Georgetown University
English 170 – Fall 2012
U.S. Literary History I: American Emergence, 1682-1900
Professor Brian Hochman
email: bh296@georgetown.edu
office: New North 324 (T 1:30-4:00)
(above: Matt Kish, “#538” from Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page )
This course examines U.S. literary history before 1900, surveying American literature in the context
of broader social and intellectual developments. Throughout the semester we will focus on four
themes that figure centrally in the emergence of American writing: 1) citizenship and the contested
ideal of the American self; 2) nationhood and the cultivation of national literary and cultural
traditions; 3) literature’s relationship to revolution, political protest, and social change; and 4) the
realities and legacies of slavery, emancipation, and American empire. Authors include Rowlandson,
Rowson, Child, Apess, Walker, Douglass, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville,
Stowe, Twain, and Chesnutt. The semester will culminate with a reading of Moby-Dick. This course
requires two essays and a final exam, as well as regular response writings throughout the term.
Required Texts (available at the GU Bookstore):
Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple (Modern Library)
Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok (Rutgers)
David Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens (Hill and Wang)
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Bedford)
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Norton)
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (Norton)
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Bedford)
selected poems/essays/etc. – I will provide these in PDF form (marked by [*] below)
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Class Policies/Requirements
Grading and Requirements:
The majority of your grade for this course is based on two major papers (20% and 30%,
respectively) and a final exam (30%). The remaining 20% is based on class participation—this
includes regular attendance, thoughtful contribution to class discussion, and sporadic “quotationresponse” writing assignments (more on these below). All absences should be excused. Missing
more than three classes throughout the semester will seriously jeopardize your participation grade; if
you miss more than five, you should expect to fail the course.
General Expectations:
1. Come to class prepared to address all of the meeting’s readings. This means bringing the
relevant texts with you. Keeping up with the syllabus is also essential. I’ve tried to make each
individual reading assignment manageable. But be warned: unread pages can pile up very, very
quickly!
You are also required to serve as an “inquisitor” for at least one class meeting during the
semester. “Inquisitors” are responsible for kicking off class discussion by sharing a particularly
interesting, difficult, poignant, or puzzling literary passage from the reading and raising one or two
solid questions about it to the class at large. This is not a formal presentation. Think “dialogue”
rather than “monologue” here. While you should plan to tell the class why you chose your passage,
the more important thing is to come up with some thoughtful questions or points of contention that
will help generate discussion. (Two helpful hints on this front: honest questions lead to honest
responses, and the best passages to pick are the ones that made you think “WOW,” or even “WTF,”
when you read them.) Whatever you do, you must let me know, via email, what passage you
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want to share by 10:00 PM on the evening prior to class. I will assign dates for inquisitors once
enrollment settles.
2. Meet with me, in office hours or otherwise, to discuss your writing. As listed above, my
office hours are Tuesdays 1:30-4:00 in New North 324. I’m also readily available by email
appointment.
3. Turn in assignments on time—either at the beginning of class (for “quotation-response”
essays), or by email (for your two papers). In both cases, late work is not acceptable. My policy is
a simple one: for every day a paper is late, 1/3 of a letter grade will be deducted. Exceptions may be
made in documented cases of personal or familial hardship (severe illnesses, family emergencies,
etc.). But please take note: the pressures of other exams, papers, or extracurricular activities are not
an acceptable excuse for lateness. Plan now to structure your time wisely—and please don’t hesitate
to take advantage of my office hours to help you work on assignments in advance of their due dates.
Writing:
1. Quotation-Response (QR) Essays: QR essays are short response papers—i.e, no more
than two pages, typed and double-spaced—due at the beginning of class on 9/11, 10/2, 11/6, and 11/20.
For these, you will reproduce a short quotation or passage from the assigned text that you found to
be particularly striking, exhilarating, poignant, puzzling, questionable, and/or difficult and then
respond to the ways it speaks to the larger themes present in the author’s work at large. Make
certain that you pay attention to the passage’s form as well as its content. In other words, don’t just
summarize what your passage says, try to explain how it says it.
Really, the only way to improve your reading skills is by writing frequently (and, for that
matter, the only way to improve your writing skills is by reading frequently), so think of QR essay
assignments as necessary “practice” for advanced literary study. With this in mind, I want you to
feel free to experiment with your writing voice here, with your register of critical response to the text
in question. Be creative. And don’t be afraid to use the pronoun “I”!! Either way, you will produce
five of these over the course of the semester. My hope is that you’ll be able to revise or extend
some of them for your two longer papers.
2. Paper # 1: due October 23, 5-7 pages (typed, double-spaced, 12-point font). For this
paper you will write a critical essay that revises and extends one of your QR essays into a more
comprehensive argument about the text from which it is drawn. I’ll of course be available for
consultation on your paper during office hours.
3. Paper #2: due December 6, 7-9 pages (typed, double-spaced, 12-point font). Here you
are to write a critical essay on at least two writers from our syllabus. I’ll provide some potential
topics and author pairings closer to the due date. No background research is necessary; ideally, your
paper will be structured around a comparative series of close, textual readings (here you might think
of several related QR essays strung together), all in the service of an underlying claim or contention
that you make at the beginning of the paper. Again, I’ll definitely make myself available for
consultation on your paper during office hours.
Final Exam:
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The Final Exam for this class will be held during exam period, time/date/location to be
announced. Broadly speaking, the exam will consist of two or three essay questions that will ask you
to make some important thematic connections between all of the texts we’ve read. I consider the
Final Exam to be a synthetic, rather than diagnostic, exercise. That is, I want it to encourage you to
bring together and sum up a semester’s worth of readings, rather than regurgitate a rote set of terms
and concepts. (Of course, the terms and concepts that emerge in our discussions throughout the
semester will be important to how you approach your answers to the final exam—so don’t write
these off either). The test is open book; you may bring the texts and your notes with you.
Plagiarism and Academic Honesty:
The Georgetown University Honor Code—which includes a detailed definition of
plagiarism—can be found on the GU website at http://gervaseprograms.georgetown.edu/honor/
system/53377.html. In short:
Plagiarism is the act of passing off as one’s own the ideas or writings of another.
While different academic disciplines have different modes for attributing credit, all
recognize and value the contributions of individuals to the general corpus of
knowledge and expertise. Students are responsible for educating themselves as to
the proper mode of attributing credit in any course or field….[T]hree simple
conventions are presented for when you must provide a reference: 1) If you use
someone else's ideas, you should cite the source; 2) If the way in which you are using
the source is unclear, make it clear; 3) If you received specific help from someone in
writing the paper, acknowledge it….Faculty may use various methods to assess the
originality of students' work. For example, faculty may submit a student's work to
electronic search engines, including turnitin.com, a service to which the Honor
Council and the Provost subscribe. Note that plagiarism can be said to have
occurred without any affirmative showing that a student’s use of another’s work was
intentional.”
I follow Georgetown’s guidelines for plagiarism. I also submit all student work to turnitin.com, an
electronic search engine that detects instances of plagiarized writing. Depending on the case, you
will receive a zero on the assignment, fail the course, and possibly receive further disciplinary action.
If you have any uncertainty about the meaning of plagiarism, please be sure to discuss it with me.
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Schedule of Assignments
Th Sept 30
Course Introduction
1. Literature, Culture, and the Early National
Tu Sept 4
Mary Rowlandson, Narrative of the Captivity of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) [*]
Th Sept 6
Susanna Rowson, Charlotte Temple (1791), 1-61
Tu Sept 11
Rowson, Charlotte Temple , 62-End
QR #1 Due
Th Sept 13
Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok (1824), 2-77
Tu Sept 18
Child, Hobomok, 78-End
Th Sept 20
William Apess, A Son of the Forest (1831) [*]
Tu Sept 25
David Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in particular, and
very expressly, to those of the United States of America (1829), 1-78
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Th Sept 27
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave,
Written by Himself (1845), 31-79 (up to Chapter X, including Garrison’s
Preface)
Tu Oct 2
Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 79-End
QR #2 Due
2. The “American Renaissance”
Th Oct 4
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown,” “The Artist of the
Beautiful” (1846) [*]
Tu Oct 9
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar” (1837), “Self Reliance”
(1841) [*]
Th Oct 11
Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” (1855/1881) [*]
Tu Oct 16
Emily Dickinson, “There’s a certain Slant of light,” “After a great pain, a
formal feeling comes,” “Because I could not stop for Death,” “I heard a Fly
buzz—when I died,” “Much Madness is divinest Sense,” “My Life had
stood—a Loaded Gun” [*]
Th Oct 18
Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1854) [*]
Tu Oct 23
Paper #1 Due
3. Peculiar Institutions, National Crises
Th Oct 25
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), 1-123 (up to Volume I,
Chapter XIV; including the Preface)
Tu Oct 30
Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 123-264 (up to Volume II, Chapter XVIII)
Th Nov 1
Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 264-End
Tu Nov 6
Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (1856) [*]
QR #3 Due
4. Fictions of Reconstruction
Th Nov 8
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), 43-184 (up to Ch. 24)
Tu Nov 13
Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 184-End
Th Nov 15
NO CLASS – AWAY AT CONFERENCE
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Tu Nov 20
Charles Chesnutt, “The Goophered Grapevine” (1887), “Po’ Sandy” (1888)
“Dave’s Neckliss” (1889), “The Wife of His Youth” (1898) [*]
QR #4 Due
Th Nov 22
NO CLASS – THANKSGIVING BREAK
5. Case Study: Moby-Dick as American Summa
Tu Nov 27
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1852), 1-180 (up to Ch. 48)
Th Nov 29
Melville, Moby-Dick, 181-276, (up to Ch. 81)
Tu Dec 4
Melville, Moby-Dick, 276-End
Th Dec 6
Paper #2 Due
Course Wrap-Up
FINAL EXAM – DATE/TIME TBA