Major American Writers I

Introduction Professor Engber

How do you see America?

The First Day of Class Goals and Expectations:

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 Things I usually do first:

tell students what to call me. pose a question.

Some things I usually don't do: 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 Questionsfor the Semester

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 PagePoems on Various Subjects, Religious and MoralEngraving attributed to Scipio Moorhead (1773)

“On Being Brought from Africa to America”

'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,Taught my benighted soul to understandThat there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

5 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 onlineEvaluate sources carefully…

American Treasures of the Library of Congress

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.

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 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?

James Fenimore Cooper Last of the Mohicans (1826)

http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/CooMohi.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