120127 VO Survey of Literatures in English II (2007W)

The course is intended to offer an introduction to literary and cultural documents produced in North-America from the first British settlements in the early 17th century to the closing of the frontier in the USA. This year (the quartercentenary of the foundation of the first permanent English colony in Jamestown) one focus will be on texts produced in the South and their contexts in the colonial and early federal periods and in the antebellum. Recent studies have documented the remarkable cultural life in the South, for instance in Virginia (cf. Thomas Jefferson's achievements), in spite of the 'peculiar institution', the cosmopolitan atmosphere in South Carolina before the Civil War, and the subsequent cultural decline. These insufficiently known facts will be illustrated by excerpts from verse and prose, included in a Reader (for instance, John Smith's account of native-white relations [Pocahontas!], poems and tales by E. A. Poe, excerpts of historical fiction by J. P. Kennedy, or W. G. Simms, "the Southern [J. F.] Cooper") and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and by some visual material in the form of documentaries and films.
These texts and films will be juxtaposed with the early slave narratives and contrasted with documents reflecting the Puritan heritage in New England (e.g. William Bradford's Plymouth Plantation) and its secularized offshoots (e.g. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography). The course will also consider the 19th century counterpoint to Puritanism in Ralph Waldo Emerson's transcendentalist prose and Nathaniel Hawthorne's struggle with the Puritan heritage.
There will be a written exam at the end of the course.