Reading List (American)

Types of reading

Symptomatic Reading: A way of looking at a text to find what it is "hiding" or what it cannot say because of the author's prejudices or the time they lived in. It looks for "blind spots."

• Example 1: Analyzing a colonial text to see how it ignores the perspectives of indigenous people.

• Example 2: Using Marxist theory to see how a story hides the reality of class struggle.

Surface Reading: Looking at exactly what is written on the page without trying to find a "hidden" or "deep" meaning. It values the literal story and how the book makes the reader feel.

• Example 1: Describing the physical beauty of a poem's rhythm.

• Example 2: Focusing on the plot and characters as they are presented, rather than as symbols.

Paranoid Reading: A "suspicious" way of reading where the reader assumes the text is trying to trick them or hide power structures, like racism or sexism.

• Example: Reading a 19th-century novel specifically to expose how it supports patriarchy.

Reparative Reading: A way of reading that looks for hope, beauty, or positive meaning in a text, even if that text comes from a difficult or oppressive history.

• Example: Finding moments of joy and resistance in a slave narrative.

Colonial Period & Puritanism (1600s – 1750s)

Puritanism: A strict religious movement that wanted to "purify" the church. They believed in hard work, simple living, and that God had a specific plan for everyone.

• Example 1: William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation.

• Example 2: John Winthrop’s sermons about how the community must act.

Covenant Theology: The belief that God has a "contract" with his people. If the people follow God’s laws, He will protect and bless them; if they fail, He will punish them.

• Example 1: The legal-religious agreements described in Of Plymouth Plantation.

• Example 2: John Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity, which treats the colony as a group bound by a contract with God.

City upon a Hill: The idea that the American colony should be a perfect example of a Christian society that the rest of the world looks up to.

• Example: The famous metaphor used by John Winthrop in his 1630 sermon.

Providence: The belief that everything that happens—good or bad—is caused directly by God for a reason.

• Example 1: Mary Rowlandson believing her survival during her kidnapping was God’s will.

• Example 2: Anne Bradstreet viewing the burning of her house as a reminder from God to value heaven over earthly things.

Predestination: The religious idea that God has already decided, before you are even born, whether you are going to heaven or hell, and you cannot change it.

• Example: The constant self-searching for "signs of grace" in Puritan diaries.

Captivity Narrative: A popular type of story where a colonist is captured by "enemies" (usually Native Americans), suffers, and is eventually rescued, usually viewing the whole thing as a test of their faith.

• Example: The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.

Puritan Plain Style: Writing that is simple, direct, and avoids fancy words or complex metaphors. It was meant to be easy for everyone to understand.

• Example 1: The straightforward, factual journals of William Bradford.

• Example 2: The clear, instructional writing of John Smith.

Jeremiad: A type of writing or speech that complains about how society is becoming immoral and warns that big trouble is coming unless people change their ways.

• Example 1: Jonathan Edwards’s sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.

• Example 2: John Winthrop’s warnings to the colonists about what happens if they fail God.

The Enlightenment & Revolutionary Period (1750s – 1800)

Enlightenment: A time when people started prioritizing science, logic, and human reason over religious tradition.

• Example 1: Thomas Paine’s logical arguments for why America should be free.

• Example 2: Benjamin Franklin’s focus on self-improvement and scientific observation.

Natural Rights: The belief that all people are born with certain rights (like freedom and life) that no government is allowed to take away.

• Example: The arguments for independence in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.

Republicanism: The idea that a country should be a republic where the people hold the power, rather than being ruled by a king.

• Example: The rejection of monarchy in the political pamphlets of the 1770s.

American Exceptionalism: The belief that the United States is unique and better than other nations because of its specific history and mission to spread liberty.

• Example: J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s description of the "new" American man.

Neoclassicism: A style of writing that tries to copy the balance and order of ancient Greek and Roman literature.

• Example 1: The formal, structured poetry of Phillis Wheatley.

Early Republic & Romanticism (1800 – 1860s)

American Adam: The idea of the "new American" as an innocent, fresh start—someone who isn't weighed down by the old, corrupt history of Europe.

• Example 1: The character Natty Bumppo in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers.

• Example 2: Benjamin Franklin's "self-made" persona in his autobiography.

The Sublime: A feeling of being completely overwhelmed by the power and scale of nature, feeling both terrified and amazed at the same time.

• Example 1: Descriptions of the vast, wild forests in Cooper’s novels.

Transcendentalism: A movement that believed people should trust their own intuition and feelings more than organized religion or political parties. They believed God exists within nature and within every person.

• Example 1: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays on self-reliance.

• Example 2: Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.

Dark Romanticism: A darker version of Romanticism that focuses on the "evil" side of humans, including guilt, sin, and madness.

• Example 1: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s "Young Goodman Brown," where a man sees evil everywhere.

• Example 2: Edgar Allan Poe’s stories of psychological breakdown.

Gothic: A style of writing full of gloom, creepy old buildings, mystery, and the supernatural.

• Example: The spooky atmosphere and "haunted" feelings in Edgar Allan Poe’s work.

Slave Narrative: An autobiographical account written by an enslaved person documenting their life, the horrors of slavery, and their escape to freedom.

• Example 1: The life story of Frederick Douglass.

• Example 2: Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

Realism & Naturalism (1865 – 1914)

Realism: A style of writing that tries to show life exactly as it is, focusing on ordinary people and everyday problems without making them sound "romantic" or "heroic."

• Example 1: Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which uses real-sounding dialects.

• Example 2: William Dean Howells's stories about middle-class life.

Regionalism (Local Color): Writing that focuses on a specific part of the country, using the local speech, customs, and landscapes of that specific place.

• Example 1: Kate Chopin’s stories set in the Louisiana bayou.

• Example 2: The specific Missouri setting and language in Huckleberry Finn.

Naturalism: A more extreme version of realism that suggests humans are just like animals, controlled by their instincts, their environment, and their DNA, with very little "free will."

• Example 1: Stephen Crane’s "The Open Boat," where the characters are at the mercy of the ocean.

• Example 2: Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, where the city of Chicago shapes the characters' fates.

Determinism: The belief that a person's life is already mapped out for them by social forces or biology, and they can't really change their destiny.

• Example: The characters in Sister Carrie who are driven by hunger and money rather than moral choices.

Double Consciousness: The feeling that Black Americans have of always looking at themselves through the eyes of a white society that hates or pities them.

• Example: W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk.

Muckraking: Investigative writing that exposes corruption in business and government or terrible living conditions to try and fix society.

• Example: Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which exposed the disgusting conditions in the meat industry.

Modernism & Postmodernism (1914 – Present)

American Dream: The idea that through hard work, anyone can achieve financial success and a happy life. In literature, this is often shown as a failure or a lie.

• Example 1: The tragic failure of the salesman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

• Example 2: The struggle of the immigrant family in The Jungle.

High Modernism: A difficult, experimental style of writing from the early 1900s that uses "stream of consciousness" and breaks stories into pieces to show how confusing the modern world is.

• Example: The complex poetry of T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound.

Jazz Aesthetic: Writing that uses the rhythms, improvisation, and "feeling" of jazz music.

• Example 1: Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem "Facing It," which uses rhythmic, shifting impressions.

• Example 2: Jack Kerouac’s "Spontaneous Prose" style in On the Road.

Metafiction: A type of fiction that talks about the fact that it is a story. It breaks the "fourth wall" and reminds the reader that the book is just a made-up object.

• Example 1: John Barth’s "Title," where the narrator discusses how to write a story while he is writing it.

Intersectionality: The idea that different parts of a person's identity (like their race, their gender, and their class) all overlap and affect how they experience the world.

• Example 1: June Jordan’s "Poem About My Rights," which links being a woman with being Black and being part of the "Third World."

Example/old Questions: What is literary History? Why are constant revisions important?

Definition: a narrative that explains significant connections between literary works. Its goal is to place individual authors and works into the context of broader trends, conventions, and literary cultures.

Mapping Shifts: It seeks to map changes in linguistic characteristics, formalistic tendencies, and thematic concerns over time.

Broader Contexts: It considers cultural, economic, social, technological, and political contexts that influence why certain works were written or why certain authors gained popularity.

Culture:

• ideal: state of human perfection in terms of certain universal values

• documentary: body of intellectual and imaginative work, in which human thought and experience are recorded

• social: particular way of life which express certain meanings and values not only in art but also ordinary behaviour

Incompleteness: Literary history is always considered incomplete because the subject is too complex and constantly evolving.

Literary history is instrumental in the "nationalist project" by imagining and recording a national literature.

"Nation-in-the-Making": American literary history specifically views the US as a nation-in-the-making, tracing developments from the 17th century to the present.

Indigenous Inclusion: A major shift in modern literary history is the recognition that Indigenous American literature is not peripheral but foundational, challenging the idea that American literary history starts with European settlers.

Example/old Questions: What do you understand by this statement? Discuss (Today we are all literary historians)

This statement suggests that every reader, not just professional scholars, now participates in interpreting, shaping, and preserving literary history.

• Historical Awareness: Contemporary readers approach texts as products of specific social and political contexts rather than isolated works.

• Active Reinterpretation: By using lenses such as gender, race, class, or colonialism, readers actively reshape how past works are understood.

• Redefining Importance: Students and readers take part in redefining "important" literature by choosing which texts to read, cite, or value.

• Media and Education: Online archives and public criticism allow non-specialists to influence literary discourse, moving interpretation from academia into classrooms and book clubs.

And: Literary History as an "Ever-Changing Laboratory"

• Dynamic Process: It is described as a process of experimentation and interpretation rather than a fixed record of biographies or publication dates.

• Constant Recontextualization: Texts are continuously reread and reinterpreted as each generation brings new theories and historical experiences to older works.

• Shifting Meaning: The significance of a text can shift; for example, a work once read for moral instruction might later be examined for its ideological tensions regarding race or gender.

• Intellectual Practice: Studying literary history is an active intellectual practice where students test interpretations and challenge the existing canon.

Example/old Questions: What do you understand about this statement? Literary history is not just about biographies, chronicles or editions, it is also an ever-changing laboratory—for literature and for its students.

Literary history is not just a list of writers, dates, and books. It is a story we keep re-telling about how texts were written, read, and valued at different times. Because every generation asks new questions and uses new methods, literary history is like a changing laboratory where we keep testing new ideas about literature.

• Dynamic Process: It is described as a process of experimentation and interpretation rather than a fixed record of biographies or publication dates.

• Constant Recontextualization: Texts are continuously reread and reinterpreted as each generation brings new theories and historical experiences to older works.

• Shifting Meaning: The significance of a text can shift; for example, a work once read for moral instruction might later be examined for its ideological tensions regarding race or gender.

• Intellectual Practice: Studying literary history is an active intellectual practice where students test interpretations and challenge the existing canon.

Example/old Questions: What is the most American period in your opinion?

Example/old Questions: How is Huckleberry Finn typical for Realism?

Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is typical for Realism because it rejects romanticized heroics to show life exactly as it is through the use of vernacular language and regional dialects. The novel employs the "innocent eye" of its young protagonist to expose the moral failures and social hypocrisies of the American South, particularly concerning the institutionalization of slavery. By focusing on ordinary characters and everyday ethical dilemmas, Twain fulfills the Realist objective of providing a truthful, often satirical, representation of contemporary society.

Example/old Questions: What effect did World War II and Postwar literature have on the American dream?

Postwar literature frequently depicts the American Dream as a source of suffering, a lie, or a tragic failure rather than an achievable promise of success. In the aftermath of World War II, authors began to explore how the dream's focus on material prosperity and social conformity led to alienation and the commodification of the self, as seen in the psychological collapse of Willy Loman. This period also highlighted that the dream was often inaccessible to marginalized groups, shifting the narrative toward exposing racial invisibility and systemic exclusion.

Example/old Questions: How is Sylvia Plaths "Daddy" typical for Confessionalism?

Sylvia Plath’s "Daddy" is typical for Confessionalism because it utilizes intense, autobiographical detail to address private trauma and the breakdown of the boundary between the speaker's personal life and public art. The poem engages with controversial and taboo themes such as domestic suffering and mental illness, turning the speaker's psychological agony into an articulate and necessary public discourse. This movement is defined by its emotional honesty and the willingness to explore the "evil" side of human experience, including guilt and the haunting presence of the past.

Example/old Questions: What about Margaret Fuller and her works can be seen as Transcendentalism?

Margaret Fuller’s writings embody Transcendentalism by applying its core principles of self-culture and intuition to the specific context of women’s intellectual and spiritual autonomy.

Like other Transcendentalists, she believed that the divine spark resides within every person and advocated for the removal of social and legal barriers that prevented individuals from trusting their own inner light.

Her insistence that every soul should be allowed to reach its full potential mirrors Emerson’s call for self-reliance and the rejection of rigid, inherited social structures.

Fuller extends this idea to challenge the Victorian ideology of Separate Spheres: She argued that women are full human beings whose souls must not be restricted to domestic passivity, insisting that every individual (regardless of gender) must be allowed to trust their inner light and achieve full self-realization.

She also linked idealism with active political reform, interweaving her critique of patriarchy with the abolition of slavery and anti-racism

Example/old Questions: Do you consider Benjamin Franklin as an example of the “American Adam”?

Yes, I consider Benjamin Franklin as an early example of the American Adam, because the American Adam represents the archetype of the "new American".

An American Adam is an innocent, self-reliant individual, who is free from the burdens of corrupt history, social hierarchies, and old traditions of Europe (the "Old World") and always on the search for a better life and thus able to get a fresh start in the American “New World”.

Benjamin Franklin’s notion of hard work and constant self-improvement has connections with the notion of the American Adam. He presents himself as a hard worker rising from obscure origins through self-discipline and moral self-improvement to become the quintessential “Self-Made Man”.

He is also the one that argues that the unique thing about America in contrast to Europe is that “people do not inquire concerning a Stranger, What is he? But, What can he do?” → it is more important what a person can do than who he is. And that ·       anyone with “any useful Art” is welcome. → If you are ready to work you are welcome

The concept of a Nation

1. Ernest Renan – “What is a Nation?” (1882)

A nation is:

• A shared past (collective memory)

• Present consent (will to live together)

• Nation = spiritual principle.

2. Benedict Anderson – Imagined Communities (1991)

Nation:

• Imagined political community

• Limited and sovereign

• Culturally constructed

• Emotionally powerful

• Key insight: Nations are not natural — they are narrated.

3. Homi Bhabha – “DissemiNation”

Nation is produced through:

• Narrative performance

• Repetition

• Pedagogical storytelling

• Literary history itself helps produce the nation.

4. Critique of American Exceptionalism

Late 20th-century American Studies:

• Critiques Cold War nationalism

• Questions celebratory exceptionalism

John Carlos Rowe

5. Empire and Transnationalism – Amy Kaplan

Key problem:

• If empire is transnational, What does it mean to critique nationalism? Raises tension between:

  • Nation-state critique

  • U.S. imperial power

Early contact: Oral Tradition
What characterizes the “oral tradition” among Indigenous Nations? How did Indigenous literature respond to “settler colonialism”?

Storytelling, performance (ceremony, ritual dance)

• Knowledge-keeping

• Re-telling, remembering

• Themes:

  • Creation of the world

  • Appearance of first people

  • Place of humans in the universe

  • Gods and heoes

  • Imaginative possibilities and lived truths

Effects of Settler Colonialism on Literature:

• Demise of storyteller population

• Loss of languages

• Oral traditions preserved despite loss

• Written forms emerged (e.g., Cherokee syllabary, 1810s–1820s)

• Writing AGAINST settler colonialism

Indigenous Americans depend on oral traditions like for example storytelling or performances like a ritual dance. It was about that they could re-tell their stories to remember the languages and spoken words. An example was the Winter Count – a visual and oral historical record of a communities important events (one symbol per year) – helping Indigenous Americans remember their history across generations. They responded to Settler colonialism by writing against the settler colonialism with the Cherokee syllabary to keep track what has been lost and learning English to understand what has been written in the treaties.

Important Events in the Period of the Early contact

Indian Removal: A 19th-century U.S. federal policy aimed at relocating Indigenous nations from their ancestral lands in the Southeast to territories west of the Mississippi River.

Manifest Destiny: The 19th-century ideology that the United States was divinely destined to expand westward; often used to justify territorial conquest, displacement, and violence against Native Americans.

Trail of Tears: The forced relocation (1830s) of five major Southeastern tribes—Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw—to present-day Oklahoma; marked by extreme suffering and high mortality.

Appropriation Bill: A legislative act that allocates government funding; in the context of Native American policy, it often funded relocation programs and administrative control over tribes.

Indian Appropriations Act: A series of U.S. laws regulating Native American affairs; the 1871 act ended recognition of tribes as independent sovereign nations and reclassified them as wards of the federal government.

Wounded Knee Massacre: The 1890 killing of approximately 300 Lakota (mostly women and children) by the U.S. Army in South Dakota; widely regarded as the symbolic end of armed Native resistance in the 19th century.

Indian Termination Policy: A mid-20th-century federal policy (1940s–1960s) aimed at dissolving tribal governments, ending federal recognition, and assimilating Native Americans into mainstream society; resulted in the dissolution of over 100 tribes.

Indian Civil Rights Act (1968): U.S. federal law granting many protections similar to those in the Bill of Rights to individuals within tribal jurisdictions, while still recognizing limited tribal sovereignty.

Example/old Questions: Consider this statement and discuss: Indigenous American Literature IS American Literature

This statement is true! It challenges the idea that American literature really only began with European settlement and that Indigenous stories and songs are but a footnote in this history. But indigenous peoples were telling stories, composing songs, and preserving histories long before the United States existed. Their traditions are foundational to the literature of the Americas

Certain themes are more relevant to many Indigenous American writers such as the climate crisis – activism through literature (literature as a form of protest) As well as Indigenous American stories as unending connections to past, present, and future.

Main themes:

• Genocide

• Forced removal

• Colonization

• Forced assimilation

• Ongoing racial violence

• Reservation life

• Myths + history + tradition

• Indigenous cosmology

• Relationship between nature and belief

• Present-ness of the past

• Colonial violence persists today

Example/old Questions: What is a Narrative and what does it mean?

A narrative is a story or account of connected events. It can be true or invented and is told in a certain order, from a certain point of view, to give those events meaning. In literary studies, “narrative” often also means the way a story is told: what is included, what is left out, and how it is arranged.

Example/Old Question: How did Puritans understand the New World? How was this understanding reflected in the literature of the colonial period?

In general, Puritan belief was marred by the doctrines of original sin and divine election.

Puritans believed the New World was a place given by God where they had to build a model Christian community, as John Winthrop writes in A Modell of Christian Charity when he calls their colony a “city upon a hill.” They were a role model for all other people. AMERICA was seen as the re-birth and earthly re-incarnation of “Eden; an unfinished project / a mission of turning “wilderness” into a “civilization” of highest form

They thought everything that happened there, good harvests, disease, war, were messages from God, and writers like William Bradford interpreted such events as signs of God’s favour or anger. Divine Providence was very present and important. And this was relayed to people in form of sermons, prayer, and religious tracts.

Furthermore, in journals, and captivity stories such as Mary Rowlandson’s Narrative, they described the land as a testing ground for believers and presented their daily struggles as part of God’s larger plan.

Example/Old Question: What are some of the ways in which Puritanism got contested and debated in the literature of the colonial period?

For the Puritans writing and reading was only for religious purposes. Imagination was frowned upon as devil’s workshop. And there is a difference in things that should be sung at church or at home. Like a Psalm or children’s literature with which they not only learned to read but also how to live a good religious life. To put it short: Puritanism dictated “a climate of expectations”.

Writers in the colonial period sometimes pushed back against these strict Puritan ideas.

While leaders like John Winthrop envisioned New England as a harmonious "city upon a hill" under God's covenant, texts like Mary Rowlandson's Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration (1682) exposed the terrifying, precarious reality of frontier conflict, revealing the deep anxieties underlying Puritan settlement. It breaks with these narratives and thus creates a contradiction between white Puritan beliefs & actual lived experiences (the promised land is not as save as it was meant to be). However, her story of abduction still fits within these Puritan parametors of the good vs. the evil. The civilisation vs. the wilderness. The events are interpreted as a test of faith, hope for (spiritual) salvation, and her survival as proof of her “election”.

But what I would mainly argue can be adressded as a contest of these ideas are Anne Bradstreet’s poems. These showcase that even the pius people of this time were not free from doubts & inner/public tensions. Her poems, for example, praise love and women’s value in ways that go beyond typical Puritan expectations for women. It was the Puritan logic versus the emotions (married life and raising children vs. her public life as a poet). She challanged expectations for women with lines such as “I am obnoxious to each carping tongue - Who says my hand a needle better fits.” with which she defends her right to write against critics who claim a needle and domestic work suit a woman better than a pen. Allthough she could not fully break the shackeles of her time and on the surface performes modesty (what is expected of a Puritan woman) (Men can do best, and Women know it well. Preeminence in all and each is yours; Yet grant some small acknowledgement of ours.), but despite that she took a step in favour of challaning Puritan ideas.

Other writers, like Roger Williams, argued that people should be free to choose their own religion, not be forced by church leaders or the government, so they openly questioned Puritan power.

Example/Old Question: What were some of the main defining features of the “Revolutionary Period”?

The Revolutionary Period in the US usually means the years around 1765–1783, when the colonies broke with Britain and formed an independent nation. People argued fiercely about taxes, rights, and political power, using Enlightenment ideas like liberty, natural rights, and government by consent to justify independence. The main writings of the time are speeches, and political documents which use clear language.

For example Thomas Paine’s Common Sense a short, plain-spoken pamphlet that argued forcefully for immediate American independence, attacking hereditary monarchy, arguments for Britain as the parent country, and articulating republican principles. Paine combines accessible rhetoric, biblical allusion, and pragmatic analogies to mobilize ordinary colonists. (asks for example why Britain is seen as the parent country when the colonists are from all over Europe (Africa is not mentioned here); also: puts advantages and disatvantages of being connected to Britain (in his mind) against eachother)

And the other example would of course be the Declaration of Independence

Example/Old Question: How did core Enlightenment values change in the US context?

Puritanism is losing it’s grip and other trends are taking hold such as the Enlightenment. Enlightenment steps away from core Puritan concepts and it focused on both individual and communal concerns.

And in this context we can also look at Benjamin Franklin’s thought of hard work and discipline’s ability to increase one’s chance at becoming rich (essentially the American Dream). Core enlightenment values like reason, natural rights, and liberty were turned into concrete political demands: colonists claimed that legitimate government must rest on the consent of the governed and protect individual rights.

However, at the same time, these supposedly universal values were applied selectively, mainly to white men, so slavery, Native dispossession, and women’s exclusion existed alongside strong rhetoric about equality and freedom, creating tensions that later reform movements tried to resolve using the same Enlightenment language.

Example/Old Question: What do we understand by Benjamin Franklin’s “self-made man” and how is the notion reflected in his own life and writing?

Acoarding to his Autobiography, he defined for himself what it took for him to achieve his dream. And thorugh his dicipline and hard work he claimed have achieved it. By age of 42 he “the self-made man”was rich enough to retire from work.

He argued that it was only possible through this dicipline. That one should seek “moral perfection” through practicing 13 virtues such as silece, order und resolution.

He proposed that with the help of a weekly turn-taking chart to practice these virtues and avoid faults [ 13 weeks, 4 courses per year ] → other people should follow this =  a more virtuous and productive way of life.

The self-made man is also known as the hero of America imagination conquering the unknown, he put a lot of focus on self-help and self-resilience. He comes from an obscure background himself and said if it worked for me it will work for you! A person who rises from humble beginnings through hard work, discipline, and self-education, instead of relying on family wealth or status. He turns his own life into a model, offering maxims and a program of 13 virtues to show others how to “make” themselves by cultivating good habits and character. By narrating his “low and humble origins” and later success, he helps create the American myth that anyone can advance through personal effort, making his life story one of the classic templates of the self-made man.

Example/Old Question: What in your view makes Franklin’s chart relevant to our discussion of American literary history?

Franklin’s chart is relevant because it turns big Enlightenment ideas about self-improvement and rational control of the self into a concrete, visual “technology” of the everyday, and that is central to American literary history. Not only talks about conceps but offers a tool for everyone to use and which seams easy to use.

The chart illustrates a shift in emphasis from dependence on divine grace toward the Enlightenment ideal of human improvement.

Example/Old Question: Discuss the significance of The Declaration of Independence as a founding document for the New Nation

• serves to formally sever the ties to Britain as well as the blueprint for the the emerging American republic

• the document transposed Enlightenment philosophies of natural rights and social contract theory into a public political declaration:

  • It declares that all people have inalienable rights (“all men are created equal”),

• that governments exist to secure those rights,

• and that a people may overthrow a government that betrays them.

• As a founding document, it formally breaks the colonies’ legal tie to Britain and asserts them to be “free and independent States,”

• while also providing a lasting language of equality and rights that later generations (abolitionists, women’s rights activists, civil rights movements) use to judge and reform the United States itself.

• It was drafted by wealthy, racist white men and was an exclusion for minorities “All men are created equal”

  • they believed in repatriation: racial tension called for physical distance between whites and blacks → people of African descent are inferior in terms of arts and intellect, so they ought to go elsewhere → to avoid “mixing” the races, which they found most disturbing and undesirable

Example/Old Question: How did “Letters from an American Farmer reflect the struggles and the mostly white dreams of the early national period?

Written through the persona of the fictional Quaker farmer James, the text formulates the archetype of the American Adam.

It reflects the mostly white dreams of the early national period by celebrating America as a land where poor Europeans can leave ancient Old World prejudices behind, become free, independent farmers and “new men.” → a regenerated “eden”. → of all these nationalities here “Americans” have arisen.

Crèvecœur portrays America as "the most perfect society now existing in the world," built by free individuals turning wild land into productive farms through industry and self-reliance.

But this optimistic tone breaks as it also reflects the period’s struggles by showing slavery and frontier violence, revealing how those white dreams depended directly on and ignored the violent exploitation and suffering of the enslaved. → this mockes the nation's high-minded Enlightenment claims of universal liberty.

→ It also ties this to the trauma of the Revolutionary era, showing how civil conflict between Loyalists and Patriots, and how that too destroyed the idyllic promise of peaceful farming communities.

Example/Old Question: What are the main features of enlightenment? Which person was really important for promoting these ideas?

the American Enlightenment marked a major cultural transition away from Puritan providential theology and toward secular reason, political persuasion, and nation-building

Main Features of the Enlightenment

• Natural Rights: all individuals are born with inherent rights that no government can legitimately take away → declaration of independence

• Republicanism: The idea that a country should be a republic where the people hold the power, rather than being ruled by a king. → Letters from an American Farmer; a political pamphlet

• Secular Self-Improvement and Rational Planning: A shift from seeking spiritual salvation to actively constructing the self through moral discipline, practical habit, and civic utility → the self-made-man → Benjamin Franklin

Example/Old Question: Dark Romanticism: What was characteristic of it and do you know an author?

(often associated with the American Gothic) emerged during the Early Republic and Romanticism period (1830s–1860s) as a direct counter-response to the optimistic, individualistic claims of Transcendentalism

Rather than viewing nature as a harmonious divine order or humanity as inherently good, Dark Romanticism explored the "shadow side" of human nature, focusing on human fallibility, sin, guilt, and moral hypocrisy

Edgar Allan Poe, → In "The Tell-Tale Heart", Poe uses an unreliable narrator whose feverish confession reveals how terror and guilt stem from within the human mind itself rather than external supernatural forces

Nathaniel Hawthorne, → In "Young Goodman Brown", the forest becomes a moral wilderness where a man witnesses the hidden wickedness of his community, returning home permanently distrustful and spiritually damaged

Herman Melville → In "Bartleby, the Scrivener", Melville presents a dark meditation on urban alienation and the emotional emptiness produced by modern industrial capitalism

Trancendentalism: What was characteristic of it and do you know an author?

• It emerged as a reaction against Enlightenment rationalism, institutional religion (Puritan/Unitarian traditions), and industrial materialism.

• It sought to establish a distinct American cultural identity based on intuition, spiritual self-reliance, and direct communion with nature

• The Over-Soul: Transcendentalists believed that a unifying divine spirit (the Over-Soul) connects all living things and resides directly within nature and every human soul

• Self-Reliance: As articulated by Ralph Waldo Emerson, individuals must trust their own inner light, intuition, and "emancipated self" rather than conforming to social dictates, established churches, or inherited traditions

• The "Transparent Eyeball": Nature is not merely a physical resource, but a visible manifestation of an invisible divine order → in Nature, Emerson famously describes the mystical experience of becoming a "transparent eyeball" in the woods → where ego vanishes, and the individual becomes a "particle of God," seeing and absorbing universal truth

• Rejection of the Past & Cultural Independence: Transcendentalism urged Americans to reject European models and "retrospective" dependence on past authority in favor of an original relationship with the universe

How does Washington Irving’s “Rip van Winkle” tie in with the Early Repubican Period?

It fits by using folklore, humor, and nostalgia to process the rapid political and cultural transformations of the Early Republic. It portrays the individual trauma and identity crisis and through that how the national alteration lead to disorientation. It explores both individual and collective nervousness over hitherto unknown social/political orders & emerging myths.

On a political level, the story functions as an historical allegory of the American Revolution: Rip’s twenty-year sleep in the Catskill Mountains represents a peaceful withdrawal from civic turmoil, waking up to find his monarchist village transformed into an unfamiliar, hyper-politicized republic

Characters who previously swore allegiance to King George III now pledge loyalty to George Washington, highlighting national disorientation and the mythic nature of rapid political change

Anti-Franklin-Type: In contrast to Benjamin Franklin’s Enlightenment model of the industrious, orderly Self-Made Man, Rip avoids profitable labor, domestic responsibility, and civic duty

Lacking centuries of Old World history, early American writers struggled to create a distinct national literature. In this setting the story by converting local geography into a mythic American landscape achieves to give the young nation a sense of legend and heritage.

American Romanticism: What was characteristic of it and do you know an author?

Seeking to construct an independent cultural identity separate from European models, American Romanticism turned to the vast American wilderness as a source of aesthetic, moral, and spiritual revelation

ather than prioritizing cold logic, it championed emotion, individual intuition, the sublime power of nature, and the autonomy of the human self

can be divided into Trancendentalism and Dark Romanticism

Key authors from this era include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville

Frontier Romance: James Fenimore Cooper and his “Pioneers”

• Letherstocking tale

• Americanized the historical novel and forged lasting national "Western myths" → important for a nation looking for these myths to form a foundation similar to the strong old one of the old world → also in this category: Rip van Winkle

• Set in 1793 in the frontier town of Templeton, New York, the novel stages the central Romantic conflict between expanding white settlement and the pristine wilderness → This tension is dramatized through two opposing figures: Judge Temple, who represents civil law, property rights, and technological "progress," and Natty Bumppo (Leatherstocking), who embodies natural virtue, individual freedom, and reverence for nature (prototype American Adam: self-reliant, an American hero with no remarkable past (ancestry or heritage) and no lasting sense of belonging in the present (home, friends, or community), who gravitates toward “natural wisdom” & away from formal education & refinement, who is always on the move, away from a lowly past into a glorious future

• Conflict between law and freedom

• The question whether America is an “Eden” or a “Wilderness” (if there are natural barriers is this realy the eden it was made out to be?)

• The question whether the so-called “Indians” are “Noble Savages” or “”Devilish Imps”

White stereotypes imposed on Indigenous peoples in the Early Republic and Romanticism Period?

The notion of the “Noble Savage”

• was built on the white assumption: “cultural primitiveness” + “natural innocence”

The notion of the “Ignoble Savage”

• was built on the white assumption: “intrinsically wild” + “incurably evil”

The notion of the “Vanishing Indian”

• Was built on the white assumption: the inevitability of Native populations’ disappearance +nostalgia about it ß cultural (through assimilation) + demographic (through Western diseases / mass slaughter)

Example:

James Fenimore Cooper’s “The Pioneers”

In it, the character of the Mahocan friend of the Judge embodies this vanishing presence

Example for the earlier more dominant ignoble savage: Puritan Captivity Narratives like the one from Mary Rowlandson about her own captivity

What was the 'American Epic,' why did early national poets attempt it, and how did its form evolve from the Early Republic to the American Renaissance?

The American Epic refers to ambitious literary attempts during the Early Republic and Early National Period (late 18th to early 19th century) to create a distinct national mythology and immortalize the young nation's political project.

Driven by intense literary nationalism and a desire to break away from derivative European/English traditions, early American poets sought to construct a national epic comparable to ancient Rome's Aeneid to foster patriotic unity and celebrate the spread of republican civilization.

The most famous early attempt was Joel Barlow’s The Columbiad (1807), which projected a future vision of American progress, peace, and the global extension of federal democracy

However, early national epics largely failed as classical epics because they lacked a single heroic figure engaged in traditional martial action, effectively positioning the nation of "America" itself as the hero

Compare how Black suffering and identity are represented in 19th-century white-authored abolitionist fiction (such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin) versus Black-authored slave narratives and literature (such as Frederick Douglass's Narrative and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents ). How do Black authors shift the narrative from white sympathy to Black agency, literacy, and self-definition?

White Abolitionists’ Literature and Sendimentalism:

Uncle Tom’s Cabin exemplifies 19th-century white-authored abolitionist fiction, deploying sentimentalism to expose slavery's moral and domestic destruction by appealing to white middle-class empathy. The suffering recieves a voice and attention. However, critiques note that such works often operate through "racial ventriloquism," where a white author writes for Black characters, reducing Black suffering to a tragic, "safe" spectacle designed to elicit white tears and moral catharsis.

Slave Narratives and Self-representation:

In contrast, antebellum slave narratives written by formerly enslaved Black authors, such as Frederick Douglass's Narrative (1845) and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1860), reclaim narrative authority through firsthand testimony, literacy, and active self-emancipation. Douglass reframes the myth of the American Adam: true self-making is demonstrated not by white merchants, but by the Black fugitive who achieves physical and spiritual freedom through discipline and resistance.

How is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 'The Yellow Wallpaper' (1892) typical of late 19th-century Feminist Gothic Realism, and how does it critique the 'rest cure' and the ideology of 'Separate Spheres'?

• it exposes the violence of late 19th-century patriarchal medicine and gender ideology

• Confined to an upstairs nursery by her physician husband, John, under the mandatory "rest cure" for a "nervous condition," the narrator is denied intellectual activity, creative writing, and autonomy

• Through a secret, journal-like first-person narration and an increasingly unreliable narrator, Gilman uses symbols of domestic imprisonment to dramatize how the Victorian logic of Separate Spheres → which enforced female passivity in the private domestic realm → and how it destroys women's mental sanity

• As the narrator becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper, her perception of a trapped woman creeping behind its pattern reflects her own psychological entrapment

• Her final mental breakdown and literal crawling over her fainted husband mark a tragic, ambiguous refusal of patriarchal control despite her state

Reconstruction: What was characteristic of it and do you know an author?
Naturalism:
Realism:
Regionalism:

The Reconstruction Era (1865–1877).

• post Civil War

• shattered Romantic optimism and Transcendentalist idealism

• replacing them with post-bellum cynicism and a demand for un-romantic, objective representations of American life

• Literary production during this era shifted decisively toward Realism, Regionalism, and early Naturalism to capture the rapid social, industrial, and economic transformations of the nation

• Slavery officially ended but: Jim Crow laws

Regionalism: Huckleberry Finn, desiree's Baby

Realism: The Jungle, the yellow wallpaper, desiree's Baby

Naturalism: The Jungle, the yellow wallpaper, desiree's Baby

Example/Old Question: Modernism and Harlem Renaissance: How were they different/similar?

Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance both sought new ways to represent twentieth-century life, but they differed in scope and historical focus. Modernism was a broad international movement, while the Harlem Renaissance was a flowering of African American literature and culture, especially during the 1920s and 1930s.

Both explored modern identity, urban life, alienation, and changing social conditions. They also experimented with literary conventions. Modernist writers often used fragmentation, shifting perspectives, and free verse. Harlem Renaissance writers contributed to this experimentation by drawing on Black vernacular speech, jazz, blues, and oral traditions. For example, Langston Hughes made Black musical forms central to his poetry.

The main difference was that the Harlem Renaissance specifically addressed racism, Black identity, and cultural self-definition. Whereas many prominent modernists questioned inherited Western values, Harlem Renaissance writers also asserted the value of Black traditions that dominant culture had excluded.

Examples for Modernism:

T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land or Ernest Hemingway: Hills like White Elephants

Examples for Harlem Renaissance:

Langston Hughes: I, too

Example/Old Question: How did E. E. Cummings experiment with form? Do you know one of his works? How did the topic of war influence his writing?

E. E. Cummings experimented with the visual appearance and grammar of poetry. He used unusual spacing, broken words, unexpected capitalization, and unconventional punctuation. → These techniques make readers actively construct meaning, while the arrangement of words can reinforce the poem’s subject.

In ‘my sweet old etcetera,’ he contrasts a soldier’s experience with his family’s patriotic enthusiasm. His relatives talk about glory and support the war effort, while the soldier lies in the mud and dreams of his lover. → The repeated ‘etcetera’ makes patriotic statements sound predictable and empty. At the end, however, it suggests intimate thoughts that remain unstated.

Influence: His experience as a pacifist ambulance driver in World War I → causing him to reject official war propaganda, state authority, and inherited Victorian conventions

Avant guard: pushes the boundaries by also distorting the poem even further by changing the form/shape → his unusual language and visual form breaks writing rules to show the importance of being yourself rather than following the crowd.

Example/Old Question: Allen Ginsberg‘s „America“: period, content, what was striking about it?

The American Adam

• Self-reliant,

• an American hero with no remarkable past (ancestry or heritage)

• and no lasting sense of belonging in the present (home, friends, or community),

• who gravitates toward “natural wisdom” & away from formal education & refinement,

• who is always on the move, away from a lowly past into a glorious future

• criticized as predominantly “a-historical” & “a-political”

• → Cowboys from Western movies based on this

• white, poor, righteous, in search of a better life (pursuing the American dream) → blacks left out of this