Designing the Early American Literature Component of the Undergraduate American Literature Survey Course

Authors

  • Richard De Prospo Washington College

Keywords:

early american literature, film, 1492, Black Robe, survey courses, teaching, pedagogy

Abstract

The author describes alternatives to traditional ways of conceptualizing the early American literature survey course, focusing on film (1492 and Black Robe).

Author Biography

Richard De Prospo, Washington College

Since the publication of Theism in the Discourse of Jonathan Edwards (University of Delaware Press) in 1986, Rich De Prospo has been working to revise American literary history—a task that is usually done from the margins of ethnic, women's, or queer studies—from the inside out, so to speak, by supposing that early American literature can be (re)read as neocolonial, as differing fundamentally from the modern American literature that it is almost universally accepted as founding, and thus as subverting claims made by generations of scholars that American literature is continuous and unified. The forthcoming The Latest Early American Literature uncovers the misreadings of early American literature that can result from the virtually unanimous acceptance of early American literature as modern American literature's immature predecessor, and the forthcoming Poe's Difference supposes that both Poe, and the popular print culture of the U.S. 1830s and 40s in which Poe tried so hard to curry favor, remain belatedly attached to a European parent culture—indeed, to a European culture that had been left behind in Europe by the middle of the nineteenth century—, a backwardness commonly accepted as a central feature of postcolonial cultures worldwide, but which has been repressed by the Americanist orientation of even the most politically liberal and curricularly expansive of contemporary American literary historians. De Prospo has been a college and university teacher for over thirty years. He is widely published in scholarly journals of early and nineteenth-century American literature, and of literary theory. He has also published on literary Abolitionism in the U.S. and on African-American literature, and has coedited, and written the "Afterword" for, The Stowe Debate: Rhetorical Strategies in Uncle Tom's Cabin (University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).

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Issue

Vol. 39 No. 2 (2010): Summer/Fall 2010

Section

Articles

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