Lecture 1

Introduction to Classics of American Literature

1. Explain the pitfalls inherent in the very notion of a "classic,"

Harold Bloom, eminent American critic, has argued that the key feature of our canonical books is their uncompromising strangeness. Not only are they strange, but they make the world a stranger place.

We will read key texts from key authors over the past 250 years: Benjamin Franklin, Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James, Stephen Crane, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Ralph Ellison, Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Toni Morrison.

2. Summarize the unique role of literature in revealing human experience.

Events come to us in the shape of human lives. Events appear to us as the dynamics of living people (rather than as data in books for students to memorize). The Salem Witch Trials, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the Gold Rush, the lure of Europe, the Great War of 1914-18, the giddy 20s and the dreary 30s all appear in their impact on lives, as human experience.

Hence, art tells us about human experience, human feelings, in a way that no other discipline approaches. Art revels in subjectivity.

3. Explain the appropriateness of the "journey" metaphor in revisiting American literature.

Whitman's title for one of his poems, "Song of the Open Road," can symbolize the journey that literature has always offered readers. This voyage from book to life, from now to then, here to there, me to you, is often imaged in unforgettable ways in these texts: Whitman who waits for you on the ferry, or on the path; Faulkner's college roommates who "enter" into the Civil War a half century after the fact; and Morrison's living ghost, who reestablishes the broken circulation system of the novel, adumbrates that mysterious mother tongue that unites mothers and daughters over time, leading back to Africa itself and the first slave ships.

Lecture 2 Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography— The First American Story

1. Compare and contrast Franklin's philosophy with that of the Puritan fathers.

Edwards is the last great Puritan: theologian, intellectual, and author of fierce sermons such as Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Franklin, by contrast, is a secular figure: printer/scientist/diplomat/ moralist.

The traditional view is that Edwards looked to the past, whereas Franklin pointed to America's future.

Yet, Franklin has had his own sharp critics. Thinkers of many varieties (e.g., Balzac, D.H. Lawrence, and William Carlos Williams) have thought his brand of optimistic secularism to be shallow.

2. Summarize the ethos of Franklin and explain how it is typically "American".

His early years consisted of establishing himself as printer, then journalist and writer. From 1732 to 1757 he wrote Poor Richard's Almanac, the first American periodical and source of proverbs that is still a bestseller even today.

Franklin's accomplishments in civic and public life are even more striking. A few of his noteworthy contributions include the following: He organized the Union Fire Co. in 1736, became Philadelphia's Postmaster in 1737, proposed the idea for the American Philosophical Society in 1743, organized the Pennsylvania Militia in 1747, and founded the Philadelphia Academy in 1749 (which later became the University of Pennsylvania).

Franklin's exploits in science and technology are equally historic. They include his invention of the Franklin fireplace (stove) in 1741, experiments in electricity in 1745, his assistance in founding Philadelphia Hospital in 1751, and his famous experiment proving that lightning is electricity in 1752.

Hostilities between the colonies and England engaged Franklin from the 1760s through the 1780s, as a representative of Pennsylvania, initially, and, after 1776, as chief negotiator of both the war and the peace. Franklin signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.