ENG 336: American Literature to Mid-19th Century
Tues/Thurs 1:30-2:45pm
Course Description:
In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison writes that she “[wonders] whether the major and championed characteristics of our national literature—individualism, masculinity, social engagement versus historical isolation; acute and ambiguous moral problematics; the thematics of innocence coupled with an obsession with figurations of death and hell—are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence.” This course will focus on the central role of Black and Indigenous people in the vast period of American literary history up to the mid-19th century. We will consider how Black and Indigenous presences haunted white-authored texts, even ones without any explicitly racialized characters. And in turn, we will read less-canonical writings by Black and Indigenous writers who resist the dominant racist ideologies that perpetuated slavery and settler colonialism. The course will travel backwards in time, proceeding in a loosely reverse chronological order. We’ll begin with early-mid 19th century literature of slavery & abolition, move backwards to the Haitian and American Revolutions of the early-19th and late 18th-centuries, and end up in the 17th century with English colonization of what’s now the eastern US. Some topics we will address include: white anxieties about Black and Indigenous rebellion, white racism disguised as benevolence, who gets included into the literary canon and why, and what are some of the numerous ways freedom might appear in ways other than what one might expect.
Books:
All readings will be made available online, via Laulima, but if you prefer reading hard copies, you might want to purchase some of our longer texts. Inexpensive editions are available easily online. These are the editions I’ll be working from:
Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Oxford, 2008, ISBN: 9780199540471
Leonora Sansay, Secret History Broadview, 2007, ISBN: 9781551113463
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, 2003, ISBN: 9780142437162