ENG 227-01 - American Literary Traditions I

4 credits (Fall)

From Captivity to Captivation. The question of a distinctly American literature is explored from the perspective of captivity. Early in the semester we focus on Lydia Maria Child’s Hobomok in order to analyze the aesthetic techniques that turn the violence of seventeenth century captivity into the captivating pleasures of nineteenth century historical romance. Discussion will be supplemented by Native American creation stories and English promotional literature; the poetry, sermons, and journals of early colonists such as Anne Bradstreet and Mary Rowlandson; and selections from William Apess and James Fenimore Cooper. The middle portion of the course focuses on two novels of the early Republic: Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn and Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive. Discussion of the transatlantic trade in slaves and its impact on republican virtue and textual self-fashioning will be supplemented by selections from Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Franklin, Hannah Foster, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and recent Iraq War versions of the captivity narrative. The course will conclude with a discussion of Emerson’s “The American Scholar,” in which he urges liberation from “our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands.” Readings from Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and especially from Walt Whitman will provide the basis for discussing how much had been done and what is left to do as “American” literature continues to acknowledge its multicultural and transnational relations.

Prerequisite: ENG 120 or ENG 121 for majors; for non-majors, ENG 120 or ENG 121 or any course in the study of literature in another language department.
Instructor: Andrews