English 352 American Literature: The Early Nation

Preliminary Issue

This is a course in American literature in the decades before the Civil War (with a few peeks at texts written afterwards). When you finish it, you will understand what concerned authors during those years and the various literary ways they expressed those concerns. As an upper-division course, it assumes that you are a competent writer of English prose and that your ability to analyze literature is roughly that of someone who is a beginning English major. These are vague assumptions, however, so let me explain. If you are or were a college student in good standing, or if you have been a dedicated reader all your life, or if you have time to devote to this course, you will find the material quite manageable. Since everyone who has read this far is such a person, or so I believe, this course is for you.

Ordinarily, this course is arranged according to authors (one lesson on Emerson, one on Thoreau, and so forth). I have taught it that way before. But this time, I have organized the course around five themes (see the table of contents to this course guide) because I would like you to see that our literary past relates to our contemporary struggles. To be an American today is to face issues that confronted nineteenth-century authors. If we read these authors thematically, we'll get help with our struggles. We need our past to survive our present.

Each lesson in this course contains a set of readings concerning its theme. I suggest you work through the readings before seeing what I have to say about them. In that way you'll be figuring out your own ideas before encountering mine. This will help you do your best on the paper required at the end of each lesson. Because this is a distance learning course, we will not be able to have in-person conferences about your papers before you submit them. But I will comment on your papers before returning them to you. Among other things, I will show you how to make your next papers better and will look kindly upon those who make constructive use of my comments.

About the Online Environment

Your online course offers several advantages to the traditional classroom, including the comprehensive Online Student Handbook, the ability to communicate electronically with students and with your instructor, and links to a rich array of online resources.

Online Student Handbook

This handbook answers questions about your online learning course, such as how to purchase your text, schedule an exam, obtain a transcript, and get technical help if you need it. The handbook also provides additional resources, such as how to order books or journals from the library and how to study for an online course.

Communication with Your Instructor and Student Peers

• Online Discussion Forums, designed by the University of Washington award winning Catalyst team, allow you to communicate with other currently enrolled students and with your instructor. We encourage you to use the discussion forum to exchange ideas, resources, and comments about your course work with other students in this course. This unstructured forum is monitored by your instructor.
• You can use e-mail to ask me a question or preferably post your question on the discussion forum. I will reply to all discussion forum questions on the forum, and to e-mail questions via e-mail.

Online Resources

As an online student, you have access to a wealth of Web resources compiled to provide fast, easy access to information that supports your online learning experience. Organized by subjects, Online Resources link you to sites with help for writing and research, study skills, language learning, and library reference materials. All links have been assessed for credibility and reliability, and they are regularly monitored to ensure their usability.

Supplementary Reading

As part of the assignment in this course, I would like you to read pp. 1-10 and 691-708 of The Norton Anthology. I would also like you to look closely at the introductions to the various authors we will study. If you wish to read more about American literature, you may consult the "Selected Bibliographies" on pp. 2519-30. Let me declare my prejudice, however, that it is infinitely better to read American literature than to read about it. I came to this conclusion after reflecting upon my own literary education. When I first began to study books, I would run to the library to see what others had said about them. Almost always, my reading was at odds with the commentaries, and I felt stupid because I could not reconcile the two. Only when I took a course in contemporary literature, for which no commentaries existed, did I discover that my reading could stand on its own and that it was a fine thing to be my own authority. Obviously, I cannot force you to discover the same things, but your writing assignments in this course will allow you to show how well you have struggled with the literature, not how successfully you have discovered the commentaries on it. Read those commentaries if you wish, but please acknowledge them at the end of your papers.

Assignments

There are five papers and one final examination in this course. Each paper, which comprises one-sixth of your grade (the final exam comprises the other sixth), constitutes the heart of your work for me. Topics and directions appear later in this course guide. Since this is a W course as defined by the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington, you have the option to revise and submit one of your papers for a better grade after I have returned it to you with comments.

For more infomation about submitting assignments please see "About Your Instructor" page

What is Good Writing?

I'd like to outline my sense of what makes good writing and how you might read the assignments in order to produce such writing. First, good spelling, grammar, and syntax alone do not make good writing, though without them we have, at best, very sloppy writing. They are conventions we must follow if we wish to be members of the writing public. If we violate them, we invite others to think ill of us. Think of these conventions as the clothes that writing wears. Unless we are nudists, we wear clothes because society dictates that we do. I think the best advice with respect to writing is to dress your papers appropriately.

What then makes for good writing? I am not alone in believing that the voice in writing ought to be one we might reasonably expect a living being to use. Only a robot, it seems to me, starts a paper by saying, "In this essay the author will attempt to prove that. . . ." You are not a robot, though you may feel that some of your earlier experiences in writing pushed you to become one. Fight that influence when you write papers, by writing as if you were talking to a friend or people at a party. If you do, I will enjoy reading your work as much as they would enjoy talking to you.

Good writing also requires that authors be interested in what they write. Robert Frost once said, "No surprises for the author, no surprises for the reader." I think we can apply his remark to the issue of interest. If you do not care about what you write, can you expect me to? I think not. So we must discover how you can locate your interest. The barrier to self-discovery is the censor you (and all of us) have internalized from your earlier schooling. That censor perches like a little bird on your shoulder. When you sit down to write, it chirps, "Your ideas are hopelessly simple-minded; you are wrong to feel anger, confusion, or excitement about the text you are studying; you had better figure out what the right (the professor's) position is on this topic." If you let this censor-bird dictate to you, you will not find out what interests you, and I will be unable to discover you in your papers. Kill the bird! I promise you that I will not report you to the Audubon Society and that your papers will improve.

Pay Attention to Detail while Reading

If you read well, you will write well. Therefore, I want to say a few words here about literary analysis. Good reading is more than summary. I know this sounds obvious, but I also know how long it took me to understand it. So let me explain what I mean by commenting on Emily Dickinson's Poem 130.

These are the days when Birds come back—
A very few—a Bird or two—
To take a backward look.

These are the days when skies resume
The old—old sophistries of June—
A blue and gold mistake.

Oh fraud that cannot cheat the Bee—
Almost the plausibility
Induces my belief.

Till ranks of seeds their witness bear—
And softly thro' the altered air
Hurries a timid leaf.

On Sacrament of summer days,
Oh Last Communion in the Haze—
Permit a child to join.

Thy sacred emblems to partake—
Thy consecrated bread to take
And thine immortal wine!

A bare bones summary of this poem might go something like this: It is autumn; Indian summer has arrived. The weather is so warm that a few birds have put off migrating, perhaps believing that spring has come again. But because there are no flowers, the bees realize it is not spring; because seeds and leaves are falling, the speaker of the poem does not mistake the season either. It is truly autumn, and she asks to join in with whatever is happening in nature.

The first thing to be said of my summary is that while it is more or less useful for the poem's first four stanzas, it in no way does justice to the last two. Only "Haze" in the last two stanzas might have something to do with autumn. Many words, however, involve Christianity. Somehow the poem's speaker has made Indian summer into a religious occasion or experience. Once I see her doing this, I feel the need to return to the poem's first four stanzas. When I look at the language there, I notice an opposition between "sophistries" and "fraud" and "cheat" on the one hand, and "belief" and "witness bear" and "altered" on the other. The speaker is suggesting that if we take nature at face value, it can deceive us-as Satan did Adam and Eve (because they didn't examine his speech closely enough?)-and persuade us that the weather will be forever golden. Looking closely, though, we find evidence that undercuts this conclusion, but this does not lead to despair. Of course, winter will come, but for the time being we have golden Indian summer, and the logical response is something approaching the religious. We should make something holy out of autumn, consecrate it, experience it as we would Communion.

I do not want to suggest that what I have just said about Dickinson's poem is the "right" interpretation, for, indeed, I do not believe in such things. I do, however, believe in well-supported or argued interpretations. As we move beyond summary to what I have called literary analysis, I suggest we pay more attention to the nuances and subtleties of language. Although this is easier to do when we are reading a short poem rather than a long piece of prose, language is equally important in the latter. Students sometimes argue that literary analysis is tantamount to finding the hidden message in a text. I grant that if one doesn't see things, they appear to have been hidden. However, when we pay attention to detail in our reading, the "message" of a text is often quite different from our initial summary. It is not so much a matter of discovering what is hidden as it is extending or redirecting our ability to see. Yet students have a good point-it is not easy to know how to pay attention to detail. Professors have learned how to do so. Hence they generate literary interpretations that dazzle students. Students properly want to know how to find the interpretative rabbit hidden in the textual hat.

Learning to Think like the Author

One way you can learn how to think like the author is by using Edgar Allen Poe's detective as a model. In The Purloined Letter, Dupin attempts to recover a stolen letter before it can be used as an item of blackmail in a political struggle. The police know perfectly well that a Minister of State has the letter but they have been unable to find it despite searching his house thoroughly. Previously, in The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Dupin's success is attributed to his ability to "throw himself into the spirit of his opponent." Ultimately, this is exactly how he finds the stolen letter. Dupin knows that the thief has anticipated a meticulous police search and so did not put the letter where it would be discovered. The thief placed the letter in his letter-rack, concluding correctly that the police would never search for it in such an open spot. By placing himself in the mind of the thief, Dupin figured out where the letter was hidden, recovered it for the police, and solved the case.

Suppose we consider our reading of texts as similar to the search for the purloined letter. If we are unsuccessful as readers, it will most likely be because we, like the police, are so caught up in our own ways of thinking that we cannot imagine anything else. Should this happen, we will fail to see what is out in the open. Instead, we must seek to become like Dupin-to throw ourselves into the spirit of authors so they will not remain hidden from us. Once we can do this, we are on our way to noticing details and successfully analyzing literature.

How Thoreau is Present in Walden

There are two problems, however, with the injunction that we must seek to know the spirit of an author. In the first place, "spirit" is hopelessly vague. Second, even if we agree on what constitutes spirit, the injunction lacks direction. So we must go one step further if we want to be literary analysts and solve these problems. As a way of showing you how to do this, I want to look closely at the first paragraph of Thoreau's Walden. I will examine it as we would if we were seeking to discover the spirit of an author.

Thoreau begins as follows:

When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from my neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in a civilized life again.

Unlike the language of the Dickinson poem I discussed earlier, this plain, ordinary passage calls little attention to itself. Indeed, it reminds me of a later passage in Walden when Thoreau complains that because his house in the woods was so small, there existed "the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words." Thoreau does not believe in dressing things up. What truths emerge from Walden will come to us as directly and as bluntly as his first paragraph. We must be plain and straightforward if we are to be guests in his textual house.

Walden's first paragraph emphasizes the personal, yet Thoreau was not just an individualist, and the following sentence from his last chapter shows why he wasn't: "I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." What interests me about this sentence is that, while it begins in the first person, it very quickly switches to the third. The implication is that what Thoreau learned for himself by going to the woods holds for us all. This does not mean that Thoreau's subjective experience has an objective status so much as that we must all have our subjective experiences if we are to know objective truths. Only by honoring the most personal in us can we discover the impersonal laws of existence. Thoreau, writing out of his own trip to the woods, points the way to truths that hold everywhere.

Let me return to the first sentence of Walden, whose nine commas break it into short, discrete units. Thoreau is suggesting that he does not believe in seamlessness or continuity. Parts are more important than the whole, a conclusion that resonates throughout Walden. At one point Thoreau asks his tailor for a piece of clothing. She tells him, "They do not make them so now." In response, Thoreau says, "When I hear this oracular sentence, I am for a moment absorbed in thought, emphasizing to myself each word separately that I may come at the meaning of it." For the tailor, meaning comes in a sentence-long package, but not for Thoreau. He prefers the irreducible unit and single facts. That is why throughout Walden he tells us such details: He spent 14 cents for hinges and screws and 22 cents for pork; he earned a dollar for selling grass that he mowed. These facts advertise one of Thoreau's basic beliefs: If anything large is to stand, it must be firmly grounded. Sentences have meaning only if each word is carefully considered; experience yields truth only if one pays close attention to hinges and screws, pork, and grass.

That first sentence also seems extraordinarily unhurried. We may pick up the book in a rush, promising ourselves we will read so many pages before bedtime. Then Thoreau slows us down-intentionally. We discover his reason for doing so in a later remark in Walden about building his house in the woods: "I made no haste in my work, but rather made the most if it." Thoreau prefers quality to quantity, and part of what constitutes quality is the ability to know and savor something for what it is. So when we begin Walden, Thoreau forces his ethic upon us with the pace of his first sentence. To read it properly, we must slow down, turn it over and over, see how the whole is composed of its parts. Because we pride ourselves on being speed-readers, slowing down isn't easy. But even Thoreau knew the difficulty of reading slowly and thereby well. "To read well," he argues, "requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object." The suggestion here is that we cannot read in a halfway manner. We must be fully present to what we are reading. Thoreau helps us with this by forcing us to read his first sentence (indeed, all of his book) slowly. The question you will ask is whether it is worth it-whether the rewards will be commensurate with the effort. Thoreau thinks so, for "a written word is the choicest of relics. . . . It is the work of art nearest to life itself." The connection here is between words and living and, by extension, between reading well and living well. Once we have learned to read well, have studied Walden with the same intensity as athletes competing in championship events, we are again ready to be successful sojourners in civilization.

We can read and understand others if we can stand in their shoes and see things from their point of view. Once we do that, we will see which details in their writing count. From these details we can make our literary analyses-the products of good reading. When you apply to them the principles of good writing, which I outlined earlier, you will produce the successful papers you and I want in English 352.

About Your Course Developer, Malcolm Griffith

I am an emeritus associate professor of English at the University of Washington. I received my Ph.D. from Ohio State in 1968. During my graduate studies and since that time, three main areas of study hold my interest: Twentieth Century Literature, Modern Criticism, and American Literature.

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