Title: SEMINAR: AMERICAN LITERATURE TO 1830 (3)

PRQ:

This course is an in-depth exploration of early American literature concentrating on situations of captivity, contact, and cultural exchange from the late seventeenth to mid-nineteenth centuries.  We will read a mixture of real life captivity stories as well as fictional accounts of cross-cultural contact and exchange.  Both of these kinds of texts will help us to account for how authors of American literature began to form a distinct cultural identity: not British, but not “American” in the way we think of it today.  Expanding the usual confines of the captivity genre (where a white person is taken captive by Native Americans) we will also consider slave narratives and accounts of Indian Removal, including contemporary works by Toni Morrison and Diane Glancy.  Our readings will challenge us to imagine a time before the formation of the United States when land boundaries, religious preferences, and customs and manners were continually fluctuating and when colonial allegiances and local practices were not so easily reconciled. 

Assignments include active participation, weekly discussion questions, research project and presentation, seminar paper (20 pgs).  Regular attendance and participation are mandatory. 

TBA but will likely include: Women's Indian Captivity Narratives edited by Katherine Derounian-Stodola, Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper, Hope Leslie by Catharine Sedgwick, A Mercy by Toni Morrison, Pushing the Bear by Diane Glancy.