Professor: Stephanie Wade
Institution: SUNY Stonybrook
Course Number: n/a
Course Description:
A study of creation tales and contact literature from Pueblo oral traditions and the King James Bible through the 20th-century in American cultures. Subjects will include attitudes towards the natural world, the functions of historical fictions, the origins of America, and the relationships between literature and history.
Course goals:
- Content knowledge: understanding of the diverse cultures that comprise the United States and the connections between place and narrative.
- Critical thinking skills: analytical abilities, library research, and archival research.
- Communication skills: public speaking and public writing.
Assignments and grading:
1. Participation in class blog: 1-2 pages of informal writing in response to weekly reading and to classmates’ posts. Students will rotate responsibility for reading and writing about criticism, to be chosen from common bibliography, and for sharing their entries to start class discussion. We will set up small-group conferences to work on the criticism. 15%
2. Researched analysis: Using the class bibliography, as well as outside archival research, students will write a 10 page essay which explores the course readings in depth via close textual analysis, historical research, and criticism. A draft of the historical research of 3-5 pages is due at week 11 and the full paper is due at the end of week 15. 20%
3. Contemporary story: Students will find a contemporary incarnation of a story that addresses the themes of creation and/or original sin in books, movies, or music. In a 5-page paper, they will summarize this story, analyze the way the version addresses the class theme(s), and consider how the contemporary historical moment might relate to the representation of these theme(s). Students will make 5 minutes presentations in the last class. The paper is due week 8. 20%
4. Creative work: Students may write a story, or poem, or song, or create an electronic narrative that addresses the themes of creation and/or sin. This piece may be set in the 21st-century or another historical period. Due week 14. 20%
5. Attendance and participation. 25%
Reading List:
Week #1:
Acoma Indian origin story (from When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846)
Biblical origin story (Genesis 1-3, 1 Timothy 2:11-14)
Week #2:
Selections from Columbus’s journal
When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Chapter #1)
Week #3:
Milton, Paradise Lost (1667)
Cotton Mather, Wonders of the Invisible World (1692)
Jay, Gregory. American Literature and the Culture Wars. Cornell, NY: Cornell UP, 1997.
Week #4:
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko (1688)
Aphra Behn (translator), A Discovery of New Worlds
Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World
Week #5:
Visit to Sag Harbor/Southampton Historical Society/Library archives
Archival research
Week #6:
Unca Eliza Winkfield, The Female American (1767)
When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 p.226-240
Kolodny, Annette. The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers. Chapel Hill & London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.
Week #7
Equiano Olaudah, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or, Gustavus Vassa, the African (1798)
Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World
Week #8
Contemporary stories/presentations
Week #9
Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, or the Transformation (1798)
Martin Bruckner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (2006)
Week #10:Break
Week #11
Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok (1824)
Gould, Phillip. Covenant and Republic: Historical Romance and the Politics of Puritanism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1966
Week #12
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850)
Davidson, Cathy. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986
Week #13
Linda Brent, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.
Week #14
Lords of the Soil: A Romance of Indian Life (1905/1912) Nathan J Cuffee and Linda Jocelyn Smith
Hunter, Lois Marie (b. 1903). The Shinnecock Indians. [Islip, NY]: Buys Brothers, 1950.
RARE E99 .S38 H86 1950. (Pequot Museum)
Week #15
Final papers due.
