Major American Writers I
Introduction
Professor Engber
How do you see America?
The First Day of Class
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Goals and Expectations:
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Make students a little comfortable
Make students a little uncomfortable
Encourage student engagement with course
content and with each other
Present course as a field of inquiry
Present competing narratives
Guide students in analysis of visual and verbal
representations of early America
Model inquiry
Model conflict negotiation
Meeting Goals, Setting Expectations
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Things I usually do first:
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tell students what to call me.
pose a question.
Some things I usually don't do:
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I often don't take attendance or hand out the
syllabus first. (I hand it out near the end of the first
class, and I post it to Blackboard.)
And I sometimes don't begin with a literary text.
Frederick Church
Twilight in the Wilderness (1860)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund
Frederic Remington
A Dash for Timber (1889)
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth
Thomas Hariot
"A Briefe and True Report
of the New Found Land of Virginia."
Frankfort: Theodore De Bry (1590)
John White
"Indian Man and Woman Eating"
Watercolor drawing (created 1585-1586).
Some Guiding Questions
for the Semester
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What is America?
Who are the American heroes?
What is a frontier? Whose frontier is it?
Is there a conflict between the individual and
nature? Or the individual and society?
If so, how does literature reflect or respond to
this conflict?
What is your connection to American literature?
How do you “see” America?
Frontispiece and Title Page
Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral
Engraving attributed to Scipio Moorhead (1773)
“On Being Brought from Africa to America”
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'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
"Their colour is a diabolic die."
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.
http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/webtexts/Wheatley/brought.html
Where can you find more information?
You can start online
Evaluate sources carefully…
American Treasures of the Library of Congress
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On September 1, 1773, Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects,
Religious and Moral was published in London, England. Wheatley's
collection was the first volume of poetry by an African-American poet to
be published. Regarded as a prodigy by her contemporaries, Wheatley
was approximately twenty at the time of the book's publication.
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Born in the Senegambia region of West Africa, she was sold into
slavery and transported to Boston at age seven or eight. Purchased off
the slave ship by prosperous merchant John Wheatley and his wife
Susanna in 1761, the young Phillis was soon copying the English
alphabet on a wall in chalk.
Looking Back
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Digital Collection DeBry Engravings
Repository University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill. Library. North Carolina Collection.
Related Resource The full text of Thomas
Hariot's "A Briefe and True Report of the New
Found Land of Virginia" is available online
through Documenting the American South at
http://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/hariot/menu.htm
Thinking Ahead:
Whose frontier is it anyway?
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James Fenimore Cooper Last of the Mohicans
(1826)
http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/CooM
ohi.html
Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia
Library
Frederick Church
Twilight in the Wilderness (1860)
Cleveland Museum of Art
Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund