LITR 4232 American Renaissance Lecture Notes

 Meeting 4: Second class on The Last of the Mohicans

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.)

Mohicans background & assignments

James Fenimore Cooper Society

Student Companions to Classic Authors, Greenwood Press

Guide to Last of the Mohicans

Objective 2. To study the movement of "Romanticism," the narrative genre of "romance," and the related styles of the "gothic" and "the sublime."

examples of gothic and sublime in opening chapters

How does Cooper extend or re-develop the gothic?

Relocates gothic scene from haunted castle to gloomy forest

Plays new cultural riffs on gothic color scheme of light and dark +- red, yellow

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

handout to Mohicans:

Cora, Gender, and the American Gothic Secret

Cora is the most interesting voice or figure in Last of the Mohicans, despite many readers' dismissal of Cooper as a sexist or macho author.  Cora's sister Alice is a "damsel in distress," but Cora, by reasons of birth and Euro-American ideology, can't fit into that category.  Pay close attention to chapter 16, where Cora's mixed background is indicated (however allusively and indirectly).

If the romance involves crossing borders, borders have already been crossed in Cora's past. As a romantic heroine, she continues to cross boundaries in terms of the expectations of her gender.  Yet she also upholds some values traditionally associated with feminine gender.

Questions re Mohicans?

cf cross in the blood 35, 63, 78, 126

2 Lenni Lenape = "unmixed people"

76 "we are men without a cross"

more on Gothic?

wilderness gothic & gothic as repressed, returning past

assignment handout, p. 4

46 forever a secret

54 cave

59, 61 hymn > strong horrid cry  > 63 a horse . . . in terror

66 demons

87 Alice prays, sees le Renard Subtil

125 a species of ruins, gloomy, crumbling, neglected, and nearly forgotten

126 graves

133 silent grave and crumbling ruin . . . to bury themselves in the gloom of the woods

Next class: chapter 16 on Cora's secret; return to Cora p. 78

53 who . . . remembers the shades of his skin!

103 Cora: "whose shades of countenance may resemble mine?"

Romance

Review popular uses: Harlequin romance; “popular literature”; ends with a kiss (etc.); light eroticism, true love

Academic uses:

“Romance” is one of 4 major kinds of story or narrative (Frye, Anatomy of Criticism 1957)

narrative is easy to recognize but hard to define

synonyms: story, plot, account, relation

analogies: melody in music--moves through time, organizing various voices or instruments in a single direction

similarly narrative can be broadly defined as 

a sequence of events

people speaking and acting together in time

4 major kinds of story or narrative (Frye, Anatomy of Criticism 1957)  

Comedy

Tragedy

Satire

Romance

These can be combined

 Narrative Genres, esp. Romance

Further Notes on Romance

110 [saved]

118 a minstrel of the western continent

129 dreaming that he was a knight of ancient chivalry . . . a recaptured princess

handout

knights of forest

cf. Batman and Robin

Romance plot as pursuit, capture, escape / rescue

110-111

Romanticism

Historical, international cultural 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

Romantic music (Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert)

Romantic painting (Millais, Turner > Impressionism)

Romantic Literature

Romanticism in relation to other periods:

Renaissance

400-1600

Columbus, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Shakespeare

Enlightenment, Age of Reason, Neo-Classical Period

late 1600s-1700s

Newton, Voltaire, Jonathan Swift, Benjamin Franklin

Romantic era

Late 1700s-1800s

Goethe, Hugo, Wordsworth, Keats, Brontes, Emerson, Whitman

Victorian era (Great Britain) / Realistic era (USA)

Late 1800s

Dickens, Tennyson, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain

Modernist period

First half of 20^th century (World War 1-World War 2?)

Picasso, Stravinsky, Yeats, Eliot, Woolf, Lawrence

Post-Modernist period

Since 1945? Since early 70s?

Twain & Lawrence on Cooper

Cooper 1789-1854 (Romantic era, American Renaissance)

Twain 1835-1910 (Realistic era, late 19c)

Lawrence 1885-1930 (Modernism, early 20c)

(interest in symbolism, primitive powers, myth, literature as creation of truth rather than reflection of reality)

Significance of Twain in American literature

Hemingway: “fountainhead of American literature”

Realistic tradition that Hemingway continued: characters as real people with real motivations, limits, desires; fiction as tough, gritty, spare

Romanticism: characters as types of people with extreme motivations, limits, desires; fiction as fuzzy, lush, anything’s possible, heroic

Twain criticizes Cooper for not being a Realist writer

novel: cf. Irving

78 "There is reason in her words"

Review objective 1:

classic, popular, and representative literature

popular--appeals to people where they are; confirms attitudes, values; "pushes buttons"

stereotypical characters--e. g., contemporary action movies: quiet decent humble but heavily armed American (or representative); Mexican men as banditos; Arab men as sniveling or hysterical; black men as noble sacrifice; European men as cold masterminds; women of various races as whole different set of stereotypes, but if the action guy likes her, she's usually just a kinder gentler version of himself who doesn't pick up her gun until her cubs are threatened.

humor / comedy: essentially conservative mode or narrative of literature--"all's well that ends well"

formulas and genres are used more or less unconsciously--

"If this is an action movie, when does the helicopter explode?"

"If this is a gothic thriller, when's the first scream in the night? When's the first turn-around-and-gasp?"

classic--

pop lit tends to throw a lot of such junk as above into a miscellaneous mix--every page has something that soothes or excites, but classic lit often involves "deferred gratification" and long attention spans, plus "compositional integrity" (parts aren't just thrown together but fit carefully into larger patterns of meaning)

classic lit doesn't just use formulas and genres like the gothic but extends and develops them in new ways, so that a familiar vehicle evokes new meaning

popular writer repeats formula

classic writer varies formula, extends range

Cooper both a popular and a classic writer

popular: sold well--great action scenes and somewhat stereotypical characters; wrote fast, and sometimes his plotting and characterization are clumsy and cumbersome

classic: explored sensitive issues, plus historical knowledge and depth