Williams, What I Learned

5 THINGS I LEARNED ABOUT AMERICA:
1. Puritanism was the root of Americans' mania for litigation.
2. Puritanism was the root of Americans' obsession with sex.
3. The Puritans' sense of religious mission was the foundation of an American "exceptionalism" that has lasted to this day.
4. Benjamin Franklin was a phony.
5. Slavery was a source of guilt among all Americans before and during the abolitionist movement, whether they acknowledged it or not.

5 THINGS I LEARNED ABOUT AMERICAN LITERATURE:

1. American literature often involves the struggle between constructing/identifying with a certain past and looking forward to living an "American" future.
2. The myth of the "self-made man" was begun by Benjamin Franklin and has become a staple characteristic of the American literary hero since then.
3. Americans, despite the surety with which they pursued the extermination of the Native American people, were conflicted about the natives of this land. James Fenimore Cooper could not decide between the superior, "civilized" American society and the wild romanticism of the lone savage, exemplified by the Indian. This struggle between community and individualism is prominent throughout American literature.
4. Slavery and all its moral implications played a larger role in the American literary imagination than I had assumed. Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville were concerned with it, and even up to today it plays a certain part in American literature. William Faulkner's entire body of work has been called an apology for slavery.
5. American literature is more deeply tied to American history than I could have imagined.

ALL IN ALL:

This course reignited my interest in American literature. After coming to college two years ago with an especial affinity for twentieth-century American fiction, my interest in American literature altogether quickly fizzled out as my knowledge of and exposure to literary theory and technique grew. I grew much more inclined to pursue international fiction, particularly of Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. I was tired of what I saw as an American obsession with "finding one's self" and a proclivity for what I learned this semester to call "exceptionalism." The actions of the previous political administration did not contribute significantly to any desire for identification with anything American, either. In short, I was "SO over American literature".

However, I learned this year that there is a history to these common themes of American literature. The conflict between past and present, the struggle to forge a completely new identity, the guilt and the obsessions with sex, were all present as far back as the first settlers. American literature has become interesting to me after learning to see it as the product of the psychological traumas that lie beneath the shiny veneer of "the American dream." In fact, my urge to dismiss American literature and stake out a claim in new territories of words is analogous to the "dismissal of the past/construction of a new identity" conflict of James Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman. This class showed me that, as it turns out, I'm still pretty American after all.