Reading prompts for the class of December 20

 1. James, by Percival Everett, is contemporary a remake of Huckleberry Finn, where Jim would rather be called "James" instead of "n- Jim", and it follows Twain's plot only up to a point. Most relevantly, James is bought by Daniel Decatur Emmett, a historical figure who had a minstrel show. Emmett claims to be James' employer but he reflects that:

Slaves didn’t have the luxury of anger toward a white man, but I had felt anger. The anger was a good bad feeling. (...) He bought me, yes, but reportedly not to own me, though he expected something from me—my voice, he claimed. I wondered what he would do if I tried to leave. In my head I could hear him shouting, “But I paid two hundred dollars for you.” A man who refused to own slaves but was not opposed to others owning slaves was still a slaver, to my thinking.  (p. 155, chap. 30)

How can this reflection be a commentary on the complicated plan of Jim's "release" from chapters 35 to 40.

2. Comment on the following disclosure dialogue of chapter 42, p. 328-329

3. Do you think there is any symbolism in Tom Sawyer using his wound bullet in a watch, and checking it regularly, as portrayed also in the picture of p. 333, chapter 43?

Reading prompts for the class of December 13 - Emily Dickinson

 Choose either of these prompts and use the comment box to answer:

1. "'Hope' is the thing with feathers" (anthology p. 210-11) and "It feels a shame to be alive" (p.210) were both composed during the Civil War, but the 1st is from 1861 and the 2nd from 1863. Do you feel a different tone from one to the other that might correspond to a change of feeling due to the war's development?

2. Can you establish intertextual relations (especially pertaining to an oblique look on the Civil War) between either of these poems and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?

Reading prompts for the class of December 6

 Here are two questions that can prepare you for the upcoming test. The latter one follows the phrasing of the second question in the test:

1. At the end of Huck Finn’s chapter 33, we have an episode of “mob behaviour”. Do you remember any previous one? Can you establish a contrast between this kind of behaviour and that of the (self-)reliant (wo)man

2. Consider the following quote by the American Studies scholar Richard Slotkin. Produce an argumentative text commenting on the sentence, and relating it with at least two texts belonging to this subject.. You can write either in Portuguese or in English:

“The evolution of the American myth was a synthetic process of reconciling the romantic-conventional myths of Europe to American experience – a process which, by an almost revolutionary turn, became an analytical attempt to (...) get back to the primary source of blood-knowledge of the wilderness, (...) the basic (...) myth-generating psychology of man.”

 

Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: the Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (Wesleyan UP, 1973), 17.

 

Reading prompts for the class of December 4 - Walt Whitman (anthology, pp. 176-187)

 1. Write a text analysis of the initial excerpt of “Song of Myself” from the beginning until “the song / of me rising from bed and meeting the sun."

2. Consider the interpretative hesitation of the part that begins, “A child said, ‘What is the Grass?’ and consider if this “poetics of doubt and speculation” has similar instances in Huck’s narration or if, on the contrary, there is a pragmatism that forebears more far-fetched comparison.

Walt Whitman, retouched picture for the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass.

Reading prompts for the class of November 29

 1. Consider the quotation below from Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self-Reliance" (anthology, p. 164 [38 of the source text]) aand reflect on how it might relate to the econunter of Huck and Jim with the Duke and the King, or of the latter two with the Wilks' family in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

"Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. (anthology In history, our imagination plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and common day's work; but the things of life are the same to both; the sum total of both is the same. Why all this deference to Alfred, and Scanderbeg, and Gustavus? Suppose they were virtuous; did they wear out virtue? As great a stake depends on your private act to-day, as followed their public and renowned steps. When private men shall act with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the actions of kings to those of gentlemen."

2. Is Huck Finn self-reliant? In what ways / when?

Reading prompts for the class of Nov. 22 - 2 questions about Huck Finn (chapters 22 and 28)

 1 Write a literaty text analysis of the following excertpt from chapter 22 of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

Suggested topics: importance of the text within the context of the author’s work and time; subject of the enunciation; point of view and effect upon the reader/addressee; rhetoric and linguistic devices and language tropes (descrptive or lyric manner, figures of speech, symbolism, innovation / surprising markers or pattern traces within the author’s work); intertextuality with texts studied in this class (at least 2) or others. 

"Do I know you? I know you clear through was born and raised in the South, and I’ve lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man’s a coward. (...) Why don’t your juries hang murderers? Because they’re afraid the man’s friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark – and it’s just what they WOULD do.

(...)

"... The average man don’t like trouble and danger. YOU don’t like trouble and danger. But if only HALF a man – like Buck Harkness, there – shouts ‘Lynch him! lynch him!’ you’re afraid to back down – afraid you’ll be found out to be what you are – COWARDS – and so you raise a yell, and hang yourselves on to that half-a-man’s coat-tail, and come raging up here, swearing what big things you’re going to do. The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is – a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any MAN at the head of it is BENEATH pitifulness. Now the thing for YOU to do is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole. If any real lynching’s going to be done it will be done in the dark, Southern fashion; and when they come they’ll bring their masks, and fetch a MAN along. Now LEAVE – and take your half-a-man with you” – tossing his gun up across his left arm and cocking it when he says this."

2. In chapter 28, Huck makes the following reflection about saying the truth or lying: " I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is in a tight place is taking considerable many resks, though I ain’t had no experience, and can’t say for certain; but it looks so to me, anyway; and yet here’s a case where I’m blest if it don’t look to me like the truth is better and actuly SAFER than a lie. I must lay it by in my mind, and think it over some time or other, it’s so kind of strange and unregular. " - Can you extrapolate from this reflection and think about other cases where the fiction you have read in this course problematized the pragmatic value of lying vs. telling the truth?

HW for the class of November 20th - E. A. Poe 's "The Raven" and "The Philosophy of Composition"

 As always, answer to one or more;

1. In "The Philosophy of Composition" (anthology, p. 143-139), E. Allan Poe purports to explain "step by step" how he wrote "The Raven". While at it, he inserts some comments on types of compostion and the difference between prose and poetry. Taking as example texts read in this class, would you agree with the distinction he makes in the following passage

"I designate Beauty as the province of the poem, merely because it is an obvious rule of Art that effects should be made to spring from direct causes — that objects should be attained through means best adapted for their attainment — no one as yet having been weak enough to deny that the peculiar elevation alluded to, is most readily attained in the poem. Now the object, Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable, to a certain extent, in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose. Truth, in fact, demands a precision, and Passion, a homeliness (the truly passionate will comprehend me) which are absolutely antagonistic to that Beauty which, I maintain, is the excitement, or pleasurable elevation, of the soul. It by no means follows from any thing here said, that passion, or even truth, may not be introduced, and even profitably introduced, into a poem — for they may serve in elucidation, or aid the general effect, as do discords in music, by contrast — but the true artist will always contrive, first, to tone them into proper subservience to the predominant aim, and, secondly, to enveil them, as far as possible, in that Beauty which is the atmosphere and the essence of the poem." (anthology, p 145)

2. Another argument of "The Philosophy of Composition" is that "close circumscription of space is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated accident -- it has the force of a frame to a picture" (anthology, p, 147). Comment on how Poe applied this constraint to "The Cask of Amontillado" (anthology, pp. 130-135), "The Raven" (pp. 140-142) and/or "The Oval Portrait" (pp.151-152)

3. Write a short creative piece where "the bust of Pallas" in the poem "The Raven" is brought to life - given that Pallas is Athena, the goddess of reason/science as well as of "warfare", you can have her address the incoherences of phantasy in at least two texts from our course.

                                                         illustration by Edouard Manet

HW for the class of November 15th - Poe and Twain in the Gothic vein

 1. Read the following article on the Gothic in American literature up to the third page (https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Thomas-Bjerre/publication/346930804_Southern_Gothic_Literature/links/5fd287c245851568d154cc25/Southern-Gothic-Literature.pdf). Speculate on Gothic features - and whether they be European, American or Southern - in Twain's Huckleberry Finn, chapter 16, and in Poe's "Annabel Lee" and/or "The Cask of Amontillado"

2. Creative writing: imagine you are Emmeline Grangenford writing on the theme of "Annabel Lee" - her death and her romance with the poet who took her for the purest maiden that ever stepped the earth.

Final papers - instructions

1. You are required to engage with the argument(s) of one of the following essays from your edition of Huckleberry Finn. Write how they changed your perspective, or why you disagree with the view, adding or opposing textual evidence (with analysis). You might also want to apply/extend the author's argument to other texts you have studied in the course. I have summarized the essays' arguments in order to help (but this is also a simplification, excluding additional interesting points):

a. Earl F. Brideu, pp. 346-355: on the drawings by Kemble and how they present a "softened" narrative [for the audience] of the verbal text

b. John H. Wallace (p. 375-376) vs. Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua (376) on wether The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are a racist text

c. Leslie Fiedler (pp. 385-86): homoerotic undertones in the relation of Jim and Huck [see full article here: http://ereserve.library.utah.edu/Annual/ENGL/7700/Locke/come.pdf]

d. Leo Marx (pp. 386-87) - the flawed ending of the book is related to Mark Twain's difficulty in escaping his "genteel tradition"

e. Ralph Ellison (pp.388-89) - the novel gives food for thought due to its ambiguity, but the "negro's" infantilization causes discomfort

f. Henry Nash Smith (pp. 389-392) how speech forms (vernacular or exalted styles) evidence the conflict between accepted values and protest

g. Toni Morrison (pp. 393-402): silences and terrors in the novel come from the wound of slavery in Southern society

h. Shelley Fisher-Fishkin (pp. 402-405): Twain gave Huck an African-American voice

i. David S. Smith (pp. 405-420): the novel contains a critique of socially construed fictions (e. g. romanticism, religion, etc.)

j. Ishamel Reed (pp. 420-425): how the themes and conundrums of the novel linger in contemporary society

k. Jane Smiley (pp. 424-434): Huck (and Twain) do not care enough about Jim's desire for freedom

l. Tom Quirk (pp. 434-45): How flaws in the novel and failure in its structure contribute to its restless liveliness

m. Thomas Cooley (pp. 445-456): innovation of narrative technique portraying both deep and impressionistic conscience ("the river of conscience" evoking the modernist "stream of consciousness")

n. Andrew Levy (pp. 456-462): relevance of the novel in the current discussion about how we raise our children

2. The work will preferably be done in pairs, although requests to do it individually can be accepted, provided they are justified.  It will be 2500 words max. excluding bibliography (or 1800 words max. in the case of individual papers).

3. Plan / Abstract The work plan should not exceed 2 pages and should include 

a) title / research question

b) short abstract

c) Topics and subtopics 

d) Annotated Bibliography (of other texts you engage with [not too many], explaining shortly why they are useful)

4. Deadlines

Plan / Abstract: by November 27th, sent via the moodle platform

1st draft (with at least 3/4 of the work): by December 18th

Submission of final work: December 30th at 8 p. m., via moodle and at the teacher's locker (in the corridor of the Department of English Studies, 2nd floor)

HW for Nov. 13: N. Hawthorne's "Wakefield" and H. D. Thoreau's intro to Walden - creative writing

After studying one of the following excerpts, follow the prompt for creative writing indicated in each of them, making sure that you introduce stylistic markers in your piece of one of the texts studied in the course (as if you were writing in "the manner of" - not necessarily of the author from the given excerpt, but of one of our authors or their most known devices). Furthermore, weave your text so that in it we will find echoes of at least two texts studied in the course so far (these may be thematic or stylistic, or characteres direclty addressing one another, as in promp two).

1.

"Only the wife of his bosom might have hesitated. She, without having analyzed his character, was partly aware of a quiet selfishness, that had rusted into his inactive mind; of a peculiar sort of vanity, the most uneasy attribute about him; of a disposition to craft which had seldom produced more positive effects than the keeping of petty secrets, hardly worth revealing; and, lastly, of what she called a little strangeness, sometimes, in the good man. This latter quality is indefinable, and perhaps non-existent. 

Let us now imagine Wakefield bidding adieu to his wife. It is the dusk of an October evening. His equipment is a drab great-coat, a hat covered with an oilcloth, top-boots, an umbrella in one hand and a small portmanteau in the other. He has informed Mrs. Wakefield that he is to take the night coach into the country. She would fain inquire the length of his journey, its object, and the probable time of his return; but, indulgent to his harmless love of mystery, interrogates him only by a look. He tells her not to expect him positively by the return coach, nor to be alarmed should he tarry three or four days; but, at all events, to look for him at supper on Friday evening. Wakefield himself, be it considered, has no suspicion of what is before him. He holds out his hand, she gives her own, and meets his parting kiss in the matter-of-course way of a ten years’ matrimony; and forth goes the middle-aged Mr. Wakefield, almost resolved to perplex his good lady by a whole week’s absence."

Rewrite Wakefield's departure in the perspective of the wife.

2. "Amid the seeming confusion of our mysterious world, individuals are so nicely adjusted to a system, and systems to one another and to a whole, that, by stepping aside for a moment, a man exposes himself to a fearful risk of losing his place forever."

Imagine Thoreau's reaction to this short story and to its concluding commentary. Make sure to weave in quotes from his text(s) or phrases that he might have written.

Reading promts for November 6: Huck Finn and Thoreau's life in the woods and civil disobedience

Answer one or more 

1. Write a literary text analysis of the passage that goes from "I see young men" to "break through and steal" (p. 110 anthology, p. 1769 of the text)

2. What points of contact do you find between the excerpt from Walden, "Economy", and chapter 14 of Huckleberry Finn?

3. "Civil Disobediece", first titled "Resistance to Civil Government" gave name to a strategy of power of the regular citizen. In which ways do Huck and Finn commit civil disobedience and in which ways are they liable to regular/petty crimes?

Reading prompts for Oct. 30: Huck Finn, chapters, 12-13

 1. Comment on the symbolism of vessels - rafts, ferrys, skiffs inside abandoned boats, people smuggled or smuggling on these vessels - in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Compare with other literary examples, either from this course or simply that you know of.

2. Text analysis practice - try your hand at the following excerpt from chapter XII

"Every night we passed towns, some of them away up on black hillsides, nothing but just a shiny bed of lights; not a house could you see. The fifth night we passed St. Louis, and it was like the whole world lit up. In St. Petersburg they used to say there was twenty or thirty thousand people in St. Louis, but I never believed it till I see that wonderful spread of lights at two o’clock that still night. There warn’t a sound there; everybody was asleep.

Every night now I used to slip ashore towards ten o’clock at some little village, and buy ten or fifteen cents’ worth of meal or bacon or other stuff to eat; and sometimes I lifted a chicken that warn’t roosting comfortable, and took him along. Pap always said, take a chicken when you get a chance, because if you don’t want him yourself you can easy find somebody that does, and a good deed ain’t ever forgot. I never see pap when he didn’t want the chicken himself, but that is what he used to say, anyway.

Mornings before daylight I slipped into cornfields and borrowed a watermelon, or a mushmelon, or a punkin, or some new corn, or things of that kind. Pap always said it warn’t no harm to borrow things if you was meaning to pay them back some time; but the widow said it warn’t anything but a soft name for stealing, and no decent body would do it. Jim said he reckoned the widow was partly right and pap was partly right; so the best way would be for us to pick out two or three things from the list and say we wouldn’t borrow them any more – then he reckoned it wouldn’t be no harm to borrow the others."

Reading prompts for Oct 25: Margaret Fuller, "Woman in the Nineteenth Century" (1843) and Stanton et al. "The Declaration of Sentiments" (1848)

 Read the excerpts from Woman in the 19th C (anthology, p. 84-97), and then "The Declaration of Sentiments" (anthology p. 98), and answer one or more.

1. Imaginative / creative exercise: Margaret Fuller was in Italy, caught up with the events of the 1848 revolution, at the time of the Seneca Falls Convention, so she did not attend. Imagine what additional clauses or turns of phrase she would have added to the document if she participated in its redaction?

2. What similar tropes - that is, either figurative expressions (for instance, "veil" for lack of address of a rightful question) or recurrent themes or constructions (for intance, a character that might be the alter-ego of the author) - do you find between Ellen Watkins, Frances Sargent Osgood, and Margaret Fuller. 

3. Or what to you was the more striking in each author?

Reading Prompts for the class of October 23 - Chapter 11 of Huckleberry Finn + Ellen Watkins, "The Two Offers"

Choose one or more:

1.  In chapter XI of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck tries to embody the stereotypes of being a girl in the 19th C but he fails. In what ways do the two cousins in Watkins' story (not) conform to the same or other stereotypes? Isn't it more the women's mind that's at stake in that story? How are differences characterized.

2. Comment on the shift(s) from direct to indirect speech in "The Two Offers" and on the effects they convey to the readers.

3. In keeping with the text's style, write a short creative piece imagining how Laura, at the end of her life, would answer to Janette's question: "Well, suppose there is [the risk of being an old maid], is that the most dreadful fate that can befall a woman?

Chronology of political events in the US (mid 19th C)

 

1845

• March 1: President John Tyler signs official proposal of statehood for Texas. Mexican leaders warn that annexing Texas could lead to war.
• March 4. Democrat James K. Polk elected President

• 1846

  • May 13: US Congress declares war on Mexico.

  1847

  • February 22-23: The Battle of Buena Vista is the last major battle in the northern theater. The Americans will hold the ground they gained until the end of the war, but not advance any farther.
  1848
  • March 10: The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo is ratified by the USA. The treaty called for the U.S. to pay US$15 million to Mexico.  It gave the United States the Rio Grande as a boundary for Texas, and gave the U.S. ownership of California and a large area comprising roughly half of New Mexico, most of Arizona, Nevada, and Utah, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado. 
  • 1849
  • Gold discovered in California
  • 1850
  • The compromise of 1850 (including the Fugitive Slave Law)
  • 1852
  • Franklin Pierce - Democrat president elected; Jefferson Davis is his secretary of War
  • 1854
  • Kansas-Nebraska Act (Kansas becoming a slave state infringes the Missouri compromise)

Reading prompts for the class of October 18: Huck Finn, chap 10 + excerpt from "The Heroic Slave" by F. Douglass

As always, choose either of the reading prompts to comment on:

 

HW for October 15 - William Apess, an Indian's Looking Glass (1833) and Huck Finn, once more

 Comment on one or more of the reading prompts:

1. What can you interpret from William Apess's use of deictics  (you may compare this with the use of pronouns in "The Declaration of Independence")

2. Choose 2-3 rhetorical questions from the text and analyse them in terms of effect.

2. In chapter VIII of Huckleberry Finn, Huck decides to side with Jim even if for that he is accused of being an Abolitionist. How moral or contradictory with the Church of the time do you find that decision, having in mind the "sermon"/speech given by William Apess to his audience?

HW for Oct. 10 - "Young Goodman Brown" by N. Hawthorne, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (until chapter 9)

 Comment on one (or more) of these reading prompts:

1. Present a literary text analysis of the incipit (initial part) of "Young Goodman, Brown":

YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN came forth at sunset, into the street of Salem village, but put his head back, after crossing the threshold, to exchange a parting kiss with his young wife. And Faith, as the wife was aptly named, thrust her own pretty head into the street, letting the wind play with the pink ribbons of her cap, while she called to Goodman Brown. 

"Dearest heart," whispered she, softly and rather sadly, when her lips were close to his ear, "pr'y thee, put off your journey until sunrise, and sleep in your own bed to-night. A lone woman is troubled with such dreams and such thoughts, that she's afeard of herself, sometimes. Pray, tarry with me this night, dear husband, of all nights in the year!"

2. Compare Young Goodman, Brown, and Huck Finn in terms of their attitude towards religion and/or morality.

3. Compare the strategies of direct speech in Nathaniel Hawthorne's tale and Mark Twain's novel.

HW for October 9 - "Rip van Winkle" by Washington Irving (and the inevitable "Huck Finn")

 Answer to one of the following:

1. Read here about nine types of heroes in fiction, and justify how you would classify Huck Finn and Rip van Winkle. Which characteristics do they share and what draws them apart?

2. Can you draw contrasts and resemblances between the use of the sceneries of the "woods" and wilderness in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and "Rip van Winkle"? Justify

HW for October 4 - close reading practice

 Choose one of the following passages from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for a close-reading analysis, focussed on the literary and cultural aspects that you find more relevant. 

Suggested topics: theme(s) and structure; importance of the text within the context of the author’s work and time; subject of the enunciation; point of view and effect upon the reader/addressee; rhetoric and linguistic devices and language tropes (descriptive, lyric or dramatic text type, figures of speech, symbolism, innovation / surprising markers, collocations, or pattern traces within the author’s work); intertextuality with texts studied in this class or others.

chapter V, p. 32:

"And looky here – you drop that school, you hear? I’ll learn people to bring up a boy to put on airs over his own father and let on to be better’n what HE is. You lemme catch you fooling around that school again, you hear? Your mother couldn’t read, and she couldn’t write, nuther, before she died. None of the family couldn’t before THEY died. I can’t; and here you’re a-swelling yourself up like this. I ain’t the man to stand it – you hear? Say, lemme hear you read.”

I took up a book and begun something about General Washington and the wars. When I’d read about a half a minute, he fetched the book a whack with his hand and knocked it across the house."

chapter VII, p. 46-47:

"They won’t ever hunt the river for anything but my dead carcass. They’ll soon get tired of that, and won’t bother no more about me. All right; I can stop anywhere I want to. Jackson’s Island is good enough for me; I know that island pretty well, and nobody ever comes there. And then I can paddle over to town nights, and slink around and pick up things I want. Jackson’s Island’s the place.

I was pretty tired, and the first thing I knowed I was asleep. When I woke up I didn’t know where I was for a minute. I set up and looked around, a little scared. Then I remembered. The river looked miles and miles across. The moon was so bright I could a counted the drift logs that went a-slipping along, black and still, hundreds of yards out from shore. Everything was dead quiet, and it looked late, and SMELT late. You know what I mean–I don’t know the words to put it in."

HW for October 2 - "The Declaration of Independence" and "Huck Finn" (chapters 3-6)

 1. Speculate on the use of subjects, pronouns (and their respective referents) in "The Declaration of Independence"

2. "Miss Watson seems to see no conflict between the religious and racial narratives she embodies" (Terrell L. Tebbetts, "Civilization, Outlawry, and a Declaration of Independence...", Mississippi Quarterly, 2023). How far is this negligence of contradictions true for the text of The Declaration of Independence?

3. How is Huck's perceived oppression and struggle for freedom comparable (or not) to that of the North American colonies in 1776?

HW for Sep 27 - Benjamin Franklin, "Autobiography"

 Choose either or both:

1. Analyse (close read) this passage, decomposing and relating its elements as best you can:

"Now imagining it may be equally agreeable to you to know the Circumstances of my Life, many of which you are yet unacquainted with; and expecting a Week’s uninterrupted Leisure in my present Country Retirement, I sit down to write them for you. To which I have besides some other Inducements. Having emerg'd from the Poverty and Obscurity in which I was born and bred, to a State of Affluence and some Degree of Reputation in the World, and having gone so far thro' Life with a considerable Share of Felicity, the conducing Means I made use of, which, with the Blessing of God, so well succeeded, my Posterity may like to know, as they may find some of them suitable to their own Situations, and therefore fit to be imitated. That Felicity, when I reflected on it, has induc'd me sometimes to say, that were it offer'd to my Choice, I should have no Objection to a Repetition of the same Life from its Beginning, only asking the Advantage Authors have in a second Edition to correct some Faults of the first. So would I if I might, besides corr[ectin]g the Faults, change some sinister Accidents and Events of it for others more favourable, but tho' this were deny'd, I should still accept the Offer."

2. In what ways is Ben Franklin's "coming of age" relatable to what you have read so far in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?

HW for Sept 25 - Bradstreet and Rowlandson (in relation with the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)

 Comment on one or more of the prompts:

1. Two pious Puritan women... or maybe not; in what ways do the writings of Anne Bradstreet and Mary Rowlandson confortm to or transgress their assigned roles as women in their epoch (17th century)?

2. Relate one or more of these women's writing samples with what you have read so far in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

The beginnings of US and early literature

 1450 - Guttenberg invents the printer

1492 - Columbus lands on Hispaniola (the Caribbean islands) - "America" (metonymy) described with exotic flourishes, enhanced by the hope of finding gold (Eldorado)
1516 - Thomas More, Utopia 
1552 - Bartolomé de las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destruición de las Indias Ocidentales
1607 - Jamestown
1620 - Plymouth (William Bradford) 
1624 - John Smith, The General History of Virginia
1626 - Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis
1630 - Massachusetts Bay (John Winthrop) - absorbs Plymouth, becoming the central community for the Pilgrims (Puritans)
1630 - John Winthrop's sermon A Model of Christian Charity (self-explanatory name)
1643 - Roger Williams (banned from Massachusetts, founds the Rhode Island Comunnity), A Key into the Language of America 

1630-1651 (printed only 1856) - William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation (the text as testimonial of the wonders of God in the name of His chosen people, with a plan of the city of New Jerusalem; also tells of the failure of the communal experience and of the pragmatic response to 'man's corruption) - important diary / journal form in "plain style". "Let them [the Puritans] confess before the Lord his loving Kindness and His wonderful works before the sons of men" (32) - institution of public confession

1682 - Mary Rowlandson, A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. M. Rowlandson
1689 - John Locke, Treatises of Goovernment 
1702 - Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (sums up conservative vision of Puritan New England, with an account of the Salem Trials; need for scientific knowledge and sanitary measures)
1765 - Stamp Act
1773 - Tea Act
1773, Dec. - Boston Tea Party
1776 - Thomas Paine, Common Sense and the Rights of Man

July 4, 1776 - "A Declaration of the Representatives of the United States of America"  
1782 - St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer.
1793 (published) - Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography
1802-1807 (written) - Diary and Autobiography of John Adams
1821 (published) - Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson

Welcome... and first homework

 Welcome to the class of US Literature - 18 and 19 C!

Choose between 1 or 2 (or, if you feel like practicing hard, do both!)

1. Please find a passage of 4-6 lines in Huckleberry Finn's chapters 1-2 that might relate to its initial "notice" (as quoted in the picture), and analyze it using all the skills and tools at your disposal.

2. Use your own insights, as well as anything you learned about "narrators" in literature/Portuguese classes before, to characterize the narrator of the novel, both in terms of its function in the narrative and its psychological characterization (or physical, if you have any hints).