"Founding Terrors" - Studies in American Literature

Instructors

• Betsy J Erkkila

Meeting Info

• University Hall 418 - Mo 2:00PM - 4:50PM

Overview of class

• This course will read against the accepted tradition of the American Revolution as an essentially rational, Lockean, and non-terroristic Revolution. We will examine American Revolutionary writing as a rhetorical battlefield in which a multiplicity of voices and a plurality of formshistory, letters, notes, autobiography, novel, epic, lyric, play, pamphlet, and journalistic piecestruggled over the cultural and political formation of America and the American. We shall pay particular attention to the grammar of Revolutionthe language, images, myths, and forms through which the American Revolution and the American republic were constituted in and through writing. We shall focus in particular on sites of contest, contradiction, resistance, and taboo in Revolutionary writing: the representation of "citizens" and "others"; conflicts between reason and passion, liberty and slavery, civilization and savage, progress and blood; anxieties about nature, the body, gender, human psychology, race, and madness; the terrors of democracy, mob violence, slave insurrection, and political faction; and debates about the excesses of language, print, and representation. We shall read relevant political and cultural theoryfrom Kant, to Poe, to the Frankfurt schooland consider various past and recent contests about the meaning of the American Revolution.

Registration Requirements

• Permission of English Department required

Evaluation Method

• Book review/oral presentation on a major critical, historical, or theoretical work (3-4 pages); critical essay on a subject of the student's choosing (10-12 pages); Black board postings; class participation.

Class Materials (Required)

• Tom Paine: Common Sense
  Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence and selections from Notes on the State of Virginia
  Abigail and John Adams: The Book of Abigail and John
  Benjamin Franklin Autobiography
  Phillis Wheatley: Poems
  Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur: Letters from an American Farmer
  Gustavus Vassa: The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself
  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay: The Federalist Papers
  Hannah Foster: The Coquette; or, the History of Eliza Wharton
  Charles Brockden Brown: Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker
  selected critical and theoretical essays

Enrollment Requirements

• 
  Add Consent: Department Consent Required
  

Current as of 05/03/13 01:02:49 PM

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