[Next week
brings a new semester, the last of my 11th year at Fitchburg State
University. So this week brings a series of spring 2016 preview posts, this
time focused on the texts we’ll be reading in my spring courses. I’d love to
hear about your spring syllabi, and other spring plans, in comments!]
Unlike the other
courses about which I’ve written this week, in my American Lit I class we don’t
have any long readings—each day we focus on at least one new author and text,
and usually at least a couple. There’s just too much literature, history, and
culture to cover in the hundreds of years of American history pre-1865 for me
to feel that we can spend multiple days on a single author or text (despite the
many very challenging and worthy ones across that period). So today I’ll
highlight instead the four units across which this course moves, and two examples
of authors (one expected and one more surprising) with whom we engage in each:
1)
Exploration/Arrival/Contact: Christopher
Columbus is one of the couple most famous figures whom we read in Am Lit I, but
I’m willing to bet that most students haven’t had a chance to read either his
first voyage letter to Luis de
Santangel or his fourth voyage one to Ferdinand
and Isabella. Those two letters are striking enough on their own terms, but
they become even more interesting when paired with excerpts from Cabeza
de Vaca’s narrative. I make sure to include Native American voices (among
many other communities and cultures) in this opening unit as well, but Columbus
and Cabeza de Vaca alone are more than enough to shake up any preconceptions we
might have about the era.
2)
The Revolution: You can’t teach a unit on the
literature of the Revolutionary era and not read Tom Paine—and luckily (and
saliently), Paine’s writing and voice in both Common Sense
and The Crisis are
so unique and compelling that they reward our attention. His persuasive
arguments become even more interesting when we pair them with the persuasive,
revolutionary arguments deployed by Annis Stockton and
Judith Sargent Murray in service of the fledgling women’s movement. These
and other writers and texts help us understand the many layers of this period’s
revolutionary trends.
3)
The Early Republic: If there’s a more fun
American short story than Washington
Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” I haven’t found it; and from its found
footage preface and historical opening to its supernatural and political
twists, the story is also full of complex elements that tell us a great deal
about America in its post-Revolution infancy. At the other end of the genre
spectrum is William
Apess’s blunt, impassioned, and unforgettable essay “An
Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man,” a work every American should
read. American literature and society were both changing in striking and
significant ways in the Early Republic, as these and other works amply illustrate.
4)
The American Renaissance: Every semester, when
we get to our final unit, I worry that students will find Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature”
simply unreadable; and yet every semester I find instead that the
Transcendental origin point speaks to at least a couple students who hadn’t
been excited by any prior readings. On the other hand, I never worry for a
second that our selected columns
by Fanny Fern will make for anything other than enjoyable reading; but Fern
is also the kind of writer who reveals new depths every time I teach and read
her, so I’m just as excited to return to her as I am to share her with a new
class. All fun ways to wrap up what will be my 11th year teaching at
least one section of Am Lit I!
Last spring
preview tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What are you
teaching/reading this spring? Other spring plans you’d share?
No comments:
Post a Comment