On a pairing that
embodies the best kind of literary and historical revisionism.
On the first day
of my American Literature I course, one of the two classes (alongside, wait for
it, American Literature II) that I’ve taught most frequently in my 8.5 years at
Fitchburg State, I connect the course’s syllabus and goals to a particular kind
of revisionism. In each of the course’s four units/time periods, we start with
a week of texts and figures that are often included in what I call The Story of
America (the Pilgrims/Puritans, the Founding Fathers, etc.), and then add in
two more weeks of texts and figures who help us think about other American
Stories (Native Americans and other European arrivals, women and African
Americans during the Revolutionary era, etc.). The goal, I try to make clear on
that first day, isn’t revisionism as competition or replacement (let’s get rid
of the emphasis on these dead white men, that sort of thing), but rather as
addition and combination—thinking about how reading and engaging with all of
these texts and figures helps us genuinely re-vise, see anew, each era and
American history, culture, and identity through them.
So that’s my
vision for the course overall—but of course what it means in practice is always
mostly and happily determined by the students and their thoughts, individually
and collectively, on particular authors, on the units, and on the class’s conversations
and work throughout. In the course’s second paper, the students have to put any
two of our texts in conversation with each other, developing a central topic
and thesis out of their ideas about that pairing, and the results often embody
particularly unique and interesting ways to connect across the units and
syllabus. This semester that meant, among many other great Paper 2 pairings:
poems on faith, community, and identity by Anne Bradstreet and William Cullen
Bryant; folk stories and myths put to historical uses by Chief
Pontiac and Washington Irving;
persuasive arguments developed by Tom Paine and Judith
Sargent Murray; and, in the evocative pairing on which I’ll focus for my
final paragraph in this post, the captivity stories of Mary
Rowlandson and Phillis
Wheatley.
The student’s
paper focused in particular on an interesting, two-part way to pair Rowlandson
and Wheatley: that both are writing about their experiences as captives
(Rowlandson in a narrative of her time with the Wampanoag tribe during King
Philip’s War; Wheatley in a poem about her experiences of the Middle Passage
and slavery); and that both use religious allusions and arguments to reframe
those experiences in a surprising way for their audiences. But the pairing and
paper also included—thanks to my response to those starting points and the
student’s strong subsequent work—an even more complex topic: how each figure
evolved as a result of her cross-cultural encounters, and how those evolutions
are reflected in their voices and choices as writers. The result, again
reflects the best kind of revisionism, one that doesn’t privilege any
particular culture or history or text or figure, but instead forces us to think
anew about captivity and community, identity and faith, and about the American
histories and literatures that portray, engage with, and help create those
ideas and images.
Next recap
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Fall classes, work, or other happenings you’d recap?
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