Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Advanced seminar in American literature. May be organized by author, genre, period, or critical approach. This course may be repeated for credit if a different topic is taught. Writing.

COURSE DETAILS:

THE SALEM WITCH HUNT: LITERATURE, HISTORY, AND BELIEF

Why in June 1692 did people living in Salem, Massachusetts start hanging their neighbors, thinking them witches? There are oodles of answers. Nearly all are speculative. One is not: Like the vast majority of people in early modern North America and Europe, people living in Salem believed in witchcraft. They were hanging witches, or so most of them thought.

We have largely forgotten that fact. Nineteenth-century Anglo-Americans, however, had not.  Struggling with their own supernatural preoccupations, they wrote constantly about Salem and its beliefs. In this class, we’ll explore the Salem Witch Hunt through their eyes, and we’ll explore their writing from a postsecular perspective, that is, from a perspective that takes faith—and the history of faith—in the supernatural seriously. We’ll also ask what Salem literature tells us about the nineteenth century itself. After all, it was clear to everyone reading Nathaniel Hawthorne that this angry great-great-grandson of a Salem judge wasn’t just writing about the past; he was writing about his own time. As historian Bernard Rosenthal argues, “Salem, in the distant past, almost in a never-never land of magic, offers an imaginative landscape where we may more safely encounter the monsters we conjure,” from white supremacy to sexual violence.

We’ll read Hawthorne, of course, but we’ll spend most of our time working with a handful of the many popular novels, poems, stories, essays, and plays—by Ella Taylor Disosway, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Elizabeth Stoddard, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Mary E. Wilkins [Freeman]—that tried to comprehend witch hunting and particularly Salem as fact and metaphor. Nearly all of this work is in the public domain and so will be freely available as PDFs on Canvas. The only novel you’ll need to purchase is Stoddard’s 1862 masterpiece The Morgesons, which is kind of like Jane Eyre if (a) Jane were a descendent of witches and (b) she boasted a sister who might still be one. Of course, this being a 400-level seminar, we’ll also read significantly in criticism and theory, especially postsecular theory and to a lesser extent trauma theory. What is Salem, after all, if not a story of trauma?

Two Notes

1. This class will include readings about and frank discussions of sexual, gender, and racial violence and trauma. If you want to take the course but are worried about those readings and/or discussions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I can give you a better sense of how they will come up in the course and how they will be handled.
   
   
2. Speaking of frank discussions of trauma, Robert Eggers’ 2015 film The Witch is a historically informed, unnerving visualization of the lived experience of seventeenth-century New England witchcraft and the Puritan “wonderworld,” i.e., the supernaturally infused reality in which Puritans lived day to day via their faith. It’s set before Salem but is a pitch-perfect depiction of the fear that gripped all British North American colonies. Please watch the film prior to our first class. We’ll be discussing it early on as I help you understand the religious physics of the world we’ll be inhabiting. For a primer on the film, read Anthony Lane’s excellent New Yorker review at www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/29/the-witch-review. Heads up: The Witch is pretty creepy and is rated R, with modest nudity at the end.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Our learning goals:

• develop an advanced understanding of features of figurative language;
• develop an advanced understanding of relationships between literary and non-literary texts and their historical, philosophical, religious, and cultural contexts;
• develop an expertise in aspects of the history of nineteenth-century American literature;
• develop a facility with postsecular theory;
• learn advanced research skills; and
• fine-tune the ability to design and execute cogent written and oral arguments advancing informed claims about textual language.

Grading

Materials

MATERIALS + SUPPLIES:

With the exception of two texts, all reading will be freely available via SFU Library or our Canvas shell.

The other two texts I have not ordered from the SFU bookstore; you'll need to get them independently. They are:

• Gerald Graff & Cathy Birkenstein, They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing (Norton) (any edition is fine; the 4th ed., 2018, is the cheapest; ISBN 0393631672)
  
  
• Elizabeth Stoddard, The Morgesons (Penguin, 1997, ISBN 9780140436518)

I hope you'll consider ordering these texts through a local bookstore, perhaps Iron Dog Books or Massy Books . I use the former because it's in my neighborhood, but both bookstores are happy to order books and get them in just days.