LITR 5731: Seminar in American
Multicultural Literature (Immigrant)
Text-Objective Discussion, summer 2006
Tuesday, 27 June 2006: The Pilgrims and the Hebrew model of national migration; prototype of white exclusiveness and purity? William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation (introduction, esp. p. xxii; chapters I-IV).
Text-objective
discussion leader: Phil Thrash
BACKGROUND
REFRESHER + INTENDED COVERAGE.
Objective:
4. “Our American historical model for “national migration” is the “Great
Migration” of the English Pilgrims to early North America.
NOTA BENE: This
English Culture became the basis for the USA’s dominant culture.
Objective:
6. “Old Immigrant Model:” Danger and costs prohibited past immigrants to
return to “Old World.” Ties were cut, especially by Pilgrims, with the Old World.”
Objective:
7. Competing Economic Ideals, Community, communal, utopian, share holders.
“Old World Ideals” of community, social obligations, and limits.
Objective:
8. Importance of Public Education and economics.
Special
Literary Objective 9. Examine
literature, fiction, non-fiction, critical and literary terminology and modes to
explore immigrant/minority literature.
#9.
(Sounds Familiar, Huh?)
Pretty smart be this Ship LIT5731’s Master White!!!
LITR5731 is Captain
White’s “Mayflower.” We
are pilgrims, stakeholders, “in media res,” or Latin for “in the middle
of things,” on this voyage to ferret out meanings of objectives of
immigrant/minority literature and their relationships to the “American
Dream.” Captain White is the
“Ship’s Master” for he started us in existing “now” literature, and
we seem to be voyaging back to some fundamental MAJOR influences on the evolution of that American Dream,
through its literature.
Please refer to
text:
Textual References to
Objectives:
1. Intro:
p. xxii. 7 lines up from bottom of page. “Leyden is not their home…and a better place to
make a living is desired…Last and which is not least…they might lay a
foundation…propagate Gospel of Christ.”
Class
Task: Identify and condense, or re-word/simplify the two apparent priorities or
motivations driving this emigration
evidenced in this
text.
Class
Discussion: Regarding textual relationships to objectives:
Thoughts/Consensus:
_______________??
Textual
references to Objectives: Continued.
Intro,
Chapters I, II, III and IV, seem to show parallels to Biblical
Exodus Story, as well as Genesis.
Chapters I, II, III and IV, seem to be aligned with Genesis and Exodus.
Chapter
I shows the “creation” = “Genesis” of the Puritans, the Separatists,
after receiving or adapting to “God’s” new word of the New Testament and
formulating congregations based upon tenets of earliest Christianity.
p.
8, 2nd Paragraph.
“…they shook off this yoke of anti-Christian bondage, and as the
Lord’s free people joined themselves (by a covenant of the Lord) into a church
estate…”
p.
8, footnote (5) bottom of page refers to this paragraph.
“A
paraphrase of the covenant that people made when they formed a Separatist (later
called Congregational) church.”
Chapters
II, III and IV seem to show the Pilgrim’s similarities of trials, tribulations
the Israelites had in Egypt: religious persecution, slavery, hard work, lack of
freedom, no future.
Chapter
II, p. 15, footnote.
“About 125 members of the Scrooby congregation “gat over” to
Amsterdam, including the two ministers Clyfton and Robinson, William Brewster
and Bradford himself.”
The
body of water crossed was the English Channel: Analogous to “Red Sea?”
Chapter
III, From Amsterdam to Leyden. p.
17, 2nd par, last 2 sent.
“…valuing
peace and their spiritual comfort above any other riches…but with hard
continual labor…”
Chapter
IV, p. 25, 9 lines from bottom,
“…of
all sorrows…was that many of their children…by these occasions and great
licentiousness …and manifold temptations…were drawn away by evil
examples…”
Foot
note. p. 25,
“…Dutch
did not remember the Sabbath Day…”
Q.
Is this text “Typology,” or Bradford’s plain writing style of
declaring history? Intentional or
Coincidental?
Note:
See Dr. White’s HO, “Typology.”
RHETORICAL PARTING SHOTS
Question:
Per Special Literary Objective 9. Is
Bradford’s work literature, social-commentary or “plain style” history and
could it be viewed from the literary critical views of
** “historicism and/or myth critics?”
**
“Historicism critics stress above all else and all historicism approaches,
that literary works are produced by, and reflect, and in some sense alter the
social, cultural and historical forces that were operative during their
composition.” (Bedford, 202)
**
“Myth Critics see and analyze mythic structures and themes as they are
recurrently manifested in literary genres and individual works.
Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667)
might be seen as the heroic quest, in this instance showing spectrum duality of
man “good-------------evil,” (Bedford, 286) when compared with Bradford.
The
“Pilgrimage of the Mayflower” was the Separatist Pilgrim’s “Exodus”
which has become one of the most influential events in Western Civilization, the
making of America, and America’s Dominant Culture.
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