10:30a-11:20a D (30) 3 cr.
This course examines the process of developing a national identity, of
becoming American,
through the study of classic nineteenth-century essays, journals,
novels, and poetry.
Although the colonists had achieved political independence by the end
of the eighteenth
century, their sense of nationhood had yet to be accomplished.
Ideological narratives about
nature and the creation of an American subject emerged through print
media to influence U.S.
culture. For example, The Journal of Lewis and Clark described the
features and content of
western North America, including the habits and characteristics of the
Native Americans.
The authors' descriptions of the variety and size of American plants
and animals contrasted
favorably with similar European species and contested narratives of
European superiority. In
the popular press and through other print forms and media, more and
more, the American
national subject was defined in contrast to the "negative other"--the
Native American, the
African American, and women. Key issues of the course are: How was the
idea or
"Americanness" articulated and inculcated? Who benefitted from the
belief in a distinct
American character? Who resisted? What strategies were used to
exclude the negative other?
What were the limits to this process?
Selections and readings of entire works will be taken from The
Journals of Lewis and
Clark , The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Walden,
Leaves of Grass, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Incidents in the
Life of a Slave Girl
, and selected short stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman
Melville.