Course Objectives
The authors we will read this semester lived in a century full of optimism and despair, of unbounded possibilities and intractable problems. The new nation of America was a land of freedom and opportunity for people from all different parts of the Old World, and yet it was a place of slavery and oppression. America was a new Eden, nature’s nation, where people in contact with the earth would be loosed from centuries of cultural baggage and set free to worship God and pursue true happiness. Or was it? Each of these authors addresses questions at the core of the American experiment: What is freedom? What are we free for? Over the course of this semester, we’ll explore the way various authors attempted to form democratic readers, readers free to participate in religious, political, and scientific interpretations of authoritative texts.
Ideally, as we read through these texts, we will accomplish three related goals: provide you with a historical and cultural framework through which to understand the particular, nineteenth-century American texts we read together; train you to read and interpret these texts; and teach you to make careful arguments about these texts. At the end of this course, you should have a historical paradigm, a set of analytical tools, and the rhetorical sophistication to read, analyze, and think about whatever literary works you encounter in the future. Along the way, you just might discover why these skills are important, and why God used the forms of literature, stories and language, to tell us about himself.
In order to accomplish these objectives, you will need to carefully read the assigned reading before each class and turn in well-written reflection writings. This should help you come to class prepared to discuss the text. Your reflection writings and our class discussions should prepare you to craft a creative, insightful final project.
Coronavirus Updates
To get the latest information about SAU’s response to the coronavirus, follow the updates here. For now, we’ll do the following in this class, Deo volente:
Before each class period thereafter, I’ll send you a Zoom invitation via email 5-10 minutes before our class begins. If possible, please join using your computer or smart phone. You’ll have to download an app to do so, but it should be a relatively quick process to get it installed. If those don’t work for you, there’s also a phone number you can call to join our meeting.
Continue doing your pre-class reflections as normal. I’ll call on you to share these, and you can use the chat functionality to indicate you have a question or comment.
We’re all figuring this out together, so please bear with me as I work to transition to a video-chat format for our discussions, and do know that I will extend grace to you all as we navigate these next days and weeks.
Course Documents
Please upload your pre-class reflections to the appropriate folder here. In order to upload files, you’ll need to select “Join folder to receive updates” on the right side of the screen. You can also find all of the assigned articles in this folder.
Grades
- 30% – Fifteen (15) Pre-Class Reflections (300 wds. each) and reading quizzes
- 10% – Scholarly Essay Review and Presentation
- 5% – Digital Annotations
- 10% – Poetry Memorization and Analysis
- 10% – Midterm
- 15% – Final Essay
- 20% – Final Exam
Texts
- The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. ISBN: 9780393979534
- Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass. ISBN: 9780345478238
- Summer on the Lakes, by Margaret Fuller ISBN: 9780252061646
- Walden, by Henry David Thoreau. ISBN: 9780140390445
- Moby Dick, by Herman Melville. ISBN: 9781586174163
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, by Mark Twain. ISBN: 9780140430646
- Nineteenth-Century American Poetry. ISBN: 9780140435870
- Other texts will be provided via a link or on box. Please print these off to bring to class.
Course Calendar
Course meets MWF 11:10-12:10 in SDH 209. This schedule is subject to change.
Week 1
- Wednesday 1/29: Introduction
- Friday 1/31: Emerson, Nature (Just read the following sections: Introduction (7-8), Nature (8-11), Commodity (11-12), Language (17-23), Idealism section 2 (31-33), and 42-45)
Week 2
- Monday 2/3: Twain 24-97 (chs. 1-9); “49,” 353; “622,” 372; “915,” 385; “1433,” 392
- Wednesday 2/5: Twain 98-170 (chs. 10-18); “Our Limitations,” 119
- Friday 2/7: Twain 171-251 (chs. 19-26); “The Slowness of Belief in a Spiritual World,” 135
Week 3
- Monday 2/10: Twain 252-332 (chs. 27-35); Berkove, Lawrence I. “A Connecticut Yankee: A Serious Hoax.” Essays in Arts and Sciences 19 (1990): 28-44.
- Wednesday 2/12: Twain 333-410 (chs. 36-end)
- Friday 2/14: no class
Week 4
- Monday 2/17: Melville ch. 1-13; “Three Quatrains,” 432
- Wednesday 2/19: Melville ch. 14-25; “Misgivings,” 266
- Friday 2/21: Melville chs. 26-36 (skim 32); “Immolated,” 265; Alexander, Robert. “Apocalyptic Readings of Moby-Dick: What Ishmael Returns to Tell Us.” Moby-Dick Mary R. Reichardt. 661-678.
Week 5
- Monday 2/24: Melville chs. 37-47; “Richard Cory,” 435
- Wednesday 2/26: Melville chs. 48-70 (skip 53, 54, 56, 57); “Terminus” 51; Heimert, Alan. “Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism.” American Quarterly, vol. 15, no. 4, 1963, pp. 498–534.
- Friday 2/28: Melville chs. 71-92 (skip 74-77, 84-85); “Four Trees”
Week 6
- Monday 3/9: Melville chs. 93-110 (skip 101-105); Bennett, Stephen J. “’A Wisdom That is Woe’: Allusions to Ecclesiastes in Moby-Dick.” Literature and Theology 1 (2013): 48-64.
- Wednesday 3/11: Melville chs. 111-127
- Friday 3/13: no class
Week 7
- Monday 3/16: Melville chs. 128-Epilogue; “Tartarus,” 124; Midterm instructions
- Wednesday 3/18: Focus
- Friday 3/20: Midterm If you’d like to take this at a different time, please let me know. Anytime before Wed. March 25 is fine.
Week 8
- Monday 3/23: no class
- Wednesday 3/25: Douglass 3-98; “The Haschish,” 81
- Friday 3/27: Douglass 99-119; “Official Piety,” 80; Royer, Daniel J. “The Process of Literacy as Communal Involvement in the Narratives of Frederick Douglass.” African American Review 3 (1994): 363–374. Print.
Week 9
- Monday 3/30: Hawthorne, “Man of Adamant“; Marsden, George M. “Everyone One’s Own Interpreter?: The Bible, Science, and Authority in Mid-Nineteenth Century America.” The Bible in America: Essays in Cultural History, edited by Nathan O Hatch and Mark A Noll, Oxford University Press, 1982, pp. 79–100. AND Hawthorne 1-35 (Custom-House Preface); “Each and All” 30
- Wednesday 4/1: Hawthorne 36-67 (ch. 1-6); “The Spirit,” 128
- Friday 4/3: Hawthorne 68-97 (ch. 7-11); Phillips, Christopher N. “Keeping the Sabbath at Home: Emily Dickinson and the Rise of Private Hymnody.” Above the American Renaissance: David S. Reynolds and the Spiritual Imagination in American Literary Studies, edited by Harold K. Bush and Brian Yothers, University of Massachusetts Press, 2018; “Some Keep the Sabbath.”
Week 10
- Monday 4/6: Hawthorne 98-132 (ch. 12-18); “The Poet,” 26; Bell, Millicent. “The Obliquity of Signs: The Scarlet Letter.” The Scarlet Letter, ed. Leland Person. 451-463.
- Wednesday 4/8: Hawthorne 132-166 (ch. 19-24); “Science and Poetry,” 163
- Friday 4/10: No Class, Good Friday
Week 11
- Monday 4/13: No Class, Easter Monday
- Wednesday 4/15: Fuller 1-43; “Thanatopsis,” 10; Tonkovich, Nicole. “Traveling in the West, Writing in the Library: Margaret Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes.” Legacy, 1993, pp. 79–102.
- Friday 4/17: Fuller 44-67; “77,” 354; “95,” 354; Simmons, Nancy Craig. “Margaret Fuller’s Boston Conversations: The 1839-1840 Series.” Studies in the American Renaissance, 1994, pp. 195–226.
Week 12
- Monday 4/20: Fuller 68-104; “Slavery,” 134; “502,” 367; Bilbro, Jeffrey. “Learning to Woo Meaning from Chaos: Milton, Interpretation, and the Ecological Form of Summer on the Lakes.” Scribes of Nature: Writing the Environment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Ed. Steven Petersheim and Madison Jones IV. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
- Wednesday 4/22: Fuller 105-156; “243,” 356; “258,” 358; Annotations due
- Friday 4/24: Thoreau 43-97; “Grace” 34
Week 13
- Monday 4/27: Thoreau 97-143 (through “Where I Lived”); “Hymn to the North Star” 14; Bush, Sargent. “The End and Means in Walden: Thoreau’s Use of the Catechism.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 1 (1985): 1–10.
- Wednesday 4/29: Thoreau 144-199 (through “Visitors”); “Blight” 35; Paper Proposal Meetings due; make appointment here
- Friday 5/1: Thoreau 200-256 (through “Baker Farm”); “Overruled,” 92; Harding, Walter Roy. “Walden’s Man of Science.” Virginia Quarterly Review: A National Journal of Literature and Discussion, vol. 57, no. 1, 1981, pp. 45–61.
Week 14
- Monday 5/4: Thoreau 257-302 (through “House-Warming”); “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” 225; Poetry essay due
- Wednesday 5/6: Thoreau 303-346 (through “The Pond in Winter”); “Beat! Beat! Drums!,” 239; “As I Lay with my Head in Your Lap Camerado,” 240; Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1964. 242-265. Hannah recorded a very slick, well-produced 3-minute video from Lime Lake reflecting on Walden and the “tonic of wildness.”
- Friday 5/8: Thoreau 347-382; “This Compost“
Week 15
- Monday 5/11: Thoreau, “Life Without Principle“
Friday 5/15: Final Exam 8:00-10:00; Final essay due