Course Description
The course is an introductory, chronological survey of American literature that provides a broad overview of what constitutes American literature up to the Civil War. A diverse range of works, genres, movements, and cultural narratives will be explored, including Native American mythology, conquest, exploration, and slave narratives, autobiography, poetry, and political writings.
Avoiding the nationalist impulse that Michael Warner warns has become the "preinterpretive commitment of the discipline," we will seek to understand early literatures not as germs of Americanness implying some unity of shared meaning or purpose, but in the fullness of complexity and contradiction, conquest and expropriation that marked the historical transatlantic world and its movements of people and/as commodities.
To position our reading historically and culturally, we will study Peter Linebaugh’s and Marcus Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Detaching itself from the mythologies of the nation-state, Hydra reveals a fresh framework for literary analysis and compelling intertextual connections. We will specifically trace the way discourses of class, race, religion, and nation develop to serve the interests of capitalism and the modern, global economy.
Required Texts
- Davis, Rebecca Harding. Life in the Iron Mills. Bedford Cultural Editions. 978-0312133603
- Douglas, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Bedford Series in History and Culture. 978-0312257378
- Franklin, Benjamin. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Second edition. Ed. Edmund S. Morgan. (Yale) 0-300-09858-8
- Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker. The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. 978-0807033173
- Melville, Herman. Benito Cereno. Bedford College Editions. 978-0312452421
- Whitman, Walt. The Portable Walt Whitman. Penguin Classics. Ed. Michael Warner. 978-0142437681
