ENG 227-01 - American Literary Traditions I

4 credits (Fall)

From Captivity to Captivation: In this course, the question of a distinctly American literature is explored from the perspective of the captivity narrative that has its origins in the struggle between Christians and Muslims in the Mediterranean world of the 16th and 17th centuries. 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 transatlantic captivity into the captivating pleasures of nineteenth century American historical romances. 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, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. 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, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman will provide the basis for discussing how much has been done and what is left to do as “American” literature continues to acknowledge its multicultural and transnational relations in its ongoing attempt to confront the “infidelism” that Whitman insisted imprisons too many of us. Grade to be determined by class discussion, collaborative work with peers, and three formal writing assignments.

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