Horton: Semester in America

Before I started this class, I thought I had a fairly good overview of American literature. Between my high school classes and a voracious appetite for books, I covered most of the major authors and periods. But of course, there's always more to learn and more to learn about the things I've already learned.

About America

1. Americans' ideals of capitalism owe a lot to Puritan predestination.

2. Americans have a long history of arguing over ostensibly ridiculous things, like whether or not spectral evidence should be allowed in a courtroom. But for us, it's always life and death, or at least we think so.

3. Our Founding Fathers had moral blind spots, just like anyone else.

4. I still can't imagine what allowed my ancestors (Southern cattle and cotton farmers) to justify building their way of life on the backs of slaves.

5. America is not free from the impulse to romanticize the lives of famous people.

About American Lit

1. The Puritan mindset was much more complicated than commonly represented.

2. History by itself is usually boring and complicated, much like real life. So when fictionalizing the Salem Witch Trials, Arthur Miller had to add a whole new conflict to simplify things.

3. Benjamin Franklin was not the simple, hardworking inventor I learned about in history class.

4. I still don't really like Melville, but now I appreciate what he was trying to accomplish with his particular style of writing.

5. Everyone, especially Southerners, should read a first-hand account of slavery. It complicated my relationship with my heritage all over again.

In short, I read a lot of stuff that I hadn't read before, and learned new things about the stuff I'd already read. Mostly, I learned (again...) that Americans have always had a great desire to fix their lives and everyone else's, which gave some perspective to my views of American political life.

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.

Bertrand, America

Five things I learned about America:
1. America moral system is still based on Puritanical values
2. Benjamin Franklin was a playboy
3. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams did not agree upon the issues of God nor morals
4. Abigail Adams was the first feminists
5. During the era of slavery, The North would sell escaped slaves back to the plantation owners

Five things I learned about American Literature
1. The Adventure Narrative is a writing technique unique to America
2. The character Natty Bumppo is depicted in all of Cooper's pentalogy
3. Romanticism is a writing technique that is not just unique Europe, but it also occurred in American Literature
4. There are American fairy tales
5.There was a stage of hopelessness in America and American Literature reflected this.

In the early years of my education, I was taught that America was the only country in the world that was founded on hope and free opportunity for all. I have learned that out "founding fathers" had no intention of making that possible for everyone. It was their intention to create a country that was dog eat dog. It was not equal opportunity for all, it was only equal opportunity for white men; as Abigail Adams states in her letters to her husband. Also, I learned that Thomas Jefferson was promoting to John Adams that The Declaration of Independence should have a specific clause that made Christianity the religion of the country, while John Adams was pushing for no religion at all. These facts blur the nonexistent ideals that many people believe that America was founded on. This country is in constant flux. This is a country that attracts people from all places with many different beliefs. Each person that comes here tries to be heard because of the ideals that America projects and America is constantly attempting to accommodate all of these beliefs. This is why America is in constant flux. In response to this flux, Americans try to find a common need and want of the country in the natural world itself. This response is depicted it Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" and in some of Emily Dickinson's poems. This is a unique response to immense diversity. Although the response to diversity in the present day is usually fear, with the factual history that our country posses, there is still hope that we can revert back to the teachings of Whitman and Thoreau. There is still hope that we can eventually see the commonality in the human race through the attributes natural world.

Rihner, America Unvealed

5 Things I learned about America:
1. During the Mexican American War, part of the poll tax was used to fund the war.
2. American exceptionalism-the American idea of standards that are created in America to judge the rest of the world.
3. The puritan idea that the devil lives in the wilderness, which is ultimately a fear of the dark, the mysterious, or the unknown.
4. The Over Soul (I still may not fully understand this), the collective soul, perhaps God, consists of nature also. Human souls are the shadow of the over soul.
5. Ben Franklin as the self made man, acting upon rationalism and sneaking his writings into the local publications.

5 Things I learned about American Literature:
1. Edgar Allen Poe was an alcoholic.
2. Innocence becomes corrupted by maturity, by knowledge (Major Molineaux).
3.The different ideals of Emerson and Thoreau. Thoreau seemed to act upon his transcendental writings much more than Emerson. However, Thoreau only spent one night in jail.
4. Rake-a seductive man that lures in tons of women.
5. The Enlightenment and religious struggles in Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland

How these things changed my mind.
Well, here we go. The way that Puritan ideals, fears, and etc. shaped both American Literature and the American man. Before, I may have blamed the American obsession with the perfect lawn on pure masculinity issues or the two world wars, however, I now know that it is the puritans to blame.

My perception of Poe has changed. Though not by too much.

Through Wieland, I learned how Shaggy was able to throw his voice in a Scooby-Doo episode from my childhood. The answer is biloquism, the ability to impersonate the voice of any living being and send that voice to different nearby locations.

A rake is more than just a garden tool.

Following the rules is not always the best plan of action. Sometimes, like Ben Franklin, we have to act for ourselves, practically. I was previously aware of this mindset, yet it is inspiring to know that Mr. Franklin followed, or perhaps initiated, it.

Christopherson, Yes, America is Cultured!

Although I am still not convinced that America is as cultured as say, France (mais bien sur), this class has enabled me to articulately argue with people that yes, America does have culture and history running through its veins. I really always had faith that America was more than just a land of uncivilized hooligans who wanted to escape persecution. However this class has allowed me to base that on facts. Consider all the great works of literature we have studied in this course. I particulary enjoyed the works of American Romanticism by Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, Irving, and Alcott. Exploring each of these magnificent works by brilliants Americans has truly enlightened me as to the talent and background of American writers and how the writings impacted people of their time and continue to influence American thought today. The paintings we studied also, like I mentioned in class reminded me of French Impressionism, yet had a uniquely American feel to them. Instead of conjuring images of pastels and flowers the paintings we studied had a woodsy rough feel to them, which essentially is how I have come to think of American Literature. It is the real deal. American writers and painters do not gloss over life in America, they portray it how it was; how life is. A struggle. The grittiness of life is portrayed in everything we have studied yet our studies have also brought me a to unique conclusion. That America really is a land of prosperity and hope. I have not felt as though anything we have studied (except maybe Poe) left me with a feeling of dissappointment in America and it's people. If anything I have learned that America and its citizens are people who live life the best they can and persevere through tough times. Sadly that is probably more than the French can say, they just like to start drama. P.S. There is one other thing I learned in this class that does not highlight Americans so well. The Puritans were crazy and the Salem Witch Trials were absolute ludicrous. Before I may have seen some justifiable reason for this insanity to take hold, but now I see that for as much as the Puritans preached the gospel they were really overzealous, powerhungry individuals concerned mainly with their own good.

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.

Sugrue: things I learnt about America

I learned that though the fabric of the United States was woven by predominantly white males, there is a real depth to American Literature. I learned that because a racist, totalizing, system has been the prevailing one driving our country towards modernization, a large minority has come to embody that ideal. Just look to immigration laws, gay marriage laws, abortion laws, for evidence...Yet this blog is not a totally pessimistic one. While the State, the muscle, of the United States has always delivered a select white protestant community towards preeminence, literature and art are the undercurrents that account for the sweeping liberal changes of the 1960's and 70's, ones which though founded in the Nation, came to effect the State as well. This class has taught me that there is a resin, a salt of the earth, of the American spirit which exists. I have been reinvigorated by the works of Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau; inclusive edicts which created the ethos, the zietgiest, of American Individualism. Though this individualism may have fallen prey to, and been contorted by, the quagmire of post-modernism, a look back to art, American art nonetheless, is a certainly refreshing answer to many of our modern problems.