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Campus | Bryn Mawr |
Semester | Fall 2021 |
Registration ID | ENGLB204001 |
Course Title | Native Lands, American Lit |
Credit | 1.00 |
Department | Environmental Studies |
Instructor | Schneider,Bethany |
Times and Days | MW 10:10am-11:30am
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Room Location | EHLEC |
Additional Course Info | Class Number: 1321 This course will explore Anglophone narratives by white and Indigenous writers, between the arrival of the British in Jamestown and the Philippine-American War. We will examine narratives of conquest that understand colonial and US expansion across Indigenous lands as “manifest destiny,” and narratives of resistance that understand the same history as imperial conquest and genocide. It took a lot of storytelling, a lot of literary labor, to invent a destiny and to make it manifest on landscapes, peoples and nations. This class asks how certain ingredients of the master-narrative of colonial expansion and the American “wild west” – bloodthirsty, sexually dangerous tribal people, violent white outlaws, hard-working normative white families, empty landscapes, easy money – came to be essential to the American myth. And how were those stories resisted and rewritten even as they were being formed? Ultimately, we will interrogate the so-called “frontier,” exposing it as a vastly diverse network of Native-, African- Asian- and Euro-American peoples whose landscapes were already inhabited, already historied, already multinational. Materials examined may include early Indigenous narratives and anonymous writings by white and Indigenous people, and texts and narratives by John Smith, William Bradford, Mary Rowlandson, Tituba (Carib), Samson Occom (Mohegan), William Appess (Pequot), Lydia Maria Child, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, James Fennimore Cooper, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Ojibwe), Mary Jemison (Seneca), Black Hawk (Sauk), John Rollin Ridge (Cherokee), Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (Paiute), Wovoka (Paiute), Stephen Crane, Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain. Approach: Critical Interpretation (CI); Enrollment Cap: 25; Freshmen Spaces: 5; If the course exceeds the enrollment cap the following criteria will be used for the lottery: Other |
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