Christopher Bowers - 10 Thing

1. The American literary tradition began with a much stronger break from its western predecessors than I previously thought.

Okay, I hear you - sounds like a pretty stiff way to start this bit. But really, this is pretty important, and not really obvious. I think I had considered the American literary as a sort of natural growth out of British tradition that later incorporated more diverse narratives. It hadnt struck me that the fact that the place was largely settled by radical separatists might create a kind of psycho-literary break that would really necessitate a whole new tradition. Seems pretty obvious now, but hey. College.

2. Maybe because of the nation's largely puritan foundation, the development of the American voice required a negotiation with old and new ways of thinking religion, spirituality, and mysticism.

It's everywhere, even when it isn't.

3. America's greatest contributions and most difficult conflicts have pivoted on the notion, or the setting, of the frontier.

From the colonists' fear of the "savages" doing all kinds of things like "lurking" in the forest, the dark scary forest, to the romantic invention that was the western frontier, the American literary has consistently sparked along the edges of the space we inhabit, either geographically or imaginatively.

4. Melville was a colonialist-imperialist.

Not really. However, even though Melville wrote critically of the colonial exploitation of the South Pacific, a histo-critical approach to this (or any) text has a lot to teach us. Reading Typee, I discovered that the discourse in which a writer is placed will have an unavoidable effect on his or her creative process, shaping the possible forms a text, or a thought, can take shape.


5. Even things I read in high-school are worth revisiting, and can teach us a lot.

A text is never dead. The more we bring to a work, the more we take away from it. The process of contextualizing the things we looked at in this class, of trying to fit them into a constellation we can call the American Literary, has had a formative effect on what and how the texts make meaning.