizzes will either be in the form of a 15–20 minute written response to a general question over the reading material or a short 5 minute response to a list of objective questions. If you miss a quiz because of an excused absence, you may re-take that quiz. Quizzes missed because of unexcused absences cannot be made up. Your cumulative quiz score will be the primary factor (with your attendance and contribution to class discussion) in determining your class participation grade, which accounts for 15% of your final grade. Even if we miss class because of snow, you are still responsible for having completed the reading assigned for that day. On the day we return, the quiz will cover the reading assignments for both the missed day and the current day. If weather cancellations do force us to make changes, I will post information about those changes on my website.
Essays: The essays for this class should be completed in a professional and timely manner. Late papers will lose one-half a letter grade per class period (unless you provide me with evidence of a legitimate and verifiable excuse). A more detailed discussion of requirements for essays will be included on individual assignments. As this is an English course, your grade on the essays will be determined primarily by the quality of your writing. Each essay should have an original, specific, and significant thesis—an arguable assertion that you are making about the work being discussed. Each essay should provide textual evidence (quotations) in support of that thesis, and each essay should provide a well-developed analysis, discussion, and interpretation of that evidence. The papers that receive the highest grades will be well-argued and well-supported. The best papers also will be well-written and relatively free of grammatical errors.
For papers, I assign letter grades that can be translated in terms of the following numerical values: C− (72), C (75), C+ (78). There are some exceptions to this pattern. An F corresponds to the numerical grade of 50. An assignment that is not completed will receive a grade of zero. Because the grade D− does not exist for me, a D grade will be assigned the value of 62. An A will be assigned the numerical value 100, an A− 95.
Please note that any student who needs accommodations in this course because of a disability should notify me at the beginning of the semester so that arrangements can be made.
As the publicity surrounding historian Stephen Ambrose's failure to use quotation marks to indicate direct quotations from the work of other historians indicates, borrowing someone else's words without appropriate acknowledgement is still frowned upon—despite the fact that the internet has made such intellectual theft easier than ever before. I expect students to act "in good faith" in doing original written work for the class. If a student violates that trust (even if it only involves a sentence or two lifted from an internet source without properly acknowledging the original), the punishment for plagiarism will be at minimum a grade of zero on a particular assignment and at maximum failure of the course.