11:15a-12:30p TR (30) 3 cr.
This class will survey the range of textual activity of early American
life, from settlement
and plantation, through colonial experience and the Revolution, and
into the first decades
of the Republic. A governing question will be the nature and
importance of
archiving–recording experience in textual, artifactual, and visual
form for the purposes of
ordering life, explaining conflict, gathering knowledge and forwarding
imperial expansion.
Of all the technological achievements with which the early European
settlers came equipped,
this power of archiving may arguably have been the most momentous and
powerful.
We will read some poetry and some novels (by C.B. Brown, Royall Tyler,
Hannah Webster
Foster), but the “literature” of this period often appears unlike
literature as we define it
today. We will thus also read historical work, travelers’ accounts,
sermons, trial records
(from the Salem witch trials), political pamphlets (from the
Revolution), captivity
narratives, and the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and Olaudah
Equiano, who was
captured as a child, enslaved, eventually “bought” his freedom, and
became an early player
in the British movement for the abolition of the slave trade.
Requirements will include a research presentation and final research
paper, a few midterm
tests, and probably some take-home short essay questions.