I. COURSE:

II. INSTRUCTOR:

III. CLASS MEETINGS:

IV. TEXTS: Some handouts and the odd occasional assignment (the movies Amistad and The Last of the Mohicans must be seen out of class, the former available in video stores by June 30, I understand), and some internet materials; but most primary texts are conveniently available in Professor Baym's anthology.

This course means to examine American literature from its beginnings through the Civil War, which most of us believe ended in 1865. Such a survey will inevitably reveal the fact that centuries-long surveys are to some extent ludicrous, complete coverage being impossible and chronological causality of literary creation being perhaps little more than a perpetually revised figment of literary historians' imaginations. (I mean, we have before us in this very course a new Spielberg film Amistad presenting experiences from 1839. And that Titanic thing, April 1914, revisited with my family in Austell on December 19, 1997. So when is or was history?)

This is also a course intended to introduce several literary-critical approaches which should prove useful in your life's work as college-educated readers (maybe to help us make a little more sense out of The Truman Show, Seinfeld, and Pulp Fiction). We will talk a lot and write a good bit less than that. Most of your reading will be done out of class; most of your extended writing, in class (I assume your writing competence to be reflective of the prerequisites for this course: English 101, 102, 205, and 206. If it is not, make plans immediately to confer with me and to engage the excellent services of The Writing Center staff).

I assume that you will conscientiously read everything assigned and that we will all thereby come to great pleasure and learning in the frighteningly brief time we call a "summersession." When we have discussed texts and ideas in class, you would do well to seek other examples of what we have found, thus to exercise and confirm your knowledge and skills.

I will occasionally ask you to write or present responses in class or online (see http://www.nicenet.org, using your Class Key = 13257e13; and the Class Bulletin Board at http://bbs.kennesaw.edu), which will be graded A or F, depending on the conscientiousness of your responses, not on your finely tuned composition skills.

We will have two two-hour tests and a final examination. The first thirty minutes of each will be of the short-answer sort, ranging over primary texts, introductory and editorial material in your texts, and class lecture-discussion. The last 115 minutes will be a unified, coherent, open-book essay, usually directed at the primary readings, intended as a showcase for your knowledge and understanding, not as a cruel trick to expose your weaknesses. All essay test material is cumulative although in practice more attention will be given to works covered since the last test.

Short-answer tests will be averaged to equal the weight of one essay. You will revise one of the first two essays out of class, using documentation according to the current Modern Language Association of America style. Of course, the MLA handbook is most complete and accurate, but several writing handbooks contain abbreviated but mostly correct versions of this form (when in doubt, ask me). I have listed some sources on my web site (http://ksumail.kennesaw.edu/~rhill) and on the "Links" available through Nicenet.

Some discretion resides, as I believe it should, with the teacher to apply grade adjustments for attendance and class participation. Time and energy that one might spend doing "extra credit" work should be directed toward the "credit" work of this course; it's quite enough for us all.

So, for grades: the average of your two short-answer bubbly tests = 12.5%; the average of your responses = 12.5%; your two essay tests = 12.5% each; your documented essay counts 25%; and your final examination counts 25%.

We have only sixteen class days (145 minutes each) scheduled for lecture and discussion. Two of those days are given up to testing, which I consider discussion of an important sort. Two of them will be "reconfigured" because of my attendance at the Dartmouth Workshops on Art, Humanities, and Mathematics, July 25-August 1. That leaves only twelve. Having heard students' requests from previous quarters that we have a planned, all-group break, I'll try to halt official proceedings for ten minutes during class lecture-discussions (another two hours chopped from the quarter).

Be here; we all need you.

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Fourth-Run-of-the-Term Schedule Week I
June 8:

Amistad and history as literature; video widely available June 30, I understand;

in-class readings, group discussions of "New Authors in the Fifth Edition"

June 10:

Appeal to the Supreme Court, re: L'Amistad, January term 1841; John Quincy Adams' argument in the case, 24 February and 1 March 1841 (read on web site); opening pages of The Norton Anthology, "Literature to 1620"; group discussions of "New Authors in the Fifth Edition"

Week II
June 15:

Olaudah Equiano (752 ff.); Thomas Jefferson, "From The Declaration of Independence" (714-19); Michael Mann's Daniel Day-Lewis version of The Last of the Mohicans (another video widely available)
Harriet Jacobs, "From Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl"; Frederick Douglass, Narrative of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself"; "The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro: Speech at Rochester, New York, July 4, 1852" (2057 ff.); Walt Whitman, "Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855)" (2080 passim); Samson Occom "A Short Narrative of My Life" (614 ff.); Herman Melville, "The Portent" (2428)

June 17:

First test (Part One: fill-in-the-bubble type = thirty minutes; Part Two: in-class, open-book essay = 115 minutes)

Week III
June 22:

Last Day to Withdraw without Academic Penalty

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

June 24:

Seven-minute group presentations to the class (guidelines: any or all group members may speak; no Powerpoint or other "heroic" presentational appliances allowed, but simple paper handouts, if appropriate; place your work or works in perspective in relation to the whole set of works contained in the "canon" that is the Norton)

Week IV
June 29:

Margaret Fuller's The Great Lawsuit: MAN versus MEN, WOMAN versus WOMEN (1592-1626); Ralph Waldo Emerson (ch. 1 of Nature, plus "Hamatreya" and "Ode, Inscribed to W.H.Channing"

July 1:

Discuss next test. Work online during the class period, examining class material to this point in the course, preparing and offering suggestions for short-answer portion of next test. Discuss latest revisions of syllabus/schedule.

Week V
July 6:

Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature, chapter one.

Edgar Allan Poe, "Israfel," "The Imp of the Perverse," "The Purloined Letter."

Herman Melville, "From Moby-Dick," "Bartleby the Scrivener," "Benito Cereno"

July 8:

Second test (Part One: fill-in-the-bubble type = thirty minutes; Part Two: in-class, open-book essay = 115 minutes)

Nota bene: For this short-answer test, you are not responsible for your group presentations on the "New Authors in NAAL," but that material is fair game for the essay portion. You are also not responsible for Washington Irving and Sherman Alexie, whose stories are now up for discussion after the test.

Week VI
July 13:

Discuss two stories under the assumption that you have not read them before you come to class: Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" and Sherman Alexie's "Captivity" (1993), "a conversation between a contemporary American Indian and Mary Rowlandson, the Puritan author of a famed and influential seventeenth-century captivity narrative [NAAL 298-330] that portrayed Indians as devils" (Paula Geyh, et al., eds. Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology. New York: Norton, 1998. 342-45).

Nota bene: Drawing on stories from his The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Sherman Alexie wrote the screenplay for a hot new indie movie called Smoke Signals, the first ever written, produced, directed, etc., all by Native Americans (whom Alexie persistently called "Indians" in a recent radio interview [SCERN, 6-26-98].

Read six poems in the Humanities Text Initiative American Verse Collection, University of Michigan, Poems of Sidney Lanier, ed. Mary D. Lanier, New York: Scribner's, 1885: "The Marshes of Glynn," "Song of the Chattahoochee," "The Struggle," "The Symphony," "Into the Woods My Master Went," and one "dialect poem": URL, 1-6-98 = http://www.hti.umich.edu/bin/amv-idx.pl?type=header&id=LaniePoems

July 15:

Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," "There Was a Child Went Forth"

Week VII
July 20:

Recap: two early visions of America: Captain John Smith (passim), John Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity" (214 ff.)

July 22:

Puritans: Anne Bradstreet's "The Prologue," "The Author to Her Book," "To My Dear and Loving Husband," "In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet," "In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Anne Bradstreet," "On My Dear Grandchild Simon Bradstreet"; Edward Taylor's "The Preface," Upon Wedlock and Death of Children," "Huswifery"; Jonathan Edwards' "Personal Narrative," "Sarah Pierrepont," "Images or Shadows of Divine Things" [Roses, Hills and Mountains, Rivers, Trees, The Book of Scripture]

FRIDAY, JULY 24:

Documented essay, 1200-1500 words, due by noon. Current MLA style for ten items in "Works Consulted" (you are not required to "cite" all of them in your essay, but you must cite at least three; this is NOT a full-scale research paper). At least three of your ten items must be from the internet, three from professional literary-critical journals, and one from a book-length monograph (that's seven, so you have leeway of three to choose from wherever you wish).

Week VIII
July 27:

View or Have Viewed Amistad, the movie, which will be shown in class today for those who wish to participate in a group experience.

Dr. Hill will be at a conference at Dartmouth College but checking in daily for your stimulating online activities.

July 29:

Each of your seven study groups will be responsible for online discussions of two poems each (total of fourteen Dickinson poems out of a HUGE number):
Group One = #49, 258
Group Two = #324, 345
Group Three = #449, 465
Group Four = #650, 712
Group Five = #744, 986
Group Six = #1068, 1129
Group Seven = #1540, 1732.

Dr. Hill will be at a conference at Dartmouth College but checking in daily for your stimulating online activities.

Wednesday, August 5: Final Examination = In-class, open-book essay

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Bibliographical Odds and Ends

AMISTAD Amistad. Dir. Steven Spielberg. 1997. Perf. Djimon Hounsou, Morgan Freeman, Matthew McConaughey, Anthony Hopkins.

"Church Criticizes 'Amistad.'" Atlanta Journal/Constitution 20 Dec 1997: C3.

"Debbie Allen Explains Why 'Amistad' Movie Is Important to All Americans." Jet 22 Dec 1997: 58-62.

Skube, Michael. "Humans as Chattel: A Long, Sad History" [rev. Hugh Thomas' The Slave Trade]. Atlanta Journal/Constitution 4 Jan 1998: K10.

HISTORIES and ANTHOLOGIES Anderson, Charles R., et al., eds. American Literary Masters. 2 vols. New York: Holt, 1965.

Elliott, Emory, ed. Columbia History of the United States. 1988.

Parrington, Vernon L. Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920 . 3 vols. 1927-30.

McQuade, Donald, et al., eds. The Harper American Literature: Compact Edition. New York: Harper, 1987. ISBN0-06-044371-5.

Miller, Perry, et al., eds. Major Writers of America. 2 vols. New York: Harcourt, 1962.

Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown, and Jerry W. Ward, eds. Redefining American Literary History. 1990.

Spiller, Robert E., et al., eds. Literary History of the United States. 3 vols. 1948, 1953, 1963.

Thomas, Hugh. Conquest: Montezuma, Cortes, and the Fall of Old Mexico.

---. The Slave Trade. New York: Simon, 1997.

SPECIAL TOPICS,
INCLUDING SPECIAL ITEMS FOR THIS COURSE Aaron, Daniel. The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War. 1973, 1987.

Bate, Walter Jackson. From Classic to Romantic.

Baym Nina. Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America. 1984.

---. The Shape of Hawthorne's Career. 1976.

---. "The Scarlet Letter": A Reading. Twayne's Masterwork Studies. Boston: Twayne, 1986.

---. Women's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-1870.

Boorstin, Daniel. The Americans: The Democratic Experience. 1973.

Brickhouse, Anna. "Hawthorne in the Americas: Frances Calderon de la Barca, Octavio Paz, and the Mexican Genealogy of 'Rappaccini's Daughter.'" PMLA 113.2 (Mar 1998): 227-42.

Bridgman, Richard. The Colloquial Style in America. 1966.

Brooks, Van Wyck. New England: Indian Summer. 1940.

Cady, Edwin. The Light of Common Day: Realism in American Fiction. 1971.

Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition. 1957.

Donovan, Josephine. New England Local Color Literature: A Woman's Tradition. 1983.

Fleischman, Fritz, ed. American Novelists Revisited.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 1979.

---. No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century. 2 vols. 1989.

Hoffman, Tyler. Rev. The Politics of Distinction: Whitman and the Discourse of Nineteenth-Century America, Christopher Beach. South Atlantic Review 62.3 (Summer 1997): 111-13.

Kazin, Alfred. An American Procession. 1984.

Kolodny, Annette. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History. 1975.

Malamud, Randy. Rev. Monsters, Tricksters, and Sacred Cows: Animal Tales and American Identities, A. James Arnold, ed. South Atlantic Review 62.3 (Summer 1997): 123-26.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. 1964.

Matthiessen, F.O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford UP, 1941.

Pattee, Fred Lewis. The Development of the American Short Story. 1923.

Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. 1961.

Smith, Henry Nash. Democracy and the Novel: Popular Resistance to Classic American Writers. 1978.

---. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. 1950.

Tanner, Tony. The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature. 1965.

Waggoner, Hyatt H. American Poets from the Puritans to the Present. 1968.

Wohlpart, A. James. Rev. Covenant and Republic: Historical Romance and the Politics of Puritanism, Philip Gould. South Atlantic Review 62.3 (Summer 1997): 138-40.

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Home: RWHWP
http://ksumail.kennesaw.edu/~rhill
*****

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[This page last revised 1 July 1998.--RWH]
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