LITR 4232 American Renaissance

Lecture Notes

 Meeting 3: conclude Irving, begin Last of the Mohicans

Tuesday, 2 September: conclude Irving, begin James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans, chapters 1-3 (pages 1-35 in Penguin Classics edition.)

Guide to Last of the Mohicans

Text-Objective Discussion: Faron Samford

Thursday, 4 September: Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans, through chapter 13 (thru p. 133 in Penguin edition.)

Text-Objective Discussion: Bryan McDonald

Tuesday, 9 September: Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans, through chapter 24 (thru p. 254 in Penguin edition.)

Web highlight (midterms on Mohicans): Nicole Bippen

Thursday, 11 September: Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans, complete (thru p. 350 in Penguin edition.)

Course Objectives:

1. To use "close reading" and "Historicism" as ways of studying classic, popular, and representative literature and cultural history of the "American Renaissance" (the generation before the Civil War).

2. To study the movement of "Romanticism," the narrative genre of "romance," and the related styles of the "gothic" and "the sublime." (The American Renaissance is the major period of American Romantic Literature.)

3. To use literature as a basis for discussing representative problems and subjects of American culture (Historicism), such as equality (race, gender, class); modernization and tradition; the individual, family; and community; nature; the role of writers in an anti-intellectual society.

How is Irving "popular"?

descriptions + picturesque, abundance

Like a sitcom: 

Sentiment, nostalgia

Stock / stereotype characters

Humor / comedy

How classical?

Insight, criticisms

Historical comprehensions

Compositional integrity (not just a lot going on, but parts fit)

Not representative

musician an old gray-headed negro

pyramid of shining black faces

grinning rows of ivory from ear to ear

what passed at this interview I will not pretend to say

O these women! These women!  

Most popular culture simply reinforces ideas, attitudes we already have

Classic literature rich with meaning, keeps giving off meaning, not obvious

Contains important ideas, comprehension of historical change

Representative literature (written by someone "other" than yourself) develops materials and ways of thinking that you or people like you might never think of otherwise.

popular / classic / representative lit.

To use critical techniques of "close reading" and "New Historicism" as ways of studying classic, popular, and representative literature and cultural history of the "American Renaissance" (the generation before the Civil War).

Why do we read and study literature? What is the purpose of literature?

pleasure, enrichment, history, ideas, inspiration, mental exercise, depth . . . .

"Literature entertains and informs" (first formulated by Roman poet Horace)

entertain = "escape"; "I like a good story"--i. e., being swept away into another world richer or more exciting than our own

examples: pure entertainment tends toward popular literature, which sells well and is read avidly but tends to disappear quickly like other consumer items, e. g., TV shows, most movies, most hit songs. They're all very right for the moment, but they get overexposed and the moment changes.

inform = elevate, edify, instruct; vicarious learning experience; "reading improves you"; "reading broadens the mind"; critical thinking

examples: lectures, editorials, sermons, bible studies, classic literature, classical music, museum art. 

Few people get rich in these areas, and the products are "underexposed" rather than overexposed. (For instance, Houston has many "pop music" stations but only 1 classical station--last year the commercial classical station changed to "urban dance.") These products are rarely as overwhelmingly right for a single moment than a pop-culture product, but they may not disappear as fast. For instance, by 2050 Stephen King's writings will likely be only a memory, replaced by another formula-horror writer, but classrooms may still be reading Poe or Emerson.

Pulling things apart in order to analyze

Popular & classic literature can overlap without negating each other 

Cooper was the first American writer to make a career as a professional novelist, and his "Leatherstocking Tales" were the first American books to become international bestsellers.

Cooper is a definitive American "Romantic" writer. His novels resemble those of the British Romantic novelist Sir Walter Scott (e. g., Ivanhoe), and Cooper spent a good deal of his life in Europe, where his novels were well-received.

Cooper grew up and lived much of his life in Cooperstown, New York, named for his father who founded the city and now famous as home of the Baseball Hall of Fame.

"The Leatherstocking Tales" are a series of five novels that are connected by two fictional characters: 

"The Leatherstocking Tales" in order of composition

The Pioneers (1823) 
(set in the 1770-80s: Natty & Chingachgook are aging squatters near the new fictional town of Templeton, modeled after Cooperstown)

The Last of the Mohicans (1826) 
(set during the French and Indian War of 1757-. Natty and Chingachgook are in the prime of middle age. The title character--"the last of the Mohicans"--is Chingachgook's son Uncas.)

The Prairie (1827) 
(Setting is the western prairies of the early 1800s at the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Chingachgook is dead, and Natty is a very old man who dies at the novel's end.)

The Pathfinder (1840) 
(Setting 1740s; Natty Bumppo as "pathfinder" in his 20s; military action and courtship in years prior to Last of the Mohicans)

The Deerslayer (1841) 
(Set near Cooperstown / Lake Otsego ["Glimmerglass"] in the 1730s. Natty and Chingachgook are young men at age of first courtship and first battles. A teenage Uncas makes a brief appearance in an epilogue to the novel.)

Glenn’s Falls

52 secret entrance 

The Last of the Mohicans and history

map of New York, including Lakes George & Champlain

Map of Fort William Henry

Mohicans

xv. cross the border (compare "romance")

women on frontier

19. sublime

"burst its bounds" + blood + secret or something on her mind

21 narrow and blind path + skin dark

30 reason in an Indian

35 no cross in his blood

review > classic and popular literature

1st class meeting: 

What is the nature of art / literature?

"art imitates reality"

"imitation" = representation, mirror, mimesis

"reality" = nature (both physical and human nature), life, existence, God

quick examples:

Hamlet 3.2, Hamlet's speech to the actors: "the purpose of playing whose end . . . is to hold as 't were the mirror up to nature"

What follows?

Art / literature is not reality or nature, doesn't just happen

But not exactly untrue either--it's "like" reality in some ways, but unlike reality in others

unlike: doesn't just happen, like the sun coming up or feeling hungry or sleepy

instead, literature is created by human endeavor

more specifically, by civilized human behavior--all writing rises from complex interactions of humans with each other. Robinson Crusoe on his desert island wouldn't have written if he hadn't learned it elsewhere, and eventually he stops writing

like: 

reality, nature, existence is huge, enormously complex

no single thing you can say about the world is always true in every situation (though that doesn't keep us from trying)

Similarly, why do we study literature?

Why do we read and study literature? What is the purpose of literature?

pleasure, enrichment, history, ideas, inspiration, mental exercise, depth . . . .

"To entertain and inform" (first stated by Roman poet Horace)

entertain = "escape"; "I like a good story"--i. e., being swept away into another world richer or more exciting than our own

examples: pure entertainment tends toward popular literature, which sells well and is read avidly but tends to disappear quickly like other consumer items, e. g., TV shows, most movies, most hit songs. They're all very right for the moment, but they get overexposed and the moment changes.

inform = elevate, edify, instruct; vicarious learning experience; "reading improves you"; "reading broadens the mind"; critical thinking

examples: lectures, editorials, sermons, bible studies, classic literature, classical music, museum art. Few people get rich in these areas, and the products are "underexposed" rather than overexposed. (For instance, Houston has many "pop music" stations but only 2 classical stations, and the commercial classical station is changing soon.) These products are rarely as overwhelmingly right for a single moment than a pop-culture product, but they tend not to disappear as fast. For instance, by 2050 Stephen King's writings will likely be only a memory, but classrooms may still be reading Poe and Emerson.

However, we're pulling things apart in order to analyze

In fact, Popular & classic literature can overlap without negating each other

Popular Classic Authors:

Twain

Shakespeare

Dickens

Irving

Cooper

Poe

(harder to find later)

Frost?

Langston Hughes

Toni Morrison

2088 inn > hotel

tree > flagpole

2089 very character of the people seemed changed

riot in the village?

RVW experience of every generation

Relate to objective 3: American Renaissance as modernity and resistance

2088 village was altered: larger and more populous

house gone to decay

called loudly . . . lonely chambers rang

(Legend) 2095 fixed x great torrent of migration and improvement . . . changes

(Legend) 2099  > Kentucky

(Van Winkle) 2106 shifting throng > ghosts . . . in long established Dutch communities

Romanticism (obj. 2)

Historical, trans-cultural, international movement, value system in literature and arts, response to massive social changes in Europe and USA

Still very influential in popular attitudes: love of nature, past, children, innocence, etc.

Movement itself: late 18^th > 19^th century (late 1700s > 1800s)

Spreads out into popular culture

gothic, sublime, the romance--all sub-categories or conventions or formulas of Romanticism

(Learning to study literature is often about learning to think in groups of ideas, which forces higher critical skills of organizing and perceiving relationships.)

sublime

aesthetic concept

aesthetics?

Hear the word mostly these days in design, whether of rooms, webpages, or commercial products like cars, electric shavers

Synonym for “appeal”?

the branch of philosophy called “aesthetics” concerns itself with the nature of beauty (or ugliness) and pleasure (or pain)

sublime as aesthetic category of beauty larger and more threatening than beauty or prettiness

combination of beauty and terror, pleasure and pain

“awesome," "wow," "larger than life"

Edmund Burke on the Sublime

down into a deep mountain glen, wild, lonely, and shagged; the bottom filled with fragments from the impending cliffs

something strange and incomprehensible about the unknown, that inspired awe and checked familiarity

gothic

several "conventions" of the Gothic, all of which may or may not be present in a given example

haunted building or spatial construct (e. g., forest, spaceship)

light and dark interplay (with flashes of lurid red or yellow)

memory of past crime or sin

creepy or startling sounds, spectral figures

great tree, woman in white that haunted the dark glen

whitewashed walls shine modestly

large brook among broken rocks and trunks of fallen trees

enormous tulip tree, gnarled, fantastic

groan – rubbing of one huge bough upon another

huge misshapen, black, and towering

haunted fields, brooks, bridges

correspondence

Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary

correspondence. 1. Act or state of corresponding; relation or agreement of things to each other or one thing to another. . . . 3. The letters which pass between correspondents.

to correspond. 1. to answer (to something else) in fitness, character, function, amount, etc.; to suit, agree, fit, or match.

every sound of nature, at that witching hour, fluttered his excited imagination

sank deep in the mind of Ichabod

all the stories of ghosts and goblins . . . came crowding upon his recollection. The night grew darker and darker

categories of gothic

European / psychological gothic—Poe + European predecessors (Walpole, Radcliffe, Lewis)

Wilderness gothic—Irving, Cooper, To Kill a Mockingbird, Blair Witch Project

Puritan / moral gothic—Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter and stories (also include some wilderness gothic)

Space gothic—Alien(s)

Suburban gothic—Nightmare on Elm Street

Urban gothic—film noir (dark detective films like The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, Chinatown, Body Heat, LA Confidential)