AMERICAN STUDIES III B, semester I
Constructions of “America” from the Colonial Period to the End of the Nineteenth Century
Lecturer: Roxana Oltean

Course Description and Requirements:
The construction of “America” as a space of desire and fulfilled dreams or as a wilderness denoting alienation constitutes a particularly rich and highly modulated theme in the body of “American” literature and culture, a highly reflexive, often self-interrogatory text repeatedly torn between the creation of American traditions and the myth of perpetually new beginnings. It is the aim of this course to highlight the complex cultural origins and mechanisms operated in the construction of “America” and of the American imaginary, indicating also the extent to which these constructions are relevant for a complex understanding of cultural phenomena in contemporary American culture and in the process of globalization.
This course looks at some key voices which gave shape to myths of America, highlighting both consensus and disparity, assimilation and resistance, nostalgia and progressivism. Lectures follow a roughly chronological approach, to encourage awareness of historical and cultural contexts, but particular significance is accorded to thematic (dis)continuities in the construction of America. The material discussed ranges from the colonial project to turn-of-the-century doubts about of the coherence and substance of American myths. The themes in context discussed during lectures are taken up again during seminars, where discussion focuses on close readings of specific texts. Students are expected to take part in seminar discussions and to prepare one seminar presentation on a theme approved by the course instructor. The oral presentation will be written up as a 3000 word essay in MLA or Chicago style. A final test will be held to evaluate students’ knowledge of primary texts and of relevant cultural contexts, continuities and discontinuities.
Assessment:
Participation in class discussion:10%
Oral presentation: 10%
Essay: 30%
Tests: 50%
Lecture Plan :
Week 1: Introduction. Colonial Imagology.
Week 2: The Puritan Imagination.
Week 3: Enlightenment, Revolution and Identity.
Week 4: Myths of the Frontier.
Week 5: The Renaissance of “America.”
Week 6: New World Landscapes.
Week 7: Mid-Term Test.
Week 8: Romance and the “American Tradition.”
Week 9: Realist Projections.
Week 10: Women’s America.
Week 11: The Turn-of-the-Century, Tradition and Innovation.
Week 12: Final Test.

Seminar Plan:
Seminar 1: Puritan Traditions. Texts for discussion: Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor.
Seminar 2: Enlightenment, Revolution and the Establishment of an “American Literature.” Texts for discussion: Benjamin Franklin, Philip Freneau, Phillis Wheatley, W. Irving, J. F. Cooper.
Seminar 3: American Landscapes, from Renaissance to Civil War. Texts for discussion: Frederic Douglass, R. W. Emerson, H. D. Thoreau, W. Whitman, E. Dickinson.
Seminar 4: Romance and the American Imaginary. Texts for discussion: N. Hawthorne, E. A. Poe, H. Melville.
Seminar 5: Realism, Regionalism and the (Re)construction of “America.” Texts for discussion: Mark Twain, Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett.
Seminar 6: The Turn-of-the-Century: Feminism, Tradition and Innovation. Texts for discussion: Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Stephen Crane.

AMERICAN STUDIES III B
semester I 2003-2004
Constructions of “America” from the Colonial Period to the End of the Nineteenth Century
Lecturer: Roxana Oltean
REQUIRED READING
John Smith, “A Description of New England,” “New England’s Trials” [exerts in Norton Anthology].
William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, Book I, Chapter I, Book I, Chapter IV, Book I, Chapter VII, Book I, Chapter IX [Norton Anthology selection].
Anne Bradstreet, “Contemplations,” “The Author to her Book,” “Before the Birth of One of Her Children,” “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent Upon Public Employment.”
Edward Taylor, two meditations from Preparatory Meditations [Norton Anthology selection], “A Fig for thee, Oh! Death.”
Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” [Norton Anthology selection].
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography, Part I [Norton Anthology].
Jean de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer - Letter III, “What is an American?”
Philip Freneau, “On The Emigration to America and Peopling the Western Country,” “The Wild Honey Suckle,” “The Indian Burying Ground.”
Phillis Wheatley, Poems [Norton Anthology Selection].
Washington Irving, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” Rip van Winkle.*
James Fennimore Cooper, The Pioneers [Norton Anthology Selection]
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” “Self-Reliance,”* “Nature.”*
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown,” The Scarlet Letter.*
Edgar Allen Poe, “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,”* “The Purloined Letter,”* “The Raven.”*
Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience [selection in American Literature. The Makers and the Making], Walden, or Life in the Woods [Norton Anthology selection].*
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass [Norton Anthology selection].
Herman Melville, “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Moby Dick chapter 42.*
Emily Dickinson, five poems of student’s choice [from Norton Anthology or American Literature, The Makers and the Making], “Because I would not Stop for Death,”* “After Great Pain a Formal Feeling Comes,”* “My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun.”*
Mark Twain, Old Times on the Mississippi [Norton Anthology selection], Huckleberry Finn [Norton Anthology selection].*
Henry James, Daisy Miller. A Study, The Portrait of a Lady.*
Sarah Orne Jewett, “A White Heron.”
Kate Chopin, “Desiree’s Baby.”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper.”
Stephen Crane, Maggie. A Girl of the Streets.


AMERICAN STUDIES III B
semester I 2003-2004
Constructions of “America” from the Colonial Period to the End of the Nineteenth Century
Lecturer: Roxana Oltean

RECOMMENDED CRITICAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
Boorstin, D.J. The Americans. The Colonial Experience.

Brooks, Cleanth et al. American Literature, The Makers and the Making.

Conn, Peter. O istorie a literaturii americane.

Dumitriu, Geta. Nineteenth Century American Fiction.

- - - . Tangled Selves. A Study of American Fiction in the 1890’s.

Elliott, Emory (ed.). Columbia Literary History of the United States.

Ford, Boris. The New Pelican Guide to English Literature.

Mathiessen, F.O. The American Renaissance.

Mihailă, Rodica. The Re-Usable Past. A Reading of Colonial and Revolutionary America.

- - - . Spaţii ale realului in proza americană.

Spiller, Robert et al. Literary History of the United States.

Tindall & Shi. America. A Narrative History.

AMERICAN STUDIES III B
semester I 2003-2004
Constructions of “America” from the Colonial Period to the End of the Nineteenth Century
Lecturer: Roxana Oltean

SUGGESTED DISCUSSION TOPICS
Fictions of the New World. “Colonization took place under the sign of (religious) narrative, translating an obsession with new beginnings but also with a pure, primordial past.” Discuss with reference to early English writings about America: Smith/ Bradford.
A rhetoric of consensus? “Early histories of America develop into a ‘ritual of consensus’ which retrospectively projects meaning into the Puritan experiment.” Discuss with reference to Bradford.
A voice of dissensus. “Anne Bradstreet is eloquent of an ‘otherly’ presence speaking a language of doubt and incertitude, undermining the construction of Utopia.” Discuss.
The functions of introspection. “The Puritan tradition is what lies behind Bradstreet’s minute observations of self and of domestic life, her poems are hermeneutic exercises.” Discuss.
Glorifying nature. “Nature as revelation, nature through revelation - Bradstreet is part of the American tradition looking to the great book of nature.” Discuss.
Theatrical selves. “The Puritan sermon is dramatized into a series of dialogues which stage inner states and conflicts.” Discuss with reference to Taylor.
A Puritan baroque? “Richness of metaphor, puns, paradoxes speak of a metaphysical poetic heritage - Taylor is the baroque side of Puritan introspection.” Discuss.
Puritan eschatology. “The underworldly spectacle of death, damnation means a process of purification and renewal for the meditative I.” Discuss.
Meaningful itineraries. “Sermons reinforce the coherence of Puritan narrations, reading past and present in the light of Biblical patterns.” Discuss with reference to Edwards.
The sermon genre. “Theatrical, translating the obsession with allegory and hermeneutics - sermons are a key to an American literary tradition.” Discuss with reference to Edwards.
Narrating the self. “Introspection, description are not so much realist techniques as narrative devices turning life into a coherent exemplary narrative.” Discuss with reference to Franklin/Douglass.
The American success story. “Franklin’s autobiography articulates the ‘rags to riches’ myth, a narrative pattern which retrospectively reads an itinerary of progress into the succession of life events, and a truly Enlightenment scenario.” Discuss.
Coining American identity. “Crevecoeur gives shape to the founding myth of the American self in eloquent opposition with Europe.” Discuss.
American landscapes. “The frontier and great expanse - these are the two realities which inscribe American identity with distinctive Americanness.” Discuss with reference to Crevecoeur/ Freneau.
The American other. “Otherness is colonized by the American mind to speak of its New World project.” Discuss with reference to Wheatley/Douglass.
Resistance and Narration. “Life narratives as slave narratives mark marginalized identities as spaces of resistance to the American project but also co-opt them in a more comprehensive American dream.”
Towards dystopia. “The presence of slavery increasingly becomes the haunting other on the surface of the American dream.” Discuss with reference to Wheatley/Douglass.
The American Enlightenment. “Through overt polemics with the Old World and through representations of American specificity, Puritan techniques and ideology came to speak the rhetoric of the American Revolution.” Discuss with reference to Franklin/ Crevecoeur/ Freneau.
American fictions. “American history is such stuff as dreams are made of.” Discuss with reference to Irving.
The American Other. “Irving’s counter-hero writes a rich allegory of failure in the very heart of Arcadia.” Discuss, with reference to Rip Van Winkle.
Warped temporality. “In temporal (and other?) displacements Rip recovers his dreamed origins.” Discuss.
Nature symbolism. “Nature has a decidedly ethical character.” Comment with reference to Irving or Cooper.
Frontier narratives. “Cultural collision, failure are what generate American identity” Discuss with reference to Cooper.
Plotting America’s past. “Cooper’s narratives attempt to engage America’s past to provide models for national growth.” Discuss.
Image(s) of the artist. “The prophet-poet is one in the series of masks adopted by Transcendentalism.” Discuss with reference to Emerson or Whitman.
Puritan reminiscences. “Transcendentalism means a rewriting and a secularization of key elements in Puritan rhetoric.” Discuss with reference to Emerson/ Whitman/ Thoreau.
The symbolic function of nature. “Nature speaks a language of interpretable signs.” Discuss with reference to Emerson or Thoreau.
The Transcendentalist view of the ‘divine universe’. “The world is a temple whose walls are covered with emblems” (Emerson). Discuss with reference to Emerson/ Whitman/ Thoreau.
‘America’ – a new poetic subject? “America in poetry, America as poem - this is the basic tenet of Transcendentalism.” Discuss with reference to Emerson/ Whitman.
The lesson of nature. “Thoreau’s robinsonnade is an exemplary narrative of American life and an embodiment of the Transcendentalist secularization of nature.” Discuss.
The language of symbols. “The Puritan heritage of emblems dominates Hawthorne’s fictions.” Discuss.
Uncertain significance(s). “Hawthorne’s symbols are richly ambiguous - the greatest red herrings in his writing.” Discuss.
Manipulations of identity. “Masks, deception, ‘embroidery’ – Hawthorne’s characters are subtle artists.” Discuss.
Enclosed worlds. “Poe’s spaces denote the oppression of matter.” Discuss.
Reflections of the self. “Spaces, objects, bodies form a symbolic texture that duplicates an unconsoled mind.” Discuss with reference to Poe’s work.
Narrative strategies. “Poe’s stories are a mise en abyme of reading.” Discuss.
Images of an underworld. “The grotesque, the disfigured, the uncanny: Poe is a (Romantic) architect of the abyss.” Discuss.
Visions of the writer. “New artistic poses take shape with Poe’s self-referential pieces.” Discuss fictions of the author suggested by Poe.
The imprisoned self. “Closed spaces speak of memory and obsessive introspection.” Discuss with reference to Poe/Melville/Hawthorne.
Romantic imagery. “Poe’s art is eloquent in figures of the ‘grotesque’ and ‘arabesque’.” Discuss with reference to Poe’s poetic imagery and techniques.
Allegorical readings. “Quest patterns, thresholds and (false?) initiation punctuate Melville’s narratives.” Discuss.
Exploration and introspection. “Inner dimensions and psychic landscapes are the real stuff of Melville’s writing.” Discuss.
The metaphor of the white whale. “The white whale is a page written over with significances and ambiguities, leading and especially misleading.”
An artist’s tale? “Moby Dick is a rich problematization of writing, the white whale itself the image of a blank page crossed by interpretations.”
An ars poetica? “Dickinson’s poems are made of rich silence” (Thackerey). Discuss with reference to three poems.
The poetic self. “Hunger, renunciation, distance – but also desire. This is the basic language of Dickinson.” Discuss with reference to three poems.
Alternative worlds. “Dickinson is a magician of the ordinary, her (feminine?) ecriture imagines new spaces of freedom.” Comment with reference to three poems.
Remembrance as poetic technique. “One finds nothing but memory objects in Dickinson’s poetry.” Consider the functions of recollection in three of Dickinson’s poems.
The American vernacular. “Twain writes the American idiom as poetic language in the Whitmanesque ‘tradition-breaking’ tradition.” Discuss with reference to Twain’s work.
Carnavalesque structures. “Clothes, language and color are effective disguises which reveal and mask the carnivalized self.” Discuss the techniques and functions of disguise in Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin.
The ‘Gilded Age’. “Alienation and dispossession speak the true language of the ‘Gilded Age’.” Discuss with reference to Douglass/Twain.
Uncertain boundaries. “Imposture and identity, fiction and reality are the real dilemmas of Twain’s America.” Discuss.
Shifting identities. “Dislocations and exile shape identity in James’ work.” Discuss.
Narrative strategies. “Authority disappears in the texture of fragmented representations – James’ novels are an impressionist canvas.” Discuss.
Shaping the American self. “Sophistication, temptation, deception: the ‘crises’ of Europe map American journeys of initiation.” Discuss with reference to James.
Transatlantic settings. “The international theme speaks a dialogue of difference between Europe and America.” Discuss with reference to James.
Regionalism and Reconstruction. “Local Color writing insists on spaces of heterogeneity but at the same time serves to reconstruct the myth of “America”.” Discuss with reference to Jewett/Chopin.
Traditions of America. “In the face of post-Civil War incongruities, regional writing re-invests New England with the values of utopian America.” Discuss with reference to Jewett.
Versions of otherness. “Women’s writing aims to empower otherness against dominant gender/color codes.” Discuss.
Thresholds and patterns of initiation. “Chopin’s writing is an allegory of initiation, dominated by scenarios of crossing and renewal.” Discuss.
Rewriting cultural models. “Chopin writes a (new?) myth of femininity, a ‘second coming’ of Aphrodite.” Discuss.
Spaces of oppression. “The utopia of America reveals its authoritarian bend in turn-of-the-century writing.” Discuss with reference to Gilman/Crane.
The tenets of American realism. “Fidelity to moral nature and ethical option, the actuality of characters, the specificity of time and place, journalistic techniques - the rhetoric of realism developed as a polemics with previous cultural models.” Discuss with reference to Jewett/Gilman/Crane.
The cultural models of realism/naturalism. “’Picturing life just as it is’ - American realism owes as much to European models as to the specific American realities it is supposed to represent.” Discuss with reference to Jewett/Gilman/Crane.
American disharmonies. “Failures, moral ambiguity, corruption, misery - naturalism strikes a note of opposition in the utopic representation of America.” Discuss with reference to Gilman/Crane.