Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

The study of selected works of American literature written before 1900. This course may survey a particular era or topic, and may be organized by various critical issues or approaches. Students with credit for ENGL 344 or 348 may not take this course for further credit.

COURSE DETAILS:

UNITED STATES of LYNCHERDOM  

In 1903 W. E. B. Du Bois wondered why black America was habitually associated with images of obligatory sacrifice. It’s no coincidence that only two years earlier Mark Twain penned (but feared to publish) an essay called “The United States of Lyncherdom,” or that ten years earlier Frederick Douglass suggested that the prevalence of lynching was proof either of a depraved government or a depraved citizenry. All were talking about the same traumatically routine fact of nineteenth-century American life: that however one defined the status quo, it often relied on the renunciation and at times extermination of non-white peoples. This course explores that fact and its literary representations by non-white and white writers alike.

Part 1 of the course focuses on the history and ramifications of slavery and structural racism. We’ll begin with Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, writers whose work defines the slave narrative genre, before moving on to Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno, a bedeviling analysis of the psychology of racism and revolt in the run up to the American Civil War. We’ll conclude with Charles Chesnutt’s “conjure” stories, which also scrutinize the psychology of racism and revolt, only this time from the perspective of Reconstruction and Jim Crow America. Part 2 focuses on the history and ideology of settler colonialism and its effect on American Indigenous peoples. We’ll start with the über concept Manifest Destiny, using it to frame the expulsion of Indigenous peoples from their traditional lands, a process represented and debated in the writings of William Apess, Black Hawk, and Elias Boudinot, among others. We’ll then move on to the mid-nineteenth century notion of “Indian Hating,” focusing on its influence via popular literature by writers like James Hall before exploring its critique by Lydia Sigourney, Lydia Maria Child, and others.

Because this history informs so much that's going on right now, I’ll host optional Zoom coffeehouse meetings throughout the semester to discuss contemporary artistic treatments of African American and Indigenous social justice movements and these treatments' relationship to work we're reading. I’m hoping especially to use these “Zoffeehouses” to talk about films like Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) and Blood Quantum, a 2019 horror movie by Mi'kmaqi director Jeff Barnaby that’s garnered praise for its representation of settler colonialism not to mention its rather timely political take on pandemics.  

With the exception of the Benito Cereno, all readings will be available on our Canvas site. Course delivery will be a mix of synchronous and asynchronous. While I realize synchronicity will entail challenges, I’m confident we can create a simultaneously rigorous and supportive online community, one that allows for a reasoned and respectful exchange of ideas in real time, if not in real person.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Refine the understanding how language – especially figurative language – creates the world and perceptions of it.

Recognize complex relationships between texts and contexts (e.g., historical, social, cultural, political).

Understand key aspects of the histories, forms, principles, and contexts of literary expression in the nineteenth-century United States, especially with regard to the Indigenous and African American experience.

Identify the nineteenth-century roots of struggles for social justice and rights on the part of African American and Indigenous peoples in the United States.

Develop skills in analyzing and interpreting language and text, broadly defined, and learn advanced strategies for creating and communicating informed claims about them.

Use language, its history, and its capacities to engage with the ideas of others.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

The only text you'll need to purchase is Herman Melville, Benito Cereno, ed. Brian Yothers (Broadview, 2019; ISBN 9781554813094), which is available for sale on the Broadview website in paperback and in two digital formats: PDF and ePub. See https://broadviewpress.com/product/benito-cereno/#tab-description. Though there are public domain versions of this novella available, I’d prefer you have the Broadview edition because of its supplementary material, much of which will be assigned reading.

All other texts will be available for download from our Canvas site. These texts are either in the public domain or available under the “fair dealing” exception to Canadian copyright law.