LITR 5535 American Romanticism

Monday 21 February: “The Iroquois Creation Story,” N 17-21; “The Cherokee Memorials,” N 571-581; William Apess, N 476-482. Complete The Last of the Mohicans.

Monday 25 September: “The Iroquois Creation Story,” N 17-21; “The Cherokee Memorials,” N 571-581; William Apess, N 476-482. Complete The Last of the Mohicans.

selection reader / discussion leader: Gordon Lewis (“Iroquois Creation Story”)

poetry: Joy Harjo, "Call It Fear," N 2834-5

poetry reader / discussion leader: Dee Ann Bongiovanni

midterm

Monday 2 October: Take-home midterm exam due within 72 hours of class meeting.

Due by next Wednesday noon--or be in touch to update status.

Instructor acknowledges receipt of email submission. If you haven't received acknowledgement of submission within 24 hours, check address and be in touch.

Midterms posted on model assignments

If submitted on time, I may read and grade before following class meeting.

You'll receive your note and grade by email.

So check email before class--don't ask about grade if you haven't checked.

Students are welcome to reply back to note and grade, or confer, or phone.

Between now and the midterm . . . .

Welcome to confer in person, by phone, email, etc.

I may not be in tomorrow, but I'll be in every other afternoon this week.

attitude adjustments . . . 

You can't cover everything that may be Romantic in your texts. Concentrate on an aspect, offshoot, or background of Romanticism and why it's meaningful or rewarding to study.

So far we've defined Romanticism as a baggy term that collects a large number of literary impulses, practices, styles.

Maybe better to consider the Romantic as highly productive or fertile complex of literary appeals.

Take-home Midterm Exam (due within 72 hours of 2 October)

Length: 5-7 typed double-spaced pages (equivalent).

Transmission: You must email your exam to me at whitec@uhcl.edu. Your submission will be posted to the webpage.

Topic: Develop an aspect of one of the course objectives.  Describe how two or three early American texts from our assigned readings through Cooper exemplify the development of an aspect of Romanticism and how their contributions converge in The Last of the Mohicans, making it a classic or normative text of American Romanticism.

            The above paragraph is the formal description of the mid-term assignment—that is, you will not be given another description of the assignment, though of course we can discuss it.  The most successful versions of this exam tend to focus on a rather specific aspect of an objective, such as gothic, the sublime, nature, the Romantic hero/ine, the romance narrative, etc. You may focus more specifically than the objective indicates—that is, analyze an aspect of the gothic or a specific feature of the romance or of Romantic spirit, for instance.

            You are required to review and make one citation of one of the earlier course midterms posted on the webpage. The only difference may be that summer offerings of LITR 5535 do not read The Last of the Mohicans. You are also welcome to cite external sources, though this assignment does not have a research requirement. A Works Cited is not required. You are expected to incorporate major ideas from class lecture and discussion. A member of this class should recognize your ideas and references as relevant to our course as it has developed thus far. You can’t simply express the ideas you walked in with; you must demonstrate learning.

If you're confused about how to start, a dependable pattern is to ask yourself, What did I walk in thinking, and what have I learned?

Some of what you have learned will reinforce what you already knew, some will extend, some will challenge and open up new possibilities of interpretation and meaning.

Learning is both recognizable and unpredictable

You have to recognize the materials in play

But just because the materials are familiar, doesn't mean the outcomes have to be familiar, repeated, 

Leigh Ann's web highlight from last week

assignments:

Monday 2 October: Take-home midterm exam due within 72 hours of class meeting. Edgar Allan Poe, N 694-696, 704-727 (“Ligeia” & “Fall of the House of Usher”); William Faulkner, “N 2160-66.

selection reader / discussion leader: Bonnie Napoli

poetry: Poe, "Anabelle Lee," N 2671

poetry reader / discussion leader: Corey Porter

Poe as "catalog of Romanticism"--His poems and stories are thick as fudge with 

passionate quests (learning, revenge, love, etc.) (quest as romance narrative)

loss (esp. "death of beautiful women")

supernatural (Romanticism doesn't have to go there, but if it's always escaping the here and now and testing boundaries, it's bound to go there sometimes)

the gothic--Poe = what most American readers think of when they think of "the gothic" and related genres

For instance?

Poe's gothic is so rich that it can go any number of ways

Poe & Faulkner as examples of European / Southern gothic

(contrast wilderness / Puritan gothic of Cooper, Irving, Hawthorne)

Southern USA remains strangely European in some ways: feudalism, stark divisions of rich and poor, "heritage" of past, social positions

mystery or buried sin: one can love the past too much

Monday 9 October: Nathaniel Hawthorne, N 579-584, 610-635 (“Young Goodman Brown,” “May-Pole of Merry Mount,” & “Minister’s Black Veil”)

selection reader / discussion leader: Angela Douglas

poetry: Sylvia Plath, "Blackberrying," N 2783

poetry reader / discussion leader: Jo Lynn Sallee

What's Romantic / gothic in Mohicans?

What is Romantic about The Last of the Mohicans?

What is not Romantic about the American Indian texts?

What about Cora as a Romantic heroine?

Why does American popular literature and culture romanticize (or gothicize) the American Indian?

Compare the "wilderness gothic" in Last of the Mohicans  to Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Blair Witch Project 

Course Objectives:

Objective 1: Literary Categories of Romanticism

  Objective 1a. Romantic Spirit or Ideology

·        To identify and criticize ideas and attitudes associated with Romanticism, such as desire and loss, rebellion, nostalgia, idealism, the gothic, the sublime, the individual in nature or separate from the masses.

·        The Romantic impulse may be as simple as a desire for anything besides “the here and now”—or “reality”; thus the quest or journey of the romance narrative involves crossing physical borders or transgressing social or psychological boundaries in order to attain or regain some transcendent goal or dream.

·        A Romantic hero or heroine may appear empty or innocent of anything except readiness or desire to transform or self-invent.

Objective 1b. The Romantic Period

·        To observe Romanticism’s concentration in the late 18^th through the 19^th centuries and its co-emergence with the rise of the middle class, the city, industrial capitalism, consumer culture, and the nation-state.

·        To observe predictive elements in “pre-Romantic” writings from earlier periods such as “The Seventeenth Century” and the "Age of Reason."

·        To speculate on residual elements in “post-Romantic” writings from later periods incl. “Realism and Local Color,” "Modernism," and “Postmodernism.”

Objective 1c: Romantic Genres

To describe & evaluate leading literary genres of Romanticism:

·        the romance narrative or novel (journey from repression to transcendence)

·        the gothic novel or style (haunted physical and mental spaces, the shadow of death or decay; dark and light in physical and moral terms; film noir)

·        the lyric poem (a momentary but comprehensive cognition or transcendent feeling—more prominent in European than American Romanticism?)

·        the essay (esp. for Transcendentalists—descended from the Puritan sermon?)

Objective 2: Cultural Issues:

America as Romanticism, and vice versa

·        To identify the Romantic era in the United States of America as the “American Renaissance”—roughly the generation before the Civil War (c. 1830-1860, one generation after the Romantic era in Europe).

gothic in Mohicans?

How does Cooper extend or re-develop the gothic?

Relocates gothic scene from haunted castle to gloomy forest

Plus plays new riffs on gothic color scheme of light and dark +- red, yellow

Romanticism & Indians

Why does American popular literature and culture romanticize (or gothicize) the American Indian?

Our Indian texts--"Iroquois Creation Story," Cherokee Memorials, & William Apess . . . .

What can you learn from them about Romanticism as well as about American Indians?

emergence of Uncas, tortoise p. 226

+ totems of their tribes

ch. 30, pp. 308-309

"tortoise" as totem of Mohegans (cf. flag for Americans, #3 / #8 for Dale Earnhardt cult)

+ 197 Delaware & Mohicans

race in Mohicans

use assignment handout

gothic mechanisms > correlate with content

style & culture merge

to some extent, just standard gothic junk, and by the end of the semester all of you will be able to spot the gothic

But why? Break through enchantment, get to meaning

Indian as ghost—cf. Lawrence handout

other meanings later in semester

Hawthorne: past as Puritan; light / dark as innocence / guilt + shades of gray

Poe: past as loss; gothic space as unconscious mind; house as head

Gothic as repressed, returning past

Lawrence on ghosts

102-103 Magua's story

223 possessed of an evil spirit

Cora's background

ch. xvi, pp. 158-9

136 [land defined by violence]

138 scalp

234 skin red, or black, or white 

Dominant culture: all white = all pure, good, virtuous

Minority cultures: darkness = sin?

Reality neither dark nor light but mixing of dark and light

176 sublime? + 179

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

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.

Lawrence on Cooper

Mohegan Sun Casino

Close Reading or "New Criticism"

"American Studies"

"New Historicism"

Jane Tompkins on Cooper

William Apess biography

William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647. ch. 33:
"The Narragansetts, after the subduing of the Pequots, thought to have ruled over all the Indians about them. But the English, especially those of Connecticut, holding correspondency and friendship with Uncas, sachem of the Mohegan Indians which lived near them . . . and he had been faithful to them in the Pequot War, they were engaged to support him in his just liberties and were contented that such of the surviving Pequots as had submitted to him should remain with him and quietly under his protection. This did much increase his power and augment his greatness, which the Narragansetts could not endure to see."

Historical Uncas: flourished 1620s-30s, cooperated politically with English while resisting conversion

Fictional Uncas: 1750s (French & Indian War), great-grandson(?) of historical Uncas

Stories & Images of "the Vanishing Indian"

Significance of dominant culture's "Vanishing Indian" narrative:

Dominant culture’s conflicted attitude toward Amerinds: 

Most dominant-culture Americans tend to vaguely admire American Indians, to feel some sentimental guilt about what happened to them, and to "romanticize" American Indians: "noble savages," "Indians didn't lie," etc. 

Not standard to hear white people say, I wish I were black, or I wish I were Mexican

But not unusual to hear people admire American Indians, children or young people wishing they could live a life like they imagine Indians leading.

"Bubbas like Indians." Trucks with Amerind decals.

Movies like Dances with Wolves and lots of worse movies

Irony: at the same time that they feel this general sentimental admiration for American Indians, dominant-culture Americans live in such a way as to guarantee that traditional American Indian culture is progressively annihilated:

*constant growth of population (perhaps 20 million American Indians in western hemisphere before Columbus; about a billion (i. e., 1000 million) people now live in the western hemisphere, and we haven't seen anything yet! (There will be at least a million more people in Houston alone in the next 10 years.)

*constant development or transformation of nature into capital for growing marketplace. (The multiplex theater where you watched Dances with Wolves was probably built over a serious patch of natural habitat . . . .)

Cars, roads, malls, apartment complexes, housing subdivisions, constantly expanding human population drives out other possibilities

Bigger subjects than we can resolve in a class like this, but note how minority literature can act as a "conscience" to American culture