Hi everyone — below the jump are your final exam questions. Enjoy!

Laurel H. Your presentation got me to thinking about Harold Bloom’s remark in The American Religion that “the Mormons, like the Jews before them, are a religion that became a people.” One of the things he meant is that Mormon identity was forged as much by a shared historical experience as by shared religious belief. That in turn got me to wondering what might happen as time goose-steps into the future. As incidents like the Extermination Order, the assassination of Joseph Smith, the Utah Exodus, and other mythic elements of the Mormon experience recede ever further into the past — and as the Church is comprised more and more of converts not descended from the original LDS pioneers — will the Mormons become less of a people and more of a religion? (Bonus questions: Are the Jews still more of a people than a religion? Are they likely to remain so?)

Tylor H. Some critics read “Young Goodman Brown” as a story about a spiritual crisis or “dark night of the soul,” a disorienting, sometimes crippling time when everything one has hitherto believed is brought into doubt. According to her recently published diaries, Mother Teresa, of all people, seems to have undergone just such a crisis. Please read Teresa, Bright and Dark by Christopher Hitchens and report on Teresa’s case to the class, paying particular attention to any ways in which Hawthorne’s story and the famous nun’s experience might illuminate each other — and whether you think her “dying hour was gloom.”

Kaitlyn P. It’s interesting to speculate on what Karl Marx would have thought about “Bartleby.” He no doubt would have appreciated the way Melville populated the story with such easily identifiable and representative economic types: a Wall Street lawyer (working for the ur-capitalist John Jacob Astor) and a collection of obviously alienated laborers. But I’m much less sure about how Marx, who thought religion was the opiate of the workers, would have felt about the seemingly Christian note on which the story ends. What do you think? Do the religious allusions at the end of the story undercut its critique of the socioeconomic order?

Fonz V. In your response to one of my blog posts you wrote, “I have to give props to the pilgrims…. [T]hey had some serious guts to settle in a strange and dangerous land. I get freaked out if I feel lost while hunting, I can’t even imagine arriving on a foreign land and expecting to survive.” I have to agree: the Pilgrims had guts. (Of course, they also had guns, and money, and (for awhile at least) a big ship floating just offshore. But still.) What gets me is that in so many ways the Pilgrims were admirable, while in so many other ways (such as their religious fanaticism and intolerance) they were detestable. What I’d like you to meditate upon is the question of how we should respond generally to individuals or groups who elicit such a combination of admiration and detestation. Illustrate your thinking with a few contemporary examples.

Nathan S. In your presentation you mentioned Scientology’s opposition to psychiatry. Do you think that opposition might be part of the larger reaction against psychiatry in the 50s and 60s? Before answering this question, do a little research on Thomas Szazs’ The Myth of Mental Illness, Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, Erving Goffman’s Asylums, Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time. Oh — let’s not forget Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist classic, “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

Chelsea A. Your presentation piqued my interest in the dialogic relations between contemporary Christianity and American popular culture. It’s pretty obvious that Christianity has greatly influenced pop culture, but to what extent is the opposite also true? Do you think television shows like Seventh Heaven and Joan of Arcadia are shaping Christianity as much as Christianity is shaping them? Think of the formal requirements of television drama as a genre. Do those requirements lead to certain television-specific ways of portraying Christians and Christianity? (See Portrayals of God in Popular Media.) If so, do you think Christian viewers then internalize those portrayals? Should we expect to see as a result — or are we already seeing — the emergence of an altogether new, televisionish Christianity?

Emma M. In your presentation you compared Mary Rowlandson to Elizabeth Smart and, to a lesser extent, Rowlandson’s Narragansett Indian captors to Brian D. Mitchell. I’d like you to pursue these comparisons further. In particular, I’d like you to consider the possibility that, in general, the discourse of captivity follows a basic logic of binary opposition:

Captive = All that is good
Captor = All that is not good

Of course, since everyone is in some ways flawed, the construction of one character as embodying All That Is Good and the other as embodying All That Is Bad requires the repression of certain realities. This in turn makes me wonder whether some of the emotional power of the captivity narrative lies in its function as a “return of the repressed.” What do you think? What might be some of the discomfiting truths that have been repressed in the discursive construction of Rowlandson and Smart (and the Narragansetts and Mitchell)?

Jon A. In your presentation you linked the White Woman in Peril trope to white male fantasies of American expansion. To your comments I would add that those imperialist fantasies were traditionally very heavily gendered: first, by associating the female with the future, and second, by imagining the land as female and its exploration and conquest as male (the whole “mastering the virgin land” schtick). For your final, please read up a bit on the arguments of the ecofeminist critic Annette Kolodny and then report back to us on the extent to which you think this nation’s persistently gendered and racialized understanding of captivity reflects an essentially white supremacist vision of its future.

Julia C. The more I think about the White Woman in Peril trope and Missing White Woman syndrome, the more I see them as vehicles of a white supremacist American nationalism. It’s not just that the White Woman in Peril is everywhere in our culture, it’s that her counterpart is nowhere. Contrast the United States to Mexico, whose cultural imaginary includes figures like the Virgin of Guadalupe and, more important for our purposes here, La Malinche. Please read up on La Malinche, then compare and contrast her story, as a captivity narrative and otherwise, to the story of Mary Rowlandson.

Abby S. “Ignorance,” you wrote in response to one of my blog posts, “is one of the determining forces limiting our freedom.” I think you’re right, though your statement could use some clarification, particularly concerning its implications for knowledge and education. In a society like ours, where most of us enjoy basic political freedom, what sorts of knowledge, and what kind of education, would be best calculated to expand our freedom beyond the merely political? In order for Americans to most fully utilize their political freedom, what are the most important things they should know? And how should they be taught those things? (You might want to read up a bit on the idea of liberal arts education.) Finally, consider a very specific example of ignorance, a particular fact of which almost all Americans are unaware: namely, that their nation has long obsessed over this or that incarnation of the White Woman in Peril, but not over any figure even remotely resembling La Malinche. If the American education system leaves most Americans unaware of this and other aspects of the racism of its cultural imaginary, can Americans truly be “free”?

Illustration: “Malinalli, Malitzin, Marina o Malinche,” by Javier Campos Santander. Read more!

Hi folks! Technical difficulties are being experienced. Here's the link to the article on Wilma Mankiller. Read more!

We’ve been toying with a fairly traditional philosophical model of freedom that thinks of it in terms of agency and determination. According to this model, agency is basically free will, which each of us possesses as long as we are in our “right mind,” while determination refers to the forces beyond our control that “determine” the options that actually confront us at any given time. In this model, agency is a given, while determination is a matter of history, chance, social structure, and the like. In this traditional model, agency is internal and determination is external. Free will is “in here,” while determination is “out there.” But guess what? Stories like “Somnambulism” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” — not to mention the theories of Sigmund Freud and neuroscience — suggest that very powerful determining forces are not external at all but are lodged in the deepest levels of the human psyche.

Now consider works like Walden (or Plato’s allegory of the cave, or The Matrix), which suggest that what we think of as reality is not reality at all. As suggested by the analogy with which Thoreau closes Walden, our conception of reality is to real reality as the morning star (aka Venus) is to the sun.

Now consider the possibility that ignorance is one of the determining forces limiting our freedom. If we are actually confronted with a choice between A, B, C, D, and E, but we are only aware of options A and B, is the choice that we go on to make fully free?

If we argue that it’s not — if we argue that freedom is partly a function of knowledge or awareness — then Walden is very much to the point. By suggesting that somewhere beyond our current awareness there lies an almost infinitely greater reality that we have not yet awakened to, Thoreau implies that there is also an almost infinitely greater kind of freedom that we have not yet attained. We might think we are really free, but that’s only because we’re still trapped in the matrix (or still stuck in Plato’s cave, or in the grip of some ideology, or whatever).

Yes? No? If yes — if in fact we are still stuck among the dark shadows of the cave — how can we get out into the bright sunlight?

Bonus questions: Is The Matrix just warmed-over Plato, only with cool sunglasses and Carrie-Anne Moss in black leather, or does it tell us something the Allegory of the Cave does not? Ditto for Walden. Read more!

In class today we tried to identify and understand the relationships between several of the more prominent elements of nineteenth century American culture: Romanticism, Manifest Destiny, the Second Great Awakening, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon and King Follett Sermon, William Cullen Bryant’s poetry, etc. We wound up with the whiteboard scribblings above.

So — to reiterate the questions I left you with at the end of class: Do the elements-plus-the-relations-between-them amount to some “thing,” some movement or cultural phenomenon? Or (as Gertrude Stein once said of Oakland) is there “no there there”? If there is something there, does it already have a name? If there is something there but it hasn’t already been named, what name might we most appropriately give it?

BTW, for more info on Joseph Smith and the Mormon scriptures, see the link at right for “Notes on the Mormon Scriptures.” Read more!

Early in The American Adam, R.W.B. Lewis wrote that

narrative art inevitably...stains ideas with restless ambiguity. For the experience of the aims and values of an epoch is apt to be more complex and even more painful than the simple statement of them; and narrative deals with experiences, not with propositions. The narrative art, moreover, dramatizes as human conflict what is elsewhere a thoughtful exchange of ideas; and art projects — in a single packed dramatic image — conflicting principles which the discursive mind must contemplate separately and consecutively. (My emphases)

Ideas can be conveyed in the form of a story or in the form of a series of propositions. And as all alert English majors know, form is never completely independent of content. The content is always in some way “stained,” as Lewis puts it, by the form. (Compare this idea to Marshall McLuhan’s contention that “the medium is the message” and Susan Sontag’s argument in “Against Interpretation” that content is actually an aspect of form rather than the opposite of form.)

Hector St. Jean de Crèvecoeur could have said what he had to say about America in the form of a nonfiction essay. He could have expressed his thoughts in a series of propositions, say, like this:

On the one hand, America holds out tremendous promise of freedom and equality, and for many that promise is coming true. While I was in rural New York I observed people of a sort never seen before, indeed not even possible to imagine, in Europe. On the other hand, even though Americans champion the ideal of freedom, they seem oblivious to the reality that many of them still own slaves….

But Crèvecoeur didn’t use the essay form. He chose instead to express his ideas in a narrative form, in the form of fictional letters written by an ordinary American farmer to a British correspondent. So what we get are passages like this:

[W]here is that station which can confer a more substantial system of felicity than that of an American farmer, possessing freedom of action, freedom of thoughts, ruled by a mode of government which requires but little from us? I owe nothing but a pepper corn to my country, a small tribute to my king, with loyalty and due respect; I know no other landlord than the lord of all land, to whom I owe the most sincere gratitude. My father left me three hundred and seventy-one acres of land, forty-seven of which are good timothy meadow, an excellent orchard, a good house, and a substantial barn. It is my duty to think how happy I am that he lived to build and to pay for all these improvements; what are the labours which I have to undergo, what are my fatigues when compared to his, who had every thing to do, from the first tree he felled to the finishing of his house? Every year I kill from 1,500 to 2,000 weight of pork, 1,200 of beef, half a dozen of good wethers in harvest: of fowls my wife has always a great stock: what can I wish more? My negroes are tolerably faithful and healthy; by a long series of industry and honest dealings, my father left behind him the name of a good man; I have but to tread his paths to be happy and a good man like him.…

The general idea seems to be that the freedoms enjoyed by Farmer James and his father permitted them to profit from the fruits of their own labor, gradually amassing wealth to pass on to their posterity. Under such conditions work becomes a joy rather than a burden.

Because he’s writing fiction, and because good fiction demands concrete, lifelike details, Crèvecoeur fleshes out this picture of felicity-and-prosperity-through-freedom with a detailed accounting of Farmer James’s wealth: this many acres, this much beef, that much pork, and so on. This list functions to make Letters from an American Farmer more believable, helping us to willingly suspend our disbelief and also seducing us into its ideology — at least until, near the end of this list, we read that bit, so casually tossed in, about “my Negroes.”

Wait a minute, we find ourselves thinking. How can it possibly make sense to mention one’s slaves in a testimony to the marvels of freedom? And then we might notice the rather dark irony of phrases like “industry and honest dealings”: whose industry? And what’s so “honest” about slavery? Then there’s the idea that all Farmer James has to do to be a “good man” like his father is to do as his father did — including, presumably, to continue to arrogate to himself and his heirs the wealth produced in part by his slaves. Undermining Farmer James’s ideal of freedom is the reality of slavery, not only in the present but projected into the future.

The fictional form of Letters demands the enumeration of concrete details, but among those details are some that “stain” the book’s “ideas with restless ambiguity” — in this case, by suggesting that the freedom under discussion is not freedom for all but only freedom for some.

What are some of the other ways Crèvecoeur’s choice to convey his ideas in narrative form “stain his ideas”? That is, what are some of the ways in which Crèvecoeur seems to be trying to tell us one thing, but is prompted by the Letters’ form to tell us other things as well? Read more!

Roadside haiku! Putting a fresh twist on an old tradition, John Morse uses poetry as social commentary. For more on roadside haiku, check out Morse's web page here. Read more!

The captivity narrative as a genre and captivity as a trope have been prominent at least since biblical times. (Think of how much mileage the Jewish national mythology gets out of the Egyptian and Babylon captivities.) Today the idea of captivity circulates through pop culture (think of Gwen Stefani singing “Just a Girl” or The Melodians reworking Psalm 137 into “By the Rivers of Babylon”) and periodically dominates the news (e.g., Elizabeth Smart and Jaycee Dugard).

In this post I want to focus on Rowlandson’s Narrative of the Captivity as a powerful work of theodicy — that is, an attempt to reconcile belief in the goodness of God with the fact of suffering in the world. Consider Rowlandson’s description, long after her captivity has ended, of her continuing misery:

I can remember the time, when I used to sleep quietly without workings in my thoughts, whole nights together, but now it is other ways with me. When all are fast about me, and no eye open, but His who ever waketh, my thoughts are upon things past, upon the awfull dispensation of the Lord towards us; upon his wonderful power and might, in carrying of us through so many difficulties, in returning us in safety, and suffering none to hurt us.

Suffering none to hurt us! This from a woman who watched her youngest child die in her arms. Rowlandson continues:

I remember in the night season, how the other day I was in the midst of thousands of enemies, and nothing but death before me: it is then hard work to persuade myself, that ever I should be satisfied with bread again. But now we are fed with the finest of the wheat, and, as I may say, with honey out of the rock: instead of the husk, we have the fatted calf: the thoughts of these things in the particulars of them, and of the love and goodness of God towards us, make it true of me, what David said of himself, Psalms 6.6. I watered my couch with my tears. Oh! the wonderful power of God that mine eyes have seen, affording matter enough for my thoughts to run in, that when others are sleeping mine are weeping. (175)

I find passages like these tremendously moving, but I’m not sure the book as a whole succeeds as a theodicy. In fact, when Rowlandson insists on “the love and goodness of God towards us” I’m not sure she believes her own words.

What do you think — does Rowlandson believe what she says? More broadly, does her Narrative succeed in reconciling the belief in “the love and goodness of God” with the seemingly random experience of captivity and loss?

Update: Theodicy, The Odyssey — what an awesome twosome.... Even more awesome was the way you all instantly tagged it as a homonym! Read more!

Every time I teach William Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation I get the same complaint: it’s dull. But it’s not! Once you get used to Bradford’s Puritan “plain style,” his account of the Plymouth colony’s early years is more fun than Disneyland. Yes, it reveals the early colonists to be every bit as bigoted and theocratic as the Puritan stereotype would suggest, but it also shows them to be dedicated, gutsy, and at least occasionally funny. I would recommend paying special attention to the account of the sailor with the “lusty, able body” (on page 248); the beautiful and moving description of just how vulnerable and isolated the colonists felt upon being dropped off by the Mayflower (249-250); the heartbreaking account of the “starving time” (251-252); the hilarious description of John Morton’s rival colony at Merrymount, which ends with Morton being arrested after he proves too drunk to lift his musket (254-258) (remember, sometimes a musket is just a musket); and the explanation of the shocking, just shocking, discovery that there were “so many wicked persons and profane people” in God’s Own Colony (262-263).

A few questions: At the beginning of his book, Bradford tells us he is writing “in a plain style, with singular regard to the simple truth in all things” (247). But is the truth of the Plymouth experiment really simple? And is Bradford’s plain style really so plain? Does it really give us the unvarnished truth, or is the plain style itself a rhetorical device used to make the untrue seem true?

Is Bradford’s History really a history at all? If not, what would you call it?

As examples of some of Bradford’s literary devices, consider the alliteration and internal rhyme that give so much zip to the phrases “to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies” and “fill their sides full of arrows.” Feel the poetic rhythm of “hideous and desolate wilderness” (each of the main words is a dactyl, with one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables: hí-de-ous, dés-o-late, wíl-der-ness). Groove on the anaphora in “wild beasts and wild men.” (The original spelling is “wild beasts and willd men.”) In other words, sense the poetry animating the prose — and the poet’s heart beating inside the sober and orthodox colonial governor.

Oh, yeah — anyone who thinks the U.S. Constitution established a “Christian nation” should be sure to check out the Mayflower Compact (251) to see what the charter of a real Christian polity looks like.

As for the excerpt from John Underhill’s Newes from America, it can be difficult to read — in more ways than one. As far as I know, this book has never been published in a modern edition, and the copy in your coursepack is from a microfilm of the original. The copy quality is poor, the spelling is old-school (“seeing the Fort was to hotte for us, wee devised a way how wee might save ourselves”), and the book uses the “long-s” (which looks like an “f” with the cross-stroke on the left side only).

But the excerpt is also difficult to read because of its horrific content. It begins after the fighting at the Pequot village of Mystic is already underway. The Pequots, mostly women and children, have been caught by surprise in their “palizado” or wooden fortress but are starting to mount an effective defense. The Puritans, led by Underhill and Captain Mason and having taken a few casualties, decide not to force their way into the fort but instead to burn it down. Underhill’s account of the ensuing slaughter can be compared to William Bradford’s account of the same event in Chapter XXVIII of his History.

Both accounts can be compared to this R-rated scene from Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911. What would you say are the some of the hallmarks of the language used to describe and justify the Pequot massacre? What about the rhetoric of empire more generally? And what about Michael Moore’s anti-imperialist rhetoric? Read more!

Welcome to American Lit I, everyone! Let's work together to analyze the illo above... and write this semester's first post for G@A. Read more!