CEPACS
United States Literature Survey
Andrew Lakritz
Miami University & USIA
Introduction:
As American literature anthologies have become heavier, it
has become increasingly more difficult but still more important
to develop narratives and constellations of narratives that link
literary texts to one another through relations of affinity,
influence, interconnection, genesis, rejection, misreading. The
old metanarratives that once held the canon of texts together no
longer have wide scholarly agreement, and some have even argued
that any metanarrative used to provide coherence to the study of
American literature is by nature totalizing in intention and
scope. It is tempting at this stage in the history of the
profession to assert that literary progress is impossible, or
that Nathaniel Hawthorne has nothing to do with Frederick
Douglass or Ann Bradstreet with Charles Bernstein, and just allow
the literary chips to fall where they may, but history and human
affairs do not take place in isolated capsules, and in teaching
and learning about United States authors one has a particularly
useful place to find continuities and discontinuities embedded in
north American life and its letters.
This course is dedicated to finding linkages and crossings,
and is particularly interested in those moments in American texts
in which writers move across boundaries of social class, gender,
race, culture in the widest sense. If one of the difficulties in
teaching United States literature is finding coherent narratives
to link important but disparate texts--disparate in terms of the
multiplicity of cultures that produce these works of imaginative
writing--then one of the important goals of any future literary
history and pedagogy must be to find imaginative links and
relations, not to produce a single, overarching narrative--The
Canon, as it were--but a multiplicity of interrelated narratives
that continue to prove fruitful in the production of culture. The
alternative to the canon needn't be chaos, and the following
course is a preliminary step toward finding "momentary stays
against confusion," to borrow from Robert Frost. As it turns out,
while the professors have been arguing about the canon and its
reformation, the literature itself continues to prove extremely
resourceful in making and remaking itself and may be defined as
itself anti-canonical.
In this way the topic for the course is the many sites in
which United States literature makes and remakes itself, in a
never-ending circulation between definition and destruction,
between creation and limitation. Many of the stories and poems to
be looked at over the semester will follow or involve this
pattern, which will serve to frame the entire semester's reading.
Our aim is not to find an exceptional north American trait, but
rather to isolate several narratives within this literature so
that we can speculate on possible relations between this
literature and other literatures around the world.
Required Texts
Lauter et. al., The Heath Anthology of American Literature,
second edition, vol. 1 & 2 (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath and
Company, 1994). Billed as the first anthology of the expanded
canon by publicists, the Heath anthology has more than 6,000
pages of fiction, history, journal writing, drama, poetry,
transcriptions of oral tales, songs, folk literature, memoir,
journalism, slave narratives, speeches, humor, criticism from
writers of every part of the United States. Excerpts tend to be
brief, but coverage is vast, and the first volume contains The
Scarlet Letter complete, while the second volume contains all of
Huck Finn. The anthologies come with a detailed instructor's
guide, a computerized pedagogical tool called "The Syllabus
Builder" (for Macintosh and IBM computers), and can be ordered
with Whitman and Dickinson packaged separately. Because the
selections tend to be brief, I also order two twentieth century
novels, as well as two collections of poems by contemporary
poets. American literature survey at the institutions where I
have taught are typically lower division courses. That means
students will usually be in their first or more likely second
year of studies--18 to 20-year-olds. This is the audience for the
course.
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York:
Harper Perennial, 1992. A powerful narrative of one woman's
coming of age in rural central Florida, students particularly
enjoy this novel because the modernist difficulties presented by
the novel (its narrative strategies, its use of dialect) pay off
richly once they are overcome. An added bonus for teachers is the
rich and sophisticated body of criticism surrounding this text,
from work by Alice Walker to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying. New York: Faulkner's novels
continue to draw significant and sustained attention in the
American academy, and students are both horrified and fascinated
by As I Lay Dying, in its narrative strategies and subject
matter. It is a particularly useful example of a literary text
where high modernist literary culture meets on the thin cultural
ground of poverty and disenfranchisement of the postbellum south,
but it is also useful for discussing issues of the alienation of
the artist figure, multiple subjectivities and the fracturing of
representational strategies, the recursive narrative and its
relation to the real. At a time when literary critics are
questioning the validity of the monological narrative and its
purported purchase on reality, Faulkner's novel contains within
it already that skeptical attitude articulated within its
narrative strategies.
John Ashbery, Selected Poems (1985), represents the work of one
of our most Emersonian poets, in the tradition of Frost and
Stevens, whose work embraces both the experimental traditions of
the avant garde (and his work is deeply connected to avant garde
traditions of art which he follows as an art critic and editor of
art journals), as well as the more peculiarly American idiom of
the post-romantic visionary sublime.
Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems (1983), is often praised as
this century's most accomplished stylist, a poet for whom the
craft of poetry was the ultimate object. Her participation in the
visionary company of poetry from Whitman and Dickinson, to Frost,
Crane, Stevens and Moore make her work central for understanding
an Emersonian access to what Bloom calls the American Sublime,
which can be defined as the discovery of grandeur or vastness on
the ground of the empty, unadorned nature.
Class Schedule
Week 1: Reading American Literature through Emerson
Readings: Lauter, Gen. Ed., The Heath Anthology, Vol. 1, Emerson,
"Nature," "The American Scholar," "Self-Reliance," "Circles,"
"The Poet," "Experience," pp. 1498-1596.
Lecture: Emerson may or may not be the daemon of United States
literary culture, but his work provides a convenient and useful
fulcrum from which to balance various competing and contradictory
narratives of our history and our writing. This introduction to
the course will emphasize the fluid and provisional character of
our literature, its tendency to insist on the partial and
momentary vision that powerful acts of metaphor can achieve. I
also introduce course policies on attendance, grades, paper
assignment conventions, class preparation, and academic
dishonesty. Students are expected to read the introductions to
individual authors as well as section introductions prior to
class lecture/discussion of a given author or period.
Discussion: Possible topics include Emerson as American
iconoclast; the radical epistemology of "Self-Reliance" and
"Circles"; the deep skepticism of "Experience"; the role that
metaphor plays in language practice; and a discussion of
competing arguments about language, truth, representation, and
belief; the impossibility of knowing others, and the imperative
of stepping outside our social cocoons.
Week 2: Oral Storytelling Traditions in the North American
Context.
Reading: Lauter, Gen. Ed., The Heath Anthology, Vol. 1: "Native
American Oral Literatures," 21-109; Lauter, Gen. Ed., The Heath
Anthology, Vol. 2: "African-American Folktales," 191-212; Leslie
Marmon Silko, 2731-2739.
Lecture: "Oral tradition is the foundation of literature,"
according to N. Scott Momaday, and recently writers as diverse as
Hurston, Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko and others
have returned to oral traditions as an structure, thematic, or
discursive strategy upon which to build written texts. The
reading for this week includes transcriptions of Native American
tales and myths, and introduces students to both the Indian
culture present at the time the Europeans colonized the North
American continent, as well as questions of oral versus written
culture; that is, questions of power, domination, authority, and
social organization implied and inscribed within these two
language systems.
Discussion: Potential topics for discussion include differences
among various myths of origins represented by Native American
stories, and Western ones (such as the Bible, Sophocles'
Oedipus), or Eastern myths; Native American attitudes toward
nature, toward animals; the linkages and differences among the
various trickster tales of different Native-American cultures, as
well as African-American ones.
Week 3: Making a New World.
Reading: Lauter, Gen. Ed., The Heath Anthology, Vol. 1: Cultures
in Contact: Voices from the Imperial Frontier, pp 110-178; John
Smith, "The Generall Historie of Virginia," 184-192; Jonathan
Edwards, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," 584-595;
Benjamin Franklin, "Remarks Concerning the Savages of North
America," 745-749; Thomas Jefferson, "Aborigines, Original
Condition and Origin," 900-901; Lauter, Gen. Ed., The Heath
Anthology, Vol. 2: Harriet Prescott Spofford, "Circumstance," 81-
92; Jos‚ Martˇ, "Our America," 819-828."
Lecture: Introduce Edmundo O'Gorman's idea that the New World was
"invented," rather than "discovered," invented by the Europeans
who came to the Americas and wrote about the landscape and
peoples they found there. Each attempt at representing the Native
peoples is an attempt anew at creating the New World, and the
examples in the reading demonstrate a variety of possible
approaches to this creative act. John Smith's popular account of
his "experiences" with Powhatan and Pocahontas demonstrate how an
entrepreneur, seeking to restore his reputation then in decline,
can create a powerful myth that continues to shape the thinking
habits of many Americans--about identity, nationality, and the
history of colonization. Spofford's powerful and brilliantly
crafted story demonstrates how long-lasting stereotypes of native
Americans as well as the landscape itself can be, and Martˇ's
essay articulates a visionary attempt to imagine an America of
racial harmony and return to Native sources of power. The most
Emersonian of the week's reading, Martˇ is useful for his
expression of an indigenous access to power, free of imitation of
European forms, tapping into the optative side of Emerson's
thought. I include Edwards in this section because, according to
Slotkin's brilliant study (Regeneration Through Violence),
Edwards's imagery and rhetorical strategies depend upon an
audience well schooled in the Puritan notion that the wilderness
is filled with dangerous Indian devils, and numerous pitfalls.
Discussion: One area for discussion would be the question of
whether the early explorers--Columbus, de Vaca, Elvas, and
others--give us a clear sighted window on the reality of what
they found, or whether certain patterns exist in the quality of
their perceptions, the features they tend to notice. Imaginative
reading concerns itself as much with what is left unsaid as with
what is spoken or written, and one can begin this section of a
discussion of the issues these writers bring to the foreground.
In other words, what is the cultural imaginary that makes these
writings possible?
Week 4: The Puritan World View
Reading: Lauter, Gen. Ed., The Heath Anthology, Vol. 1: Anne
Bradstreet, 289-315; Mary White Rowlandson, 340-366; Edward
Taylor, 366-408; Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Minister's Black
Veil," 2138-2147.
Lecture: Major issues in presenting the Puritan mind, of the
early shaping forces of the colonies, include the obsessive
introspection and meditative stance of the Puritan searching for
evidence of election; the use of emblem and allegory and the
focus on language as mystical phenomena important to the poet
with a theological aim; also the encounter between the Puritans
and the Native Americans, in Rowlandson's haunting narrative a
violent encounter; Calvinism and its later critique by Hawthorne.
Discussion: With Bradstreet and Taylor one has evidence of the
drama of living a Puritan life, a drama determined by the dogma
of Calvinism and the encounter with the harsh realities of the
colonial project. With Rowlandson, however, one can discuss how a
closer encounter with Native Americans produces the incipient
cracks and fissures in the dogma. Most European women who were
kept in captivity for more than a year chose to remain with the
Indian tribes, enjoying greater respect and responsibility in the
tribal community than within the communities they had left.
According to John M. Murrin, "Most American colonies were founded
by terrorists," which would account for the ferocity of attacks
like the one Rowlandson narrates. Rowlandson's late-night
wakefulness mentioned at the narrative's end might even presage
the brooding storytelling of Hawthorne, who draws out the moral
consequences of Puritan introspection, self-immolation, and
horror of sin.
Week 5: The Enlightenment: Edwards, Franklin, Paine, Jefferson
Reading: Lauter, Gen. Ed., The Heath Anthology, Vol. 1: Jonathan
Edwards, "Sinners in the Hands of An Angry God," 584-95; Benjamin
Franklin, 708-810; Thomas Paine, 851-873; Thomas Jefferson, 887-
917.
Lecture: Introduction of Enlightenment philosophy and social
theory; Edwards's theory and practice of exploiting emotions in
religious conversions as a precursor to American pragmatism;
Franklin as a trickster figure, who makes and remakes his
narrative persona to suit the needs of the moment; Paine's use of
Lockean theories of language, and the political and social
consequences of enlightenment thought in Jefferson.
Discussion: Although Enlightenment thought made more progressive
attitudes toward both Native Americans and African slaves as well
as freed blacks possible, Edwards's "Sinners" remains a powerful
document for its exploitation of imagery linked to deeply held
fears European Americans had concerning the wilderness and its
inhabitants (Richard Slotkin's studies are useful here). These
texts include a range of materials pointing toward the conditions
of possibility for creating a new nation, and it is worth while
to discuss how one of the youngest nations on earth is a
development of European ideas and efforts.
Week 6: Early Nineteenth Century
Reading: Lauter, Gen. Ed., The Heath Anthology, Vol. 1:
Washington Irving, 1284-1326; James Fenimore Cooper, 1326-1346;
Catherine Maria Sedgwick, 1346-1361; Edgar Allan Poe, 1361-1457.
Lecture: Coincident with the shift from totalitarian forms of
government and religious organization to representative
democracy, the very idea of "literature" undergoes a shift, as
the imagination becomes privatized in a commercial book culture.
The works in this section are hybrid forms, demonstrating their
origins in journalism and popular magazine forms, as well as
offering objects for purely aesthetic contemplation. Introduction
of this important context of the emergence of the "literary" in
its historical and cultural setting.
Discussion: The popularity of the captivity narrative,
inaugurated by Mary Rowlandson, returns with Sedgwick's
narrative, which draws also on John Smith's story of Pocahontas.
It could be argued that each of the authors in this section
concern himself or herself with the consequences, or the feared
consequences, of assimilation and incorporation into the new
land, from Rip Van Winkle's journey into the new world of the
republic, to Cooper's and Sedgwick's attempts to represent the
Native American in relation to the dominant culture. Poe's
obsessive texts can be discussed in relation to the
professionalization of the writer as well as in relation to the
constellation of ideas involving revolution, psychological
horror, and gender relations.
Week 7: Thoreau
Reading: Lauter, Gen. Ed., The Heath Anthology, Vol. 1: "A
Concord Individualist," 2012-2110.
Lecture: Thoreau's works continue to offer articulations of a
characteristic antinomian impulse in U.S. culture, a resistance
to attempts by the government to legislate personal moral values,
and a romantic investment in nature as the locus for important
spiritual values. Thoreau had much to say about the dangers of a
commercial and administrative culture then expanding its
influence, and ridiculed the blind faith in "progress" that
seemed to characterize his country.
Discussion: In discussion Thoreau's critique of contemporary
north American society, one might engage the place that the
literary occupies within this critique. With its crucial
investments in the imagination, the romantic version of literary
culture would appear to reject a purely materialist truth claim
and offer an alternative pathway toward the truth which
anticipates pragmatism.
Week 8: The American Slave Narrative
Reading: Lauter, Gen. Ed., The Heath Anthology, Vol. 1: Frederick
Douglass, 1666-1751; Harriet Ann Jacobs, 1751-1778.
Lecture: Introduce the slave narrative as a genre, its
connections with the abolitionist movement, and its relation to
nineteenth-century literary forms such as the novel. Introduce
Jacobs and Douglass as characteristic writers of these
narratives, with distinct rhetorical strategies based on gender
as well as biographical differences.
Discussion: Discuss the importance of the "sorrow songs" in
African-American culture, their origins and their practical uses;
discuss the meaning of "literacy" in Douglass's narrative, as a
crucial moment in the making of an individual, as well as the
significant costs to the individual enslaved or oppressed;
discuss the issue of sexual choice which marks Jacobs's narrative
as distinct from Douglass, and informs the history of African-
American literature in succeeding generations; discuss the
"loophole of retreat" as both biographical detail and metaphor
for the arena of action allowed to the female protagonist of the
slave narrative.
Week 8: Hawthorne and Stowe
Reading: Lauter, Gen. Ed., The Heath Anthology, Vol. 1: Nathaniel
Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (including "The Custom House"),
2178-2315; Harriet Beecher Stowe, from Uncle Tom's Cabin, 2348-
2403.
Lecture: Introduce Hawthorne as mid-century critic of American
commercial and political values, closely associated with the
Emerson of the "Essays," especially "The Poet," "The American
Scholar," "Circles," "Self Reliance." Introduce basic elements in
the Hawthorne biography that will serve to bridge and frame the
novel with its preface. While Stowe's important novel is seldom
read as an aesthetic achievement, it does offer important
insights into the relationship between white and black culture,
or the construction of those cultures in the imagination of
literate America. Furthermore, it is significant to read Stowe's
novel both as an example of the popular writing Hawthorne scorned
and envied for its popularity--introduction of the nineteenth-
century literary market and its values.
Discussion: Discuss the relation between "The Custom House," as
preface, and the novel, between autobiography and fiction.
Discuss the opposition between romance and realism in relation to
an allegory of American political, social, and ethical values--
the second "story" of the Custom House, the neglected story in
terms of what is dominant, may just be the narrative of a truth
Americans would rather leave unread. Discuss the aesthetic values
of Uncle Tom's Cabin for what they can tell us about a female
sensibility prominent during the mid-nineteenth century, one that
was current not only within a female domestic community, but also
within the larger religious, social, and cultural community of
the time.
Week 9: Melville and Wilson
Reading: Lauter, Gen. Ed., The Heath Anthology, Vol. 1: Herman
Melville, 2440-2628; Harriet E. Wilson, Our Nig, or, Sketches
from the Life of a Free Black, 2673-2681.
Lecture: Like other important 19th century American authors,
Melville writes not only in the romantic tradition, but also in
the autobiographical tradition--at least one can introduce the
biography as reference for stories like "Bartleby, the
Scrivener." Introduce Melville as a "fallen" son of a prominent
Northeast family, with ties to law and politics, and present his
relationship to this family as a frame for the fiction,
particularly "Benito Cereno" which will then serve as a counter-
text for Wilson's Our Nig. Harriet Wilson's novel, in the
tradition of the sentimental novel, the slave narrative, as well
as autobiography, is a counter-point for Melville's study of the
psychology and logic of racism.
Discussion: One important area for discussion is the question of
reader response or aesthetic function. Does Melville's story,
"Benito Cereno," a sophisticated literary text (ironic,
multivoiced) represent an intrinsically more valuable reading
experience than the sentimental and direct fiction by Wilson?
(Discuss the literary history of these texts and authors, which
articulate in itself the values assigned to them by tradition.)
Week 10: Whitman and Dickinson
Reading: Lauter, Gen. Ed., The Heath Anthology, Vol. 1: Walt
Whitman, 2740-2869; Emily Dickinson, 2869-2921.
Lecture: With these two poets we have the drama of our major
writers, each coming from opposite perspectives, each
articulating constellations of issues related to the formation of
an identity, both individual and national. Whitman can be
introduced as a public poet on the surface intensely interested
in civic issues, while Dickinson can be introduced as a private
poet who, again on the surface, is most intensely interested in
the self, the soul, the spirit. But this opposition explains only
partly the drama of these two writers, who would enclose within
their work the entirety of these oppositions, as Whitman would
seek to become the poet of the self, while Dickinson would
explore the self in relation to the largest social and
metaphysical structures then imaginable--the other, the father,
society at large, God.
Discussion: With Whitman the class can discuss the making of a
poet of democracy, one who was interested in becoming the
inclusive voice of his generation, while with Dickinson the class
can discuss a poetic imagination as ambitious as Whitman's,
perhaps even more so, in that she would cover similar ground and
do it within more carefully crafted verse forms. The class can
discuss the aesthetic choices of both poets, Whitman's free verse
expansive lines, and Dickinson's reliance on the hymnal tradition
within which she allows herself to develop, modify, and challenge
the tradition on several levels--syntax, rhyme, rhythm as well as
image and content.
Week 11: African-American Folktales & Twain
Reading: Lauter, Gen. Ed., The Heath Anthology, Vol. 2: African-
American Folktales, 191-212; Mark Twain, The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, 236-419.
Lecture: Introduce the relationship between African-American
folktales and African sources; the function of the tales as
allegories of plantation life and struggle; the role of allegory
and metaphor and linguistic agility generally in the social life
of the slave community; introduce Huck Finn as inaugural and
identifying text in United States literature; introduce debates
concerning the novel as either oppressive to African-Americans
(recapitulating linguistic and other stereotypes), progressive
vis-a-vis the question of race relations, or a dark vision of the
North American future.
Discussion: Oral storytelling does not "use" dialect in the same
way that Twain does; it in fact may be quite sophisticated
linguistically without being aware of other possible choices for
narration. It is useful to discuss the forms of dialect and their
functions in the two modes of language, one primarily oral, the
other primarily written. It is also useful to compare Twain's
text to the model, the oral storytelling, for their derivation
and lines of affinity--both are composed within a context of deep
pessimism and a recognition of suffering. Whereas the folktales
often find ways of escape for their protagonists, Twain's novel
seems dedicated to spinning a farce in which a free man is freed,
who moves deeper and deeper with his white companion "down the
river" in a fiction set in the antebellum south but written for a
postbellum United States.
Week 12: James, Chopin, Crane, Gilman
Reading: Lauter, Gen. Ed., The Heath Anthology, Vol. 2: Henry
James, 557-635; Kate Chopin, 635-661; Stephen Crane, 706-742;
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 799-819.
Lecture: The four fiction writers listed for this unit represent
both the established canon and the emergent canon of turn-of-the-
century American writers, yet all of them are subjects of
exciting new directions in literary history current today which
are very suggestive of the ways that figures once thought to
stand alone in their aesthetic purity now can be related in
connection with cultural history. Introduce James's biography--
American expatriate bachelor in London from a prominent
intellectual family--and connect that with such texts as "The
Beast in the Jungle" for its suggestive relation to sexual and
gendered identity. Reading James and Crane next to Chopin and
Gilman can be useful for establishing the literary alternatives
male and female authors exploited.
Discussion: Discuss "The Beast in the Jungle" as complicated
psychological exploration of courage and commitment, and in the
context of social history, of the pressures on bachelors during
the period to "appear" normal. Read Chopin's "The Story of an
Hour," and "The Storm" as feminist vignettes exploring the
limitations and pressures placed on married women in the creole
society of Louisiana. Read "The Open Boat" as a powerful study of
male association under extreme pressure as an alternative to the
image of American society Crane often invokes as growing hyper-
civilized and effeminate. Read Gilman's "The Yellow Wall-Paper"
as a disturbing psychological account of a woman who has absorbed
all too well the sense of her role constructed for her by her
husband and brother.
Week 13: William Faulkner's South
Reading: As I Lay Dying
Lecture: Introduce elements of Faulkner's biography, and the
historical context of post-bellum southern hard scrabble farming
life. Faulkner's stylistic innovations are often explained as a
result of his apprenticeship to important modernist writers (like
Sherwood Anderson) and his desire to transcend local conditions.
I like to discuss Faulkner's aesthetic project as coming out of
specific historical needs--to on the one hand invoke the
storytelling traditions of the south, and to demonstrate their
breakdown. This aspect of the lecture raises both the issue of
the story--a family journey through suffering, commitment, and
betrayal--and the storytelling--the multiple perspectives,
telling and retelling the narrative, the obsessive and compulsive
movement of a family in crisis with its community, each other,
and even them selves.
Discussion: Faulknerian narrative method lends itself
particularly well to a discussion of an Emersonian aesthetic of
contingency, partial access to truth, and particularly in this
novel, Darl Bundren's exuberant if brooding poetic imagination.
Darl can be linked as well with the artist figure of Hawthorne's
"The Custom House" (who emerges in the voice of the narrator), as
an implicit critique of America business and political values.
Students also enjoy picking their "favorite" narrators, and
making cases for them, elaborating criteria on which to base
claims of authenticity, authority, and the like.
Week 14: The Varieties of Modernist Poetry
Reading: Lauter, Gen. Ed., The Heath Anthology, Vol. 2: Robert
Frost, 1191-1210; Ezra Pound, 1257-1282; Gertrude Stein, 1297-
1310; William Carlos Williams, 1310-1329; H.D., 1380-1387; T.S.
Eliot, 1435-1469; Marianne Moore, 1506-1516; Wallace Stevens,
1530-1542; Hart Crane, 1565-1578; Langston Hughes, 1612-1644;
Sterling A. Brown, 1656-1672; Claude McKay, 1689-1696; Blues
Lyrics, 1722-1729.
Lecture: Introduce basic concepts of modernist aesthetics,
including several versions of avant garde practices and their
historical contexts. It is useful to distinguish among the
several traditions to which the above writers more or less
adhere: Frost, Stevens, Crane, a post-Emersonian romantic
tradition of vatic seeing and saying; Pound and Eliot, as high
modernists who invoked a post-Arnoldian tradition of cultural
high seriousness and purpose; Stein, H.D. and Moore as
experimentalists interested in remaking poetry by reinventing the
female poet; Williams and Hughes, as poets in the Whitmanic
tradition, writing in an "American" idiom, stripping down the
language to its "essential" character and qualities; Brown and
McKay exploring the vernacular idioms of a rural America then
(1920s and 30s) in economic and demographic decline.
Discussion: Given the widely different approaches of the various
poets covered in this week of readings, one useful avenue for
discussion would be to find points of contact, connection,
affiliation, and influence among the works themselves. For
example, Frost and Williams interest in finding in poetry
resources for the spoken word can usefully be compared to that of
Hughes and Brown, even though these poets are seldom read
together--and the anthology itself has chosen to segregate these
poets. One might explore themes as well, for example Frost,
Stevens, Crane, Moore, Stein, Williams, Hughes, Brown and McKay
all write poems that attempt to define American identity, and one
might read them for their various approaches.
Week 15: Their Eyes Were Watching God
Reading: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Lecture: Introduce Hurston as a member of the New Negro
Renaissance (or Harlem Renaissance), her education under Franz
Boas as an anthropologist, her work in African-American folk
traditions, and her struggles with other African-American writers
of the time such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. Also,
introduce the novel as a prime example of recent efforts in canon
reformation, beginning with her death in obscurity in 1960, her
rediscovery by Alice Walker and others in the mid-seventies, and
the reissue of her works by the University of Illinois Press in
the seventies, and now the reissue by the copyright holders,
Harper & Row in the nineties.
Discussion: The novel can function as an excellent vehicle for
discussions about canon formation, literary and aesthetic value,
the politics of access to literary texts, and the history of
changes in the literary academy. Specific issues for discussion
within the novel itself include the narrative structure and its
relation to the creation of an autonomous but collective female
voice, the controversy over the courtroom scene in which Janie
fails to speak directly, and the novel's uneasy approach to
violence.
Week 16: Ashbery and Bishop
Reading: John Ashbery, Selected Poems; Elizabeth Bishop, The
Complete Poems.
Lecture: Although Ashbery and Bishop come to the craft of poetry
from widely different angles--Ashbery from surrealism and the
avant garde, Bishop from more traditional forms--both share
elements in common even if in different measures. Bishop's "The
Man-Moth" is a wonderfully surrealist poem, while Ashbery's "Farm
Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape" is a strange observation
in the form of the traditional sestina. Where both poets can be
linked as major American voices, is on the ground of Emerson's
bare common, a landscape bereft of culture but astonished into
life by the imagination of the poet.
Discussion: Among the topics for discussion this unit raises
includes the role of the expatriate writer in defining American
traditions in literature (both Ashbery and Bishop lived abroad
for extended periods of time), the balance between innovation and
tradition in style and subject matter, and the role of the poet
in contemporary American culture. Both poets concern themselves
with the discovery of the sublime in the ordinary--and the
ordinary in the exotic--and this aspect of North American
literature can be a focal point for any summing up that needs to
be done as the course concludes. This discussion calls into play
the relation between the literary texts and American culture,
history, and society in general--American identity in the largest
sense, related to its brief history, its landscapes and
architecture, its cities and rural areas, its social
organization, its multitude of peoples and cultures. Both Ashbery
and Bishop write poetry particularly sensitive to the crossing of
boundaries among cultures, languages, experiences that marks
United States society, but most importantly they are writers of
the first rank who have created an important body of work.