Diego A. Gutierrez

May 3, 2012

Discovering the Unknown

It was the winter break when I made the decision to register for the Early American Literature class Dr. White was offering. I was clueless about how early in history we would go in this course. Yes, I expected to see writings from the founding fathers and writings from the enlightment period, but I never imagined how deep we would go into the subject. From previous literature courses, even some from high school, I remember learning about the birth of our country and how we came to be in this land, but never thought of it in the way this course made me think. I basically came into the classroom not knowing much about early American literature, but many aspects of the course helped me learn a bit more about literature in America.

At first when presented with the syllabus, I was overwhelmed with the amount of reading we had to do for this class. I knew it was a literature class, but knowing that I had other courses to read on, I just said to myself, I need to calm down and let’s do this. The first class came and went, and the second Thursday I became engaged in the subject. We had started with the stories of creation and evolution, and being a strong Christian man, this was my comfort area; I enjoyed this objective so much that my first research post was on creationism and what the Catholic church thinks about this. Although being familiar with the topic, this research post on the stories of creation taught me a lot.  First of all, I had never seen the creation story on the Native American’s point of view, nor had I ever compared the letters from Columbus to the Creation story in Genesis. While doing this research I noticed how similar the creation story from Genesis and Columbus letters were. Columbus writes about his finding of the new world and how he named the islands; this made me think of God naming each thing as he created it. The stories about creation continued and I kept noticing similarities amongst the stories. They all created something as the word implied, but not a human life necessarily. I learned that creation does not only mean creation of a human being, but creation of governments and countries as well, as it was portrayed in the other stories like the Guadalupe story and the Declaration of Independence, both stories of the birth of a country.

After learning of creation, we moved on to the enlightenment period and yet another objective that I felt a connection to because of my education background. During this time the slaves learned to read and write, despite the many laws that prohibited this as depicted in the Short Narrative of my Life by Samson Occom. I can say Occom’s narrative was not the best thing I have ever read, but it was interesting. It gave me an insight of how important it was for slaves to learn to read. I could clearly see that Occom was trying to deliver a message to the others saying, if I can do it, you can too. During the enlightenment period many slaves became literate because they were forced to learn to read to understand the Holy Scriptures. They basically had no choice; the white wanted them to become Christians, to become “enlightened.” Once one African American would learn to read and or write, they would then pass their knowledge down to another slave, and that slave would pass it down to another. Some other lucky slaves would have tutors that their masters would hire as I mentioned in my research post two. They would learn from the tutors and then practice with the master’s children or grandchildren as they did in Monticello back in the 1700’s. Learning about this period gave me more reasons to love literature. Here we have students who refuse to do reading assignments, knowing how to read, while in the 1700’s we had some African American who would “kill” to learn to read and write; it gave me a reason to appreciate the fact that I can read.

Along with Occom’s Short narrative of My Life, Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative … also taught me a lot. In this narrative Equiano explained basically what he went thru during his captivity time. I would have to agree with Lori Arnold’s Final Exam posting from 2010, “[t]he narrative definitely illustrates very gruesome details of slavery from the initial capture, the transport by ship, to the work required of them on the plantations, a slave generally suffered many atrocities.” Despite its gruesome details of the life in captivity, I sensed a message of success in this narrative. Although Equiano had to go through all of this, he eventually learned some skills from his friend, who just happened to be his master and owner as well, later allowing him to buy his freedom.

The presentations we had to do for our classmates did a lot of help as well. Not only because I learned from myself, but because I was able to learn from others. I was able to see how others interpreted a piece of writing, which many times I completely understood a different thing from the readings. Although not from a classmate, but from the TA, I really enjoyed Ryan’s web review; I had heard of the trail of tears, but never understood exactly what it was about. After Ryan’s presentation I now understand that this was a trail that different Native American tribes from the eastern side of the country took when they were basically thrown out of their land and relocated. Many lives were lost during this migration from one place to the other, hence the name Trial of Tears. I found the web site very interesting and helpful to understand the topic.

As for the two novels that we read at the end of the semester, I think they were very interesting. I preferred Edgar Huntly by Charles Brockden Brown better than Charlotte Temple.  I enjoyed the darkness of the story. It definitely shows a gothic side to it. The mysteriousness of the events in the novel kept me attached to the screen; it kind of reminded me of a much better version of a children’s Goosebumps book. In the novel they introduce a sleepwalker, Edgar, that doesn’t know he sleepwalks, that sees another sleep walker, Clithero, and believes that Clithero has killed Waldegrave, Edgar’s friend. Huntly sees Clithero overnight were Waldegrave was killed and later finds out that it was not him, but the Indians after he wakes up in a cave and realizes he is a sleepwalker himself.

After taking this course, I can truly say that my knowledge about early American literature has grown substantially. Many things that remained in the darkness for me have finally reached the light. I have become more knowledgeable of the topics spoken about in the class. I know of different beliefs of creation. I know of the hardships slaves went through to learn to read and a lot more.  It was interesting to go through all these periods so fast yet to learn so much from them, although I would have loved to learn a lot more about the Romantic period, I felt like we could have covered more of this period. Regardless of the amount of time spent on each section, the experiences gained from presentations and discussions were really engaging and enjoyable.