Adam Glasgow

A Trot through the Ages

The learning experience in this class was much different than that of most college courses I’ve taken up to this point. It was unique in almost every way – from the class presentations, to the readings, to the assignments. Having most of the class led by students was a brilliant idea, I think. It forced the presenter to think about the material in ways that simply reading it never would have. Being able to read an assignment and respond to surface level questions is one thing, but having to lead a class discussion is on an entirely different level. I also really enjoyed that the class was able to go back and read and reflect on writings from previous classes.  Writing college essays frequently feels mundane to me, because I know that the final product will be read once, quite possibly hastily depending on the professor’s course load, I’ll be assigned a grade, and then no one will ever look at or see the writing again. Obviously getting a good grade is a motivator for doing good work, but knowing that my ideas will be passed on to future classmates is an even bigger one. It’s forced me to contemplate my subjects longer and take time while writing. I have been in many previous classes where the instructor has used the term “join in the great conversation,” but this is perhaps the first class that truly makes me feel like I am part of a bigger conversation. That’s an exciting concept to me. The fact that the reading material is all available online was a huge bonus as well. Putting fewer pay barriers between students and materials is always a good thing, in my opinion.

Aside from the structure of the class, the content was fascinating as well. I will admit, when I signed up for a course entitled “Early American Literature” I was expecting Mark Twain, which would have been great, but what I got was so much more interesting, mainly because I had never been exposed to much of it before. Perhaps most fascinating to me was being able to watch the birth of the novel. I certainly noticed the focus placed on that aspect of the class. Going all the way back to the early readings we analyzed what made the readings more or less like a modern day novel. The first piece of United States fiction we discussed was Rip Van Winkle, which was delightful, but even before that when talking about something like Cabeza de Vaca’s writing we explored what made it an enjoyable piece of work one might read for fun, and what made it more of a struggle to endure.

This theme continued in the class even through the Enlightenment writings. Reading through The Age of Reason, for example, might yield interesting results, but I don’t think an average reader would conquer those pages and honestly be able to say that he or she had a great time doing so. The same set of readings, however, included John and Abigail Adams’ letters to one another. These letters, while studied mainly now for historical purposes, were generally regarded by the class as much more fun and enjoyable to read when compared to The Age of Reason or Thomas Jefferson on Religion. The reason for this, according to the consensus of the class, was because these letters felt more personal and real than much of what we had read before, something that makes the novel more enjoyable to read when compared to some other forms of writing.

This all built up to the end of the semester when we read two novels: Charlotte Temple and Edgar Huntly. Reading these after reading everything else in the class made them much more intriguing than they otherwise would have been for me. Charlotte Temple was well told and easy to finish, but was made all the more fascinating because of what I read in class and in Christina English’s research posts about the role of women in American literature (The Marginalization of Women in Early American Literature and A Decrease in the Marginalization of Women in Early American Literature). Christian explored how the role of women has changed in literature throughout early American history, and seeing where Charlotte Temple fell in this continuum added an extra layer of content for me to think about while I read.

Perhaps most interesting to me when it come to the fiction we discussed in class was Edgar Huntly, mainly because it felt so much more modern than it is. The Gothic tones, the mystery, the uncertainty felt by both the characters within and the reader, the aspects of the novel left up to the reader’s imagination, etc. It felt more unsettling than anything else I have read from the time period, and it laid a great foundation to help understand where authors like Edgar Allan Poe (whose work was published a little over thirty years after the release of Edgar Huntly) and H.P. Lovecraft (whose first story was published over a hundred years later). The influence of this story, directly or indirectly, can be felt even to this day.

This brings me to the last aspect of my learning experience in the course I wanted to talk about that I enjoyed – the research posts. The amount of freedom we as students were given to explore questions that the texts brought up was wonderful. It is because of this freedom that research post topics range everywhere from The Bible, to Native Americans, to the Gothic genre, to topics that seem even less connected to the original content, like my research post on a modern presidential election. I do not think I have ever been in a class that allowed that much freedom in choosing what we wrote about, but it made the class all that much more interesting and varied.