LITR 4232 American Renaissance

Lecture Notes

 Meeting 5: conclude The Last of the Mohicans


Authors of the United States
Engraving by A. H. Ritchie, 1866
Based on 1857(?) painting by Thomas Hicks

 

Today's agenda

Webpage > revised syllabus
Next Tuesday's assignment: representative literature
Obj. 2: What's Romantic about Mohicans?
Obj. 3: resolutions for couples? racial attitudes?
Obj. 1: Cooper in literary history: Twain and Lawrence

 

 

Classes of 11, 16, 18 September cancelled due to Hurricane Ike

Thursday, 23 or 25 September: Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans, complete (thru p. 350 in Penguin edition.)

Guide to Last of the Mohicans

Twain, Lawrence on Cooper

Thursday, 2 October: Ralph Waldo Emerson 1106-1113: introduction + opening 5 pages of Nature; 1163-68: opening 5 pages of “Self-Reliance”

Text-Objective Discussion: Martin Bidegaray

 

Webpage > revised syllabus

This week, come to class either Tuesday or Thursday

 

changes in syllabus:

Research paper dropped > 2 exams + presentation, participation

dropped Melville, Billy Budd

relocated some presentations, cut some web highlights

 

 

Next Tuesday's assignment: representative literature
 

Tuesday, 30 September: Emergence & repression of minority voices. William Apess (Pequot) 1051-58.  The Cherokee Memorials 1263-1268; Sojourner Truth, "Speech to the Women's Rights Convention . . . " 1695-6

Text-Objective Discussion: Karina Ramos

Objective 1: "Popular, Classic, and Representative Literature"

Two Indian texts and a black woman's speech

What differences in style, subject, emphases, etc.?

Importance of reading introductory materials, compared to "classic" literature. Pay attention to racial backgrounds.

What kind of relationship are these voices claiming with the dominant culture that originally formed the USA?

Watch out for moment of "sublime" in Sojourner Truth

 

 

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.

 

Obj. 2: What's Romantic about Mohicans? Start with title . . .


Obj. 3: resolutions for couples? racial attitudes?


Obj. 1: Cooper in literary history: Twain and Lawrence

 

What's Romantic about Mohicans?

Our course and period are called "American Renaissance," but the graduate version of this course is called "American Romanticism"

The American Renaissance is "the American period of Romantic literature"

Nearly all of our classic authors can be related to Romanticism, esp. Emerson, Poe, Fuller . . .

Cooper as essential early author of "American Romanticism"

Quick history of Romanticism

Romanticism originally a European movement, beginning in German and France in 2nd half of 17th century

Standard angle: Romanticism, which emphasizes feeling and senses and desires, is an intellectual and artistic reaction against the earlier period of European thought and art, variously known as "The Age of Reason," "the Enlightenment," and "Classicism."

Romanticism is international and inter-disciplinary: It happens in every major European country (also in New World), and it happens in music, art, dance, philosophy, theology . . . maybe even politics, with French Revolution and American Revolution, Napoleon, Reform Bills, British and American Empires, etc.

For literature in American classrooms, most people know "Romanticism" through the British Romantic poets and novelists:

Poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats

Dates of English Romanticism: 1789-1832

Period of American Romanticism: 1820-1860

Cooper's greatest work done in the 1820s

transplanted Romantic themes and styles to New World / American setting

very popular in Europe--sold Romanticism back to them in a new form, and strong influence on European perceptions of American culture of guns, frontiersmen, Indians, nature, etc.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Simplest, most consistent and productive way of thinking about Romanticism:

Contrast with "Realism"

 

 

resolutions for couples

Operative myths that are explored and / or verified by Mohicans

Races in America are pure, permanent, and stable

The Indians are a vanishing people

 

Mohegan Tribe Homepage

Mohegan Sun Casino

 

 

(From LITR 4332 American Minority Literature)

4b. To distinguish the ideology of American racialism—which sees races as pure, separate, and permanent identities—from American practice, which always involves hybridity (or mixing) and change.

Tabular summary of 4b

American racial ideology (what dominant culture thinks or says)

American racial practice

(what American culture actually does)

Races or genders are pure and separate.

Races always mix. What we call "pure" is only the latest change we're used to.

Races and genders are permanent categories, perhaps allotted by God or Nature as a result of Creation, climate, natural selection, etc.,

Racial divisions & definitions constantly change or adapt; e. g., the Old South's quadroons, octaroons, "a single drop"; recent revisions of racial origins of Native America; Hispanic as "non-racial" classification; "bi-racial"

buddy movies

American frontier remains a masculine world where races can cross as long as no sex

cf Huck and Jim, Lone Ranger and Tonto, Ishmael & Queequeg (Moby Dick)

Any interracial chick-buddy movies? Thelma and Louise? Coyote Ugly.

 

LITR 4332: American Minority Literature
Objective 4

4a. To identify the "new American" who crosses, combines, or confuses ethnic or gender identities (e. g., Tiger Woods, Halle Berry, Lenny Kravitz, Mariah Carey, K. D. Lang, Dennis Rodman, RuPaul, David Bowie)

 

 

 

 

 

Romanticism in relation to other periods:

 

Renaissance

1400-1600

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, Poe, Cooper, Whitman, Dickinson, Hawthorne

 

Victorian era (Great Britain) / Realism (USA)

Late 1800s

Dickens, Tennyson, Browning, George Eliot, Hardy, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, Mark Twain

(especially in England the Victorian era may be increasingly seen as a later development of the Romantic era)

Modernist period

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

Picasso, Stravinsky, Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf (see The Hours), Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence

 

Post-Modernist period

Since 1945? Since early 70s?

Latin American Magic Realism, Salman Rushdie, Thomas Pynchon

 

Twain & Lawrence on Cooper

Cooper 1789-1854 (Romantic era, American Renaissance)

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

Realism: literature should represent the here and now, not the long ago and far away; dialogue should resemble normal or possible speech instead of "flowery book talk"; characters should act from real motivations (e. g., greed, lust, conscience) rather than on "codes of honor"

186 [stage tricks as woodcraft]

D. H. Lawrence 1885-1930 (Modernism, early 20c)

Modernism: mistrusts limits of Realism > 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

 

 

 

 

D. H. Lawrence

Born to working family in England, in poor health most of his life, died at age 45 of tuberculosis, but amazingly productive;

also lived in Europe, Australia, America (Taos, New Mexico as pilgrimage site)

Fans of D. H. Lawrence are passionately devoted to him, but he always causes a lot of controversy--

he writes a lot about women in both passionately committed but critical terms--so always an argument over who finds him rewarding or offputting

most famous novels 

Sons and Lovers (1913)

The Rainbow (1915)

Women in Love (1920)

(movies have been made from all of these)

"Piano"

"Trees in the Garden"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How was Irving "popular"?

How was Irving classic?

 

What about Cooper?

Popular:

First international bestselling novel from USA

Adventure, action / violence (pursuit > capture > escape)

"I like a good story"

Romance as love story +vorbidden love? (no love like forbidden love)

Spectacular settings

Gothic atmosphere, thrills

appeal of popular literature: literature as entertainment

 

Classic:

Mohicans never out of print

works with or tests serious problems, issues, boundaries of American culture and history (race, gender, wilderness)

serious dialogues & tough choices; characters stand for something, and what happens to them makes a difference

development of genre: adapts "romance" to American wilderness (cf. medieval romance in European wasteland); adapts gothic from European castles to American forest

radical development of gothic: relates gothic dynamics to racial dynamics

tragic romance as more profound romance (cf. sublime)

Cooper comes in and out of fashion, but still potentially meaningful

appeal of classic literature: literature as exploration of meaning, testing of boundaries of understanding; not just entertainment--but good to have both

+ other purposes for reading classic literature:

esp. linkage between content and form (i. e., not just what it means, but how it means)

e. g., linking of gothic light and dark to American racial issues

*past people struggled with and partly resolved chronic human problems such as equality, difference, spirit & matter, etc., and future people will too.

*But we don't have to reinvent the wheel: our own struggles and resolutions can benefit from knowing previous struggles, etc.

 

resolutions

ch 30

364 Tamenund recognizes

308-309 recognition scene plus "air of a king"  

cf. King Arthur pulling Excalibur from the stone: common boy > king

emergence of heroic individual

cf. Cora

78 "Why die at all!" . . . "There is reason in her words!"

142 Cora: "we are equal"

Contrast Katrina van Tassel

 

final resolutions

p 343-44 Uncas and Cora in hunting grounds/heaven

p 345 Hawkeye doubts (open-ended truth)

p 348 tale of Cora & Uncas (cf. Titanic); Alice and Heyward return to palefaces

p 349 cf Hawkeye and Chingachgook

 

 4b. To distinguish the ideology of American racialism—which sees races as pure, separate, and permanent identities—from American practice, which always involves hybridity (or mixing) and change.

Tabular summary of 4b

American racial ideology (what dominant culture thinks or says)

American racial practice

(what American culture actually does)

Races or genders are pure and separate.

Races always mix. What we call "pure" is only the latest change we're used to.

Races and genders are permanent categories, perhaps allotted by God or Nature as a result of Creation, climate, natural selection, etc.,

Race & gender classifications or definitions constantly change or adapt; e. g., the Old South's quadroons, octaroons, "a single drop"; "crossing"; recent revisions of racial origins of Native America; Hispanic as "non-racial" classification; "bi-racial"

 

interracial hetero romance still considered extraordinary, though appearing more

Spike Lee movies, Far From Heaven

 

 Genre: tragic romance

How a story ends can indicate genre.

romance: "transcendence" at end (cf. riding off into sunset, "too good for this earth"

p 343-44 Uncas and Cora in hunting grounds/heaven  

tragedy: heroic stature of characters, significance of problem or issues

cf. sublime

 

 

102-103 Magua's story

223 possessed of an evil spirit

conclusion? gothic can be a "template" or "program" that adapts unknown or repressed data to familiar moral terms and forms

Examples on national newsmagazine covers:

O. J. Simpson's police photograph darkened (Newsweek)

Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran drawn to look satanic (Time)

Bin Laden

 

 

 

Last class: "American Renaissance" is a "period survey" course (cf. sophomore-level "American Literature before the Civil War"), in which both literature and the history of literature and culture are studied.

Where and how do literature and history meet, overlap, reflect or create each other?

from The Declaration of Independence, 1776

 . . . We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness . . . .  

When the Declaration said "all men are created equal," who did it mean?

As far as the Founding Fathers could imagine, the phrase applied to people like themselves: white men of the upper class

Possible reactions?

Declaration as a sham? Many Founding Fathers were slaveholders who couldn't imagine women or people of color having the same rights or privileges as themselves. And most of the ones who thought differently would have been branded as "Massachusetts liberals."

Alternative to cynicism:

The Declaration establishes a goal and a process for American history.

The goal might be that "equality" will someday be available to all.

The process might be the extension of rights to previously excluded groups.

Question: Can this process or story-line of American history be interpreted as a romance?

Question: Can the Declaration of Independence be studied with texts like The Last of the Mohicans as literature?

With representative literature, 

extension of rights to previously excluded groups