American Literature Final

Black vernacular discourse

"Gates explored rhetorical figures that turn on the tension between the spoken and the written word,...'The slave wrote not primarily to demonstrate human letters,' Gates writes, 'but to demonstrate his or her own membership in the human community'...the curious tension between the black vernacular and the literate white text, between the spoken and the written word, between the oral and the printed forms of literary discourse" Ex. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Douglass's Narrative, David Walker's Appeal Ex. David Walker's Appeal

Writing to mediate erasure and silence

"early African American literature was often mediated by the propaganda machine of abolitionism, privileged anonymous, pseudynomous, and collective authorship as much as the single author, and routinely culled from and incorporated text drawn from already published works...across the 19th century, African American literature became increasingly embedded in an industrial print sphere that helped disseminate but also circumscribed black writing in historically contingent ways"

Philosophical idealism

"the problem of philosophy, according to Plato, 'is, for all that exists conditionally, to find a ground unconditioned and absolute'" separation of all that exists conditionally from "ground unconditioned and absolute" (aka transcendental); separation of the mundane world of matter from the realm of ideas that preexist and transcend the world of matter

Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Young Goodman Brown," 2

'Ah, forsooth, and is it your worship, indeed?' cried the good dame. 'Yea, truly is it, and in the very image of my old gossip, goodman Brown, the grandfather of the selly fellow that now is.' (348, Young Goodman Brown)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" 1

After the kings of Great Britain had assumed the right of appointing the colonial governors, the measures of the latter seldom met with the ready and general approbation, which had been paid to those of their predecessors, under the original charters. The people looked with most jealous scrutiny to the exercise of power, which did not emanate from themselves, and they usually rewarded the rulers with slender gratitude...The reader, in order to avoid a long and dry detail of colonial affairs, is requested to dispense with an account of the train of circumstances that had caused much temporary inflammation of the popular mind. (332-3, My Kinsman, Major Molineux)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar" 1

American evasion of philosophy - Emerson swerved from the epistemological concerns of European philosophers; conceived of his project as a form of power, a kind of provocation, and himself as an indomitable person whose very activity changed the world; evades modern philosophy by refusing its quest for certainty and foundations What is nature to him? There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find, ⎯ so entire, so boundless. Far, too, as her splendors shine, system on system shooting like rays, upward, downward, without centre, without circumference, ⎯ in the mass and in the particle, nature hastens to render account of herself to the mind. (American Scholar)

Washington Irving, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" 3

Laughability of pretending self-seriousness to impose order on the literary domain; rather, it is the wild west, the American woodlands where everything proliferates ceaselessly The ample charms of a genuine Dutch country tea-table, in the sumptuous times of autumn...Heaven bless the mark! I want breath and time to discuss this banquet as it deserves, and am too eager to get on with my story. Happily, Ichabod Crane was not in so great a hurry as his historian, but did ample justice to every dainty. (54) Detains and defers the resolution of domestic drama; more acute with anatomizing a buffet than a plot; often clueless with info crucial to the plot of the story

Lydia Marie Child, "The Black Saxons" 2

Mediation - story framed as a large game of telephone These cogitations did not, so far as I ever heard, lead to the emancipation of his bondmen; but they did prevent his revealing a secret, which would have brought hundreds to an immediate and violent death. After a painful conflict between contending feelings and duties, he contented himself with advising the magistrates to forbid all meetings whatsoever among the colored people, until the war was ended. He visited Boston several years after, and told the story to a gentleman, who often repeated it in the circle of his friends. In brief outline, it reached my ears. I have told it truly, with some filling up by imagination, some additional garniture of language, and the adoption of fictitious names, because I have forgotten the real ones.

Herman Melville

Melville's Harvard and Yale was also a whaler, travels gave his work a planetary compass wording his experience through literary latitudes → Melville incorporates high, low, into the chowder that is Moby Dick Frank accounts of his life with the natives - earned him scorn in the religious press Young America Movement - springboard to artistic maturity was literary nationalism in this movement; published in Evert Duyckink's magazine; rhetoric of young america present in his reviews, other works

Herman Melville, "Benito Cereno" 2

Not that such precisely was the impression made by the Spaniard on the mind of his visitor. The Spaniard's individual unrest was, for the present, but noted as a conspicuous feature in the ship's general affliction. Still, Captain Delano was not a little concerned at what he could not help taking for the time to be Don Benito's unfriendly indifference towards himself. The Spaniard's manner, too, conveyed a sort of sour and gloomy disdain, which he seemed at no pains to disguise. But this the American in charity ascribed to the harassing effects of sickness, since, in former instances, he had noted that there are peculiar natures on whom prolonged physical suffering seems to cancel every social instinct of kindness; as if, forced to black bread themselves, they deemed it but equity that each person coming nigh them should, indirectly, by some slight or affront, be made to partake of their fare. (1517) Not again that this reflection occurred to Captain Delano at the time, charitable man as he was. Rather another idea.

William Apess, "Eulogy on King Philip" 4

Now, we wonder if the sons of the Pilgrims would like to have us, poor Indians, come out and curse the Doctor, and all their sons, as we have been by manyy of them. And suppose that, in some future day, our children should repay all these wrongs, would it not be doing as wee, poor Indians, have been done to? But we sincerely hope there is more humanity in us than that. (284)

Herman Melville, "Benito Cereno" 4

Problem is moments of ambiguous discourse - certain racist notions are transmitted that prevent the reader from recognizing what's really happened on board the San Dominick - a slave revolt "What, I, Amasa Delano — Jack of the Beach, as they called me when a lad — I, Amasa; the same that, duck-satchel in hand, used to paddle along the water-side to the school-house made from the old hulk — I, little Jack of the Beach, that used to go berrying with cousin Nat and the rest; I to be murdered here at the ends of the earth, on board a haunted pirate-ship by a horrible Spaniard? Too nonsensical to think of! Who would murder Amasa Delano? His conscience is clean. There is some one above. Fie, fie, Jack of the Beach! you are a child indeed; a child of the second childhood, old boy; you are beginning to dote and drule, I'm afraid."

Herman Melville, "Benito Cereno" 1

Repeated & more pronounced in Benito Cereno Considering the lawlessness and loneliness of the spot, and the sort of stories, at that day, associated with those seas, Captain Delano's surprise might have deepened into some uneasiness had he not been a person of a singularly undistrustful good-nature, not liable, except on extraordinary and repeated incentives, and hardly then, to indulge in personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in man. Whether, in view of what humanity is capable, such a trait implies, along with a benevolent heart, more than ordinary quickness and accuracy of intellectual perception, may be left to the wise to determine. (1512)

Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Semi-sadistic Melville enjoyed confusing and tricking his readership, at the end of his life Willful digressiveness of the installment of moby dick Jarring shifts in views and representational modes Compulsiveness to obtain definite belief that is impossible - desperation for knowledge is unlikely to be rewarded Ishmael began to reason of providence and futurity and what lies beyond human ken, does not seem to rest in the anticipation of death, point of view, motive of representation are stylized imposter - what looks like omniscience is really faked omnipotence by Ishmael, but he's also a part of the narrative Ahab attempts to script the crew to

Washington Irving, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" 1

Sense of overflowing abundance/copia to Irving's work, see "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow": As Ichabod jogged slowly on his way, his eye, ever open to every symptom of culinary abundance, ranged with delight over the treasures of jolly autumn (B:52)

Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills 3

Shift from the literal to the figurative - assumes a God's eye view of the working class, occupying the position of God's judging angel Condescension - being looked down upon, but also the condescension of God in Christ, idea in a theological sense that out of compassion he condescended himself in Jesus Interior frame (deborah) - working class character with whom the narrator disidentifies Even Deborah muttered, as she crept through, "looks like t' Devil's place!" It did,—in more ways than one. Marked difference between deborah and the narrator - when their perspectives do align, surprise is expressed Interior frame 2 (middle class with whom the narrator identifies) amateur psychologist / gymnast dilettante / a man who sucked the essence (B: 1706-7) you laugh at it B:1704/1715/1720 there was a laugh... B:1706 if it were not that you...unarmed, too 1705-6,1707

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance" 3

The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlour what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests: he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him: he does not court you. But the man is, as it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable. He would utter opinions on all passing affairs, which being seen to be not private, but necessary, would sink like darts into the ear of men, and put them in fear. These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. (Self-Reliance) Culture and society explicitly feminized; the "real man" should always be honest, caring nothing for the opinions of others; the gender of the reliant self is specifically male?

Margaret Fuller, Things and Thoughts in Europe

The thinking American—a man who, recognizing the immense advantage of being born to a new world and on a virgin soil,yet does not wish one seed from the Past to be lost. He is anxious to gather and carry back with him all that will bear a new climate and a new culture. Some will dwindle; others will attain a bloom and stature unknown before. He wishes to gather them clean, free from noxious insects. He wishes to give them a fair trial in this new world. (Things and Thoughts)

Margaret Fuller, "The Great Lawsuit" 1

Speaks to the anxiety of origins, transcendental self-reliance as a man's movement Once I thought that men would help on this state of things more than I do now. I saw so many of them wretched in the connections they had formed in weakness and vanity. They seemed so glad to esteem women whenever they could! But early I perceived that men never, in any extreme of despair, wished to be women. Where they admired any woman they were inclined to speak of her as above her sex. Silently I observed this, and feared it argued a rooted skepticism, which for ages had been fastening on the heart, and which only an age of miracles could eradicate. (The Great Lawsuit)

Black Hawk, Life of Black Hawk 4

The whites were complaining at the same time that we were intruding upon their rights! They made themselves out the injured party, and we the intruders! and called loudly to the great war chief to protect their property! (311) -this entire section of Black Hawk's narrative is about ownership, and how language was mobilized to create the concept of property, and manipulate the natives into giving up their land with tools that they don't understand -the concept of land being "property" is one that the whites invented; so they have the power to manipulate it

Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The May-Pole of Merry Mount" 1

There is an admirable foundation for a philosophic romance, in the curious history of the early settlement of Mount Wallaston, or Merry Mount. In the slight sketch here attempted, the facts, recorded on the grave pages of our New England annalists, have wrought themselves, almost spontaneously, into a sort of allegory. (360, Merry Mount)

Idealism

any system of thought or philosophy in which the object of external perception is held to consist either in itself or as perceived, of ideas

Anxiety of Origins

impels American writers to search for precursors (in the name of community) rather than escape from them (in the name of individuation) to connect to traditions and histories (in the name of a usable past) rather than to dissociate from them (in the name of originality) Ex. Washington Irving, "The Art of Bookmaking," "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"; Andres Bello's Prospectus of El Repertorio Americano

Anthropotheism

in which "Godlike" beings like Ahab treat actual human beings, in their animal mortality, and animals, in their non humanity, with the same imperiousness that God subordinates humans

Theriotheism

in which super and nonhuman forces combine to devastate human beings in their pretensions to godlike power

Herman Melville, "Benito Cereno" 3

narrator over and against the patently partial view of the focalizer Melville's narrator not only does not disabuse the reader of omniscience, seduces the reader with authoritative voice The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter's mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.(1511-12)

Immediatism

opposite of gradualism; free slaves, immediately against political reformism: "a repudiation of the various media, like colonization or apprenticeship, that had been advocated as remedies" eschatological tendency: "a shift in total outlook from detached rationalistic perspective on human history and progress to a personal commitment to make no compromise with sin" Transcendent - transcendent - surpassing or excelling others of its kind; going beyond the ordinary limits; pre-eminent, superior or supreme; extraordinary —> above, greatly superior to vs. Immanent - immanent - existing or operating within, inherent; permanently pervading and sustaining the universe Garrisonian critiquing of the system from a position outside the system is a transcendent critique aspires to engender a set of conditions under which redemption can take place - need a facilitated conversion not necessarily mediated by evangelists

Materialism

theory or belief that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications

Transcendentalism

transcendental philosophy was applied in Europe to teachings by Kant and other philosophers, but became a disparaging label, code for foreign in the Americas; speculative philosophy that was grounding for the need to find a different relationship to the spirit traditionally totally religious in nature, only afterwards the realization of the secular as well as the spiritual liberal christians whose reading of scripture made them reject calvinism and predestination first American counterculture/youth movement; the ground zero of US literary nationalism Self-Reliance and others did not mark originality through mimetic reflection of locality; this rugged american individualism might be the limit of transcendental ideals; Margaret Fuller's attempt to bring the ideal to bear for women is to discover its limitations Ex. Emerson's Nature

Parataxis

very few dependent clauses - open ended stringing of conjunctions together

Edgar Allan Poe, "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" 1

2 American stories are mirrors of one another; A Tale of the Ragged Mountains is conspicuously American but dilates into an anti-imperialist critique that intimates Anglo violence to Indians in both America and India, undermining US exceptionalism; It has its mirror image in a European setting that is an allegory of sectional and race relations between north and south and raises questions about slavery Upon a dim, warm, misty day, toward the close of November, and during the strange interregnum of the seasons which in America is termed the Indian Summer, Mr. Bedloe departed as usual for the hills.(657)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature," 3

A noble doubt perpetually suggests itself, whether this end be not the Final Cause of the Universe; and whether nature outwardly exists. It is a sufficient account of that Appearance we call the World, that God will teach a human mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of congruent sensations, which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade. In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions that they make on me corresponds with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven, or soe god paints the image in the firmament of the soul? (Nature 198) Emerson asks two questions, the first being whether objects of nature have any significance beyond the tangible, and whether human perception is accurate. Additionally, Emerson's style seems oratorical, to be all phenomenal fluctuation—he doesn't grab onto meaning that easily, making you think there is something beyond - similar to transcendentalism

William Apess, "Eulogy on King Philip" 3

And if another nation should come to these regions and begin to rob and plunder all that came in their way, would not the orators of the day be called to address the people and arouse them to war for such insults? And, for all this, would they not be called Christians and patriots? (282)

Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Young Goodman Brown," 1

As nearly as could be discerned, the second traveler was about fifty years old, apparently in the same rank of life as goodman Brown, and bearing a considerable resemblance to him, though perhaps more in expression than features. Still, they might have been taken for father and son. (Goodman Brown)

Chowder

Chowder (v)- to make a chowder; to convert into chowder Chowder scene in moby dick; chowder-headed, prolific, profligate minds like Ishmael and Melville's concerns regarding its own forms and effect Moby Dick can be read as a multilayered inquiry into chowderheadedness - stupidity, or intelligence characterized by tolerance and eclecticism rather than academia

William Cullen Bryant, "The Prairies" 1

As o'er the verdant waste I guide my steed, Among the high rank grass that sweeps his sides, The hollow beating of his footstep seems A sacreligious sound. I think of those Upon whose rest he tramples. Are they here— The dead of other days!—and did the dust Of these fair solitudes once stir with life And burn with passion? Let the mighty mounds That overlook the rivers, or that rise In the dim forest crowded with old oaks, Answer. A race, that long has passed away, Built them;—a disciplined and populous race Heaped, with long toil, the earth, while yet the Greek Was hewing the Pentelicus to forms Of symmetry, and rearing on its rock The glittering Parthenon... Gave the soft winds a voice. The red man came— The roaming hunter tribes, warlike and fierce, And the mound-builders vanished from the earth. -Bryant turns the Indians into interlopers; the way-station between mound-builders and the quickly advancing multitude

Douglass, "The Heroic Slave" 1

At these words, the traveller raised his head...(for that was the name of our hero) (1241) The narrative voice asserts itself and "one-ups" the focalizer by insinuating greater knowledge The narrator relays knowledge the focalizer does not yet have (heightened by the use of parenthesis; Listwell is later characterized as the narrator's "informant" (B: 1257), but the narrative opens with a history lesson that suggests the narrator's additional researches ("the state of Virginia is famous in american annals" B:1239), and net effect is that the narrator's knowledge is only partially sourced by Listwell

Andres Bello, Prospectus of El Repertorio Americano

Bello disses Madrid by praising London, at the same time putting himself in the rather uncomfortable position of defining American ideology through its colonial oppressors For some years now, advocates of American civilization have wanted to publish a periodical that would defend, as a cause close to its heart, the independence and freedom of the new nations that have emerged in the New World, upon the ruins of Spanish domination; (3) Given the present state of America and Europe, London is perhaps the best place to publish this periodical. (3) But London is not only the metropolis of trade; in no part of the globe are the causes that vivify and nourish the human spirit as active as they are in great Britain.

"The Heroic Slave," Douglass 2

By some strange neglect, one of the truest, manliest, and bravest of her children,--one who, in after years, will, I think, command the pen of genius to set his merits forth, holds now no higher place in the records of that grand old Commonwealth than is held by a horse or an ox. Let those account for it who can, but there stands the fact, that a man who loved liberty as well as did Patrick Henry,--who deserved it as much as Thomas Jefferson,--and who fought for it with a valor as high, an arm as strong, and against odds as great, as he who led all the armies of the American colonies through the great war for freedom and independence, lives now only in the chattel records of his native State. Glimpses of this great character are all that can now be presented. He is brought to view only by a few transient incidents, and these afford but partial satisfaction. Like a guiding star on a stormy night, he is seen through the parted clouds and the howling tempests; or, like the gray peak of a menacing rock on a perilous coast, he is seen by the quivering flash of angry lightning, and he again disappears covered with mystery. Curiously, earnestly, anxiously we peer into the dark, and wish even for the blinding flash, or the light of northern skies to reveal him. But alas! he is still enveloped in darkness, and we return from the pursuit like a wearied and disheartened mother, (after a tedious and unsuccessful search for a lost child,) who returns weighed down with disappointment and sorrow. Speaking of marks, traces, possibles, and probabilities, we come before our readers. Douglass' narrator albeit better informed than its informant, not only does not pretend to omniscience but underscores the structural limits of knowledge when it comes to the history of slavery Refusal to provide a first person narrative makes point about the bias of the archive itself

Heroic Slave and Benito Cereno

Different means to the same end: both The Heroic Slave and Benito Cereno fashion elaborate and intricate narrative structures that provide readers with an interactive experience in which they are confronted with the extent to which racism has infected perception and the production of knowledge and meaning Douglass achieves by having his narrator admit to its lack of knowledge as a result of inescapable partiality of the historical archive and openly depriving the reader of access to interiority Melville achieves by having narrator project an omniscience that is belied by the revelation of the slave rebels' plot What happens, formally speaking, when the actual slave revolt is related? Narrative localization—and entire form—dramatically shifts; part iv the heroic slave, focalizer listwell is entirely absent (as is protagonist) and Madison's revolt is begrudgingly related by the Creole's first mate, Tom Grant At the end of the main narrative of Benito Cereno, Delano stays behind when the crew go to commander the San Dominick and we momentarily enter the consciousness of the first mate Main narr of Benito Cereno is then supplemented by a deposition and epilogue that detail the particulars of the slave revolt and its aftermath Deposition is doubly mediated by the spanish notary who casts Cereno's testimony in the third person and an editorial agent that intervenes to abbreviate the deposition

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature," 5

Discovering new systems of thought and compositions is an end in and of itself because it strengthens the spirit; goes with the idea that Emerson's substance is in his style; it's about the performance of thinking rather than the solidification of thought Idealism is a hypothesis to account for nature by other principles than those of carpentry and chemistry. Yet, if it only deny the existence of matter, it does not satisfy the demands of the spirit. It leaves God out of me. It leaves me in the splendid labyrinth of my perceptions, to wander without end. Then the heart resists it, because it balks the affections in denying substantive being to men and women. Nature is so pervaded with human life, that there is something of humanity in all, and in every particular. But this theory makes nature foreign to me, and does not account for that consanguinity which we acknowledge to it. Let it stand, then, in the present state of our knowledge, merely as a useful introductory hypothesis, serving to apprise us of the eternal distinction between the soul and the world. (Nature)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature," 2

Does Emerson really make clear the relationship between nature/soul, mind/spirit that undergirds everything? Example of idealism vs. materialism, specifically philosophical idealism Whilst we see that it always stands to clothe what we would say, we cannot avoid the question, whether the characters are not significant of themselves. Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts? (Nature 192)

Margaret Fuller, "The Great Lawsuit" 2

Ever I have been treated with great sincerity; and I look upon it as a most signal instance of this, that an intimate friend of the other sex said in a fervent moment, that I deserved in some star to be a man. Another used as highest praise, in speaking of a character in literature, the words "a manly woman." It is well known that of every strong woman they say she has a masculine mind. (The Great Lawsuit)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature," 4

Every surmise and vaticination of the mind is entailed to a certain respect, and we learn to prefer, imperfect theories, and sentences, which contain glimpses of truth, to digested systems which have no one valuable suggestion. A wise writer will feel that the ends of study and composition are best answered by announcing undiscovered regions of thought, and so communicating, through hope, new activity to the torpid spirit. (Nature 207)

Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" 2

For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced. Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, "may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!"

Black Hawk, Life of Black Hawk 2

Here, for the first time, I touched a goose quill to the treaty—not knowing, however, that, by that act, I consented to give away my village. Had that been explained to me, I should have opposed it, and never would have signed their treaty, as my recent conduct will clearly prove. (310) -act of signing was a coercive act, as he didn't understand what he was signing; goose quill as significant symbol of colonial writing that was not shared by Black Hawk

Washington Irving, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" 5

From the listless repose of the place, and the peculiar character of its inhabitants, who are descendants from the original Dutch settlers, this sequestered glen...A drowsy, dreamy influence seems to hang over the land, and pervade the very atmosphere. Some say that the place was bewitched by a high German doctor during the early days of the settlement; others, that an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe, held his powwow there before the country was discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson. Certain it is, the place still continues under the sway of some witching power that holds a spell over the minds of the good people, causing them to walk in a continual reverie. (42) Makes sense of the English lack of enthusiasm for writing as descending from a limited worldview; the themes of literature that are too vast for the small manicured island of the British are present in the sprawling Americas. He traces American superiority to birthright, echoing the British nobility, gleefully making the claim to American superiority in terms of a reverse cultural imperialism and echoing Thomas Paine. Irving converts fugitive cosmopolitanism to American nationality.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Young Goodman Brown," 3

He could have well nigh sworn, that the shape of his own dead father beckoned him to advance, looking downward from a smoke-wreath, while a woman, with dim features of despair, threw out her hand to warn him back. (352, Young Goodman Brown)

Washington Irving, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" 2

He was, in fact, an odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple credulity. His appetite for the marvellous, and his powers of digesting it, were equally extraordinary; and both had been increased by his residence in this spellbound region. No tale was too gross or too monstrous for his capacious swallow. (B:45)

Lydia Marie Child, "The Black Saxons"

His republican sympathies, and the "system entailed upon him by his ancestors," were obviously out of joint with each other; and the skilfullest soldering of casuistry could by no means make them adhere together. Clear as the tones of a cathedral bell above the hacks and drays of a city, the voice of Reason rose above all the pretexts of selfishness, and the apologies of sophistry, and loudly proclaimed that his sympathies were right, and his practice wrong. Had there been at his elbow some honest John Woolman, or fearless Elias Hicks, that hour might perhaps have seen him a freeman, in giving freedom to his serfs. But he was alone; and the prejudices of education, and the habits of his whole life, conjured up a fearful array of lions in his path; and he wist not that they were phantoms. The admonitions of awakened conscience gradually gave place to considerations of personal safety, and plans for ascertaining the real extent of his danger. Evident power of language and other people to move - without attending and cultivating the conditions of conversion, prejudice and habit are left to do their work; in the absence of the immediatist performance, custom is allowed to mediate the decisions of individuals

Black Hawk, Life of Black Hawk 3

How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right. (311) -language and writing are weaponized, smooth, slippery

Edgar Allan Poe, "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" 2

I bent my steps immediately to the mountains, and, about ten, entered a gorge which was entirely new to me. I followed the windings of this pass with much interest. The scenery which presented itself on all sides, although scarcely entitled to be called grand, had about it an indescribable and to me a delicious aspect of dreary desolation. The solitude seemed absolutely virgin. I could not help believing that the green sods and the gray rocks upon which I trod had been trodden never before by the foot of a human being. So entirely secluded, and in fact inaccessible, except through a series of accidents, is the entrance of the ravine, that it is by no means impossible that I was indeed the first adventurer- the very first and sole adventurer who had ever penetrated its recesses. (657-58)

Lydia Marie Child, Letter XXXIV

I once heard a very beautiful lecture from R.W. Emerson, on Being and Seeming. In the course of many remarks, as true as they were graceful, he urged women to be rather than seem. He told them that all their laboured education of forms, strict observance of genteel etiquette, tasteful arrangement of the toilette, &c, all this seeming would not gain hearts like being truly what God made them; that earnest simplicity, the sincerity of nature, would kindle the eye, light up the countenance, and give an inexpressible charm to the plainest features. The advice was excellent, but the motive, by which it was urged, brought a flush of indignation over my face. Men were exhorted to be, rather than seem, that they might fulfil the sacred mission for which theirs were embodied; that they might, in God's freedom, grow up into the full stature of spiritual manhood; but women were urged to simplicity and truthfulness, that they might become pleasing. (Letter XXXIV)

Edgar Allan Poe, "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" 3

I remembered, too, strange stories told about these Ragged Hills, and of the uncouth and fierce races of men who tenanted their groves and caverns. A thousand vague fancies oppressed and disconcerted me- fancies the more distressing because vague. Very suddenly my attention was arrested by the loud beating of a drum. (658)

William Lloyd Garrison, "To The Public"

I unreflectingly assented to the popular but pernicious doctrine of gradual abolition. I seize this opportunity to make a full and unequivocal recantation, and thus publicly to to ask pardon of my God, of my country, and of my brethren the poor slaves, for having uttered a sentiment so full of timidity, injustice, or absurdity. Oppression! I have seen thee, face to face, And met thy cruel eye and cloudy brow; But thy soul-withering glance I fear not now -- For dread to prouder feelings doth give place Of deep abhorrence! Scorning the disgrace Of slavish knees that at thy footstool bow, I also kneel -- but with far other vow Do hail thee and thy hord of hirelings base: -- I swear, while life-blood warms my throbbing veins, Still to oppose and thwart, with heart and hand, Thy brutalising sway -- till Afric's chains Are burst, and Freedom rules the rescued land, -- Trampling Oppression and his iron rod: Such is the vow I take -- SO HELP ME GOD!

Domingo Sarmiento, Facundo

If any form of national literature shall appear in these new American societies, it must result from the description of the mighty scenes of nature, and still more from the illustration of the struggle between European civilization and native Barbarism (28) Now, I inquire, what impressions must be made upon the inhabitant of the Argentine Republic by the simple act of fixing his eyes upon the horizon, and seeing nothing?...What is the end of the world which he vainly seeks to penetrate? He knows not! What is there beyond what he sees? The wilderness, danger, the savage, death! Here is poetry already; he who moves among such scenes is assailed by fantastic doubts and fears, by dreams which possess his waking hours. (30-31) Examples of the transcendentalist world being applied to the Americas & the formation of a national literature

Wendell Phillips, "Philosophy of the Abolition Movement" 2

Immediatism - hyper-Protestant refusal of any separation from God In such a land, the Abolitionists early saw, that for a moral question like theirs, only two paths lay open: to work through the church--that failing, to join battle with it. Some tried long, like Luther, to be Protestants, and yet not come out of Catholicism; but their eyes were soon opened. Since then, we have been convinced that, to come out from the Church, to hold her up as the Bulwark of Slavery, and to make her shortcomings the main burden of our appeals to the religious sentiment of the community, was our first duty and best policy. This course alienated many friends, and was a subject of frequent rebuke from such men as Dr. Channing. But nothing has ever more strengthened the cause, or won it more influence; and it has had the healthiest effect on the Church itself.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance" 1

In Self-Reliance - the limitations of American rugged individualism as exclusionary and inapplicable to women and minorities Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways. If malic and vanity wear the cost of philanthropy, shall that pass?... I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. (Self Reliance)

Monroe Doctrine

In regard to these continents...it is equally impossible, therefore, that we should behold such interposition in any form, with indifference began the seeds of a cultural anxiety that already attended precisely the same hemisphereic thinking; the Anglo-Saxonist obssession with the idea that our neighbors may become our rivals ex. Bello and Irving

Edgar Allan Poe, "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" 4

Insinuates a kind of karmic judgment - what does it mean for Bedloe to have virtually experienced oldeb's death and repeated it (snakelike leech vs snakelike arrow) redundancy, episode reenacted because a lesson has gone unlearned Is Bedloe all too eager to join against the Indians - I found myself at the foot of a high mountain...I knew not whom with the nervous ferocity of despair (659-60,661)

"The Cask of Amontillado," Poe

Inters Fortunato alive because of a perceived "slight"; led to believe that slight has caused Montresor to take this disturbing // perverse action Other hints of a class bound society built on distrust - narrator's description of how he gets his servants out of the palazzo - knowing that his servants will immediately disobey the master - given antagonism between classes Narrator assumes that we will trust Montresor without any ethos The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that gave utterance to a threat. At length I would be avenged; this was a point definitely, settled --but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved precluded the idea of risk. I must not only punish but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong. Narrator presupposes that we are in sympathy with him and that the rationale is self justifying enact the ethos of an aristocratic society - we are put in the position of verifying his carte blanche violence

Washington Irving, "The Art of Bookmaking"

Irving and Bello produced much of their cultural commentary from abroad; Irving lived in Europe for much of that time; they were cultural commentators and government envoys with a common effort to outline the American difference Irving, by contrast to Bello, straight up disses London, and the art of adopting English influences, in "The Art of Bookmaking": I found that these mysterious personages, whom I had mistaken for Magi, were principally authors, and in the very act of manufacturing books. I was, in fact, in the reading room of the great British Library—an immense collection of volumes of all ages and languages, many of which are now forgotten, and most of which are seldom read; one of these sequestered pools of obsolete literature to which modern authors repair and draw buckets full of classic lore, or "pure English, undefiled," wherewith to swell their own scanty rills of thought...There was one dapper little gentleman in bright-colored clothes, with a chirping, gossiping expression of countenance, who had all the appearance of an author on good terms with his bookseller. After considering him attentively, I recognized in him a diligent getter-up of miscellaneous works which bustled off well with the trade. I was curious to see how he manufactured his wares. He made more stir and show of business than any of the others, dipping into various books, fluttering over the leaves of manuscripts, taking a morsel out of one, a morsel out of another, "line upon line, precept upon precept, here a little and there a little." The contents of his book seemed to be as heterogeneous as those of the witches' cauldron in Macbeth. It was here a finger and there a thumb, toe of frog and blind-worm's sting, with his own gossip poured in like "baboon's blood," to make the medley "slab and good." (79-80)

Washington Irving, "Philip of Pokanoket" 1

Irving's engagement with Phillip is mediated through literary imperatives It is to be regretted that those early writers who treated of the discovery and settlement of America have not given us more particular and candid accounts of the remarkable characters that flourished in savage life. The scanty anecdotes which have reached us are full of peculiarity and interest; they furnish us with nearer glimpses of human nature. (283)

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature," 6

It appears that motion, poetry, physical and intellectual science, and religion, all tend to affect our convictions of the reality of the external world. But I own there is something ungrateful in expanding too curiously the particulars of the general proposition, that all culture tends to imbue us with idealism. I have no hostility to nature, but a child's love to it. I expand and live in the warm day like corn and melons. Let us speak her fair. I do not wish to fling stones at my beautiful mother, nor soil my gentle nest. I only wish to indicate the true position of nature in regard to man, wherein to establish man, all right education tends; as the ground which to attain is the object of human life, that is, of man's connection with nature. Culture inverts the vulgar views of nature, and brings the mind to call that apparent, which it uses to call real, and that real, which it uses to call visionary. Children, it is true, believe in the external world. The belief that it appears only, is an afterthought, but with culture, this faith will as surely arise on the mind as did the first. The advantage of the ideal theory over the popular faith, is this, that it presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable to the mind. (Nature)

cannibalistic encyclopedism / historical originality

It is as if the great American novel had constantly to be measuring itself against the highest achievements of other cultures

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The May-Pole of Merry Mount" 2

Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire (361, Merry Mount) The future complexion of New England (365, Merry Mount)

Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills 5

Middle class can only uplift the working class by providing an inspirational model for them to uplift themselves Eighteen centuries ago, the Master of this man tried reform in the streets of a city as crowded and vile as this, and did not fail. His disciple, showing Him to-night to cultured hearers, showing the clearness of the God-power acting through Him, shrank back from one coarse fact; that in birth and habit the man Christ was thrown up from the lowest of the people: his flesh, their flesh; their blood, his blood; tempted like them, to brutalize day by day; to lie, to steal: the actual slime and want of their hourly life, and the wine-press he trod alone. Yet, is there no meaning in this perpetually covered truth? If the son of the carpenter had stood in the church that night, as he stood with the fishermen and harlots by the sea of Galilee, before His Father and their Father, despised and rejected of men, without a place to lay His head, wounded for their iniquities, bruised for their transgressions, would not that hungry mill-boy at least, in the back seat, have "known the man"? That Jesus did not stand there.

Edgar Allan Poe, "The Masque of the Red Death" 1

Minimal Americanness manifest in Poe - in flamboyant settings of pageant a terrifying sense of claustrophobia And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all. Courtiers perish, society collapses as their desire to preserve their noble blood is destroyed by the red death; blood (mortality) trumps blood (nobility) One reading - impossibility of the narratorial pov - if the red death exterminates revelers, how can the story be told from the inside? who is the only surviving witness of the carnage? maybe death itself - winking anachronism (centuries after the events that the story depicts) - death as equal opportunity mower down of rich and poor alike - comeuppance for the uppity

Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills 4

Mitchell mediates the reader's experience by serving as the middle class reader, and mediates the narrator's narrative by echoing it; also mediates Hugh Wolfe Meets hugh in the context of his meeting with Mitchell and functions as the type of char that Hugh wants to become Then flashed before his vivid poetic sense the man who had left him,—the pure face, the delicate, sinewy limbs, in harmony with all he knew of beauty or truth. In his cloudy fancy he had pictured a Something like this. He had found it in this Mitchell, even when he idly scoffed at his pain: a Man all-knowing, all-seeing, crowned by Nature, reigning,—the keen glance of his eye falling like a sceptre on other men. That night, after the trial, a gentleman came to see him here, name of Mitchell,—him as he stole from. Talked to him for an hour. Thought he came for curiosity, like. After he was gone, thought Wolfe was remarkable quiet, and went into his cell

Moby Dick 5

Moby Dick as rewriting of the book of job As the three boats lay there on that gently rolling sea, gazing down into its eternal blue noon; and as not a single groan or cry of any sort, nay, not so much as a ripple or a bubble came up from its depths; what landsman would have thought, that beneath all that silence and placidity, the utmost monster of the seas was writhing and wrenching in agony! Not eight inches of perpendicular rope were visible at the bows. Seems it credible that by three such thin threads the great Leviathan was suspended like the big weight to an eight day clock. Suspended? and to what? To three bits of board. Is this the creature of whom it was once so triumphantly said—"Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish-spears? The sword of him that layeth at him cannot hold, the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon: he esteemeth iron as straw; the arrow cannot make him flee; darts are counted as stubble; he laugheth at the shaking of a spear!" This the creature? this he? Oh! that unfulfilments should follow the prophets. For with the strength of a thousand thighs in his tail, Leviathan had run his head under the mountains of the sea, to hide him from the Pequod's fish-spears!

Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?" 1

Must I undertake to prove that the slave is a man? (1238) The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me.

Black Hawk, Life of Black Hawk 1

My reason teaches me that land cannot be sold. The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon, and cultivate, as far as it is necessary for their subsistence, and so long as they occupy and cultivate it, they have the right to the soil—but if they voluntarily leave it, than any other people have a right to settle upon it. Nothing can be sold, but such things as can be carried away. (311) -compact between people and the Great Spirit of voluntary cultivation of land, but land is not movable and thus cannot be sold, because it is not owned, only rented, so to speak, from the Great Spirit

Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills 2

Narrator's identification with the middle class reader: I want you to hide your disgust, take no heed to your clean clothes, and come right down with me,—here, into the thickest of the fog and mud and foul effluvia. I want you to hear this story. There is a secret down here, in this nightmare fog, that has lain dumb for centuries: I want to make it a real thing to you. You, Egoist, or Pantheist, or Arminian, busy in making straight paths for your feet on the hills, do not see it clearly,—this terrible question which men here have gone mad and died trying to answer. I dare not put this secret into words. I told you it was dumb. These men, going by with drunken faces and brains full of unawakened power, do not ask it of Society or of God. Their lives ask it; their deaths ask it. There is no reply. I will tell you plainly that I have a great hope; and I bring it to you to be tested. It is this: that this terrible dumb question is its own reply; that it is not the sentence of death we think it, but, from the very extremity of its darkness, the most solemn prophecy which the world has known of the Hope to come. I dare make my meaning no clearer, but will only tell my story. It will, perhaps, seem to you as foul and dark as this thick vapor about us, I want you to come down and look at this Wolfe, standing there among the lowest of his kind, and see him just as he is, that you may judge him justly when you hear the story of this night. I want you to look back, as he does every day, at his birth in vice, his starved infancy; to remember the heavy years he has groped through as boy and man,—the slow, heavy years of constant, hot work. So long ago he began, that he thinks sometimes he has worked there for ages. There is no hope that it will ever end. Think that God put into this man's soul a fierce thirst for beauty,—to know it, to create it; to be—something, he knows not what,—other than he is. There are moments when a passing cloud, the sun glinting on the purple thistles, a kindly smile, a child's face, will rouse him to a passion of pain,—when his nature starts up with a mad cry of rage against God, man, whoever it is that has forced this vile, slimy life upon him. With all this groping, this mad desire, a great blind intellect stumbling through wrong, a loving poet's heart, the man was by habit only a coarse, vulgar laborer, familiar with sights and words you would blush to name. Be just: when I tell you about this night, see him as he is. Be just,—not like man's law, which seizes on one isolated fact, but like God's judging angel, whose clear, sad eye saw all the countless cankering days of this man's life, all the countless nights, when, sick with starving, his soul fainted in him, before it judged him for this night, the saddest of all. A hope, trifling, perhaps, but very dear, had died just then out of the poor puddler's life, as he looked at the sleeping, innocent girl,—some plan for the future, in which she had borne a part. He gave it up that moment, then and forever. Only a trifle, perhaps, to us: his face grew a shade paler,—that was all. But, somehow, the man's soul, as God and the angels looked down on it, never was the same afterwards.

Narrow berth of cultural identity (who gets to be people?)

Native insurgency - idea of Indian removal acts and agency natives had to take up to try and preserve their own lands African integration- how will enslaved people function in the US? British imperialism- relationship with Britain and how it changed as a result of US sovereignty; the imperialism of Britain and how they tried to control land in other territories Latin American independence ex. William Cullen Bryant's "The Prairies"

Emerson (The American Scholar)

Only way of accounting for the fact that "American Scholar" is surprisingly short: The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be a university of knowledges. If there be one lesson more than another, which should pierce his ear, it is, The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all. Mr. President and Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. (American Scholar)

Moby Dick 4

Opposition between Hellenism vs. Hebraism Ahab (critiques) vs. Ishmael (celebrates) Hellenism - philosophy of plato integrated into christian metaphysics - essentialist view that random appearances of the world are united by one meeting, apprehension of which involves violent penetration "way is in rather than through the letter" (293) "excellence of the book trumps that of some original occulted word" (296) "Ishmael 'refuses to gather words into Word'" (299) "Ishmael sails on to find in words not a Word, but more words still" Reconcile scripture's historicity with its eternal truth

Poe

Parrington on Poe - quite outside the current of American thought Relates at very few points to the main assumptions about literature that were held by any of my group- Matthiessen Relied on stereotypes of Poe as the southerner - planter, walking, breathing anachronism of production of feudal economy and serfdom, given to the medieval and outdated in the modern world

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature," 1

Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which Philosophy distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, and other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, Nature. (Nature 182)

Herman Melville, "Benito Cereno" 5

Shifts to unclear indirect / free indirect indirect: "what then, thought...has come (B:1538?) free indirect: "There is something in the negro....appear to a benevolent one (B:1511-12) There is something in the negro which, in a peculiar way, fits him for avocations about one's person. Most negroes are natural valets and hair-dressers; taking to the comb and brush congenially as to the castinets, and flourishing them apparently with almost equal satisfaction. There is, too, a smooth tact about them in this employment, with a marvelous, noiseless, gliding briskness, not ungraceful in its way, singularly pleasing to behold, and still more so to be the manipulated subject of. And above all is the great gift of good-humor. Not the mere grin or laugh is here meant. Those were unsuitable. But a certain easy cheerfulness, harmonious in every glance and gesture; as though God had set the whole negro to some pleasant tune. When to this is added the docility arising from the unaspiring contentment of a limited mind and that susceptibility of blind attachment sometimes inhering in indisputable inferiors, one readily perceives why those hypochondriacs, Johnson and Byron — it may be, something like the hypochondriac Benito Cereno — took to their hearts, almost to the exclusion of the entire white race, their serving men, the negroes, Barber and Fletcher. But if there be that in the negro which exempts him from the inflicted sourness of the morbid or cynical mind, how, in his most prepossessing aspects, must he appear to a benevolent one?

"The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether"

Similarly creepy European setting Broadly comic - uneasy masquerade of order that obscures the fact that world has been turned upside down - masters become slaves Captive keepers - 716 - are a "perfect army of chimpanzees", racialized/racist image of slave revolt Identify captive keepers with slaves, lunatics with southern provincialists Captor inmates - are southern provincialists - lunatics temporarily holding at bay the writing of the world Troubling extent to which the master class depends on slaves for economic and social status soothing system - keepers indulgence of inmates' delusions - jab at immediate abolition??? permits lunatics to act out delusions - southern slaveholding is delusion of grandeur that permits slaveholder to exercise absolute power = may be at black slaves for capitulating to fantasies of the masters doesn't cure but creates environment where lunacy reigns supreme system of doctor tar and professor father - revolted inmates' violent imprisonment of the keeper - turns into a system of immense violence where slave revolt cannot help but happen haunted by the potential consequence Manipulated nationalist effects in order to undercut them against imperialist tendencies

Herman Melville, Moby Dick 3

Site at which we see purported omniscience exposed as artistic omnipotence Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behooves me to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him out to the uttermost coil of his bowels. Having already described him in most of his present habitatory and anatomical peculiarities, it now remains to magnify him in an archæological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of view. Applied to any other creature than the Leviathan—to an ant or a flea—such portly terms might justly be deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered. Fain am I to stagger to this emprise under the weightiest words of the dictionary. And here be it said, that whenever it has been convenient to consult one in the course of these dissertations, I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer's uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author like me. One often hears of writers that rise and swell with their subject, though it may seem but an ordinary one. How, then, with me, writing of this Leviathan? Unconsciously my chirography expands into placard capitals. Give me a condor's quill! Give me Vesuvius' crater for an inkstand! Friends, hold my arms! For in the mere act of penning my thoughts of this Leviathan, they weary me, and make me faint with their outreaching comprehensiveness of sweep, as if to include the whole circle of the sciences, and all the generations of whales, and men, and mastodons, past, present, and to come, with all the revolving panoramas of empire on earth, and throughout the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs. Such, and so magnifying, is the virtue of a large and liberal theme! We expand to its bulk. To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it. Is language an end in itself and not a way to articulate meaning? Fruitlessness of the chapters is compensated for by their rhetorical effervescence Might be attributed to the need to staunch the insatiable thirst for knowledge, to exhaust the desire for knowledge and come at it with this massive archive of information in order to quell that desire for knowledge Wager seems to be something like: you'll have so much fun along the way that you'll forget about getting to the knowledge that you want to obtain

Wendell Phillips, "Philosophy of the Abolition Movement"

So far from the Anti-Slavery cause having lacked a manly and able discussion, I think it will be acknowledged hereafter that this discussion has been one of the noblest contributions to a literature really American. Heretofore, not only has our tone been but an echo of foreign culture, but the very topics discussed and the views maintained have been too often pale reflections of European politics and European philosophy. No matter what dress we assumed, the voice was ever "the voice of Jacob." At last we have stirred a question thoroughly American; the subject has been looked at from a point of view entirely American; and it is of such deep interest, that it has called out all the intellectual strength of the nation. For once, the nation speaks its own thoughts, in its own language, and the tone also is all its own.

The(ri)humanism in which mortal beings throw off their "creatureliness" by looking to each other rather than up to a creator for ultimate value, finding—or making—"God" in and of themselves

Speeches by ahab with network of allusion to one another Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast man's eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light, O sun! Level by nature to this earth's horizon are the glances of man's eyes; not shot from the crown of his head, as if God had meant him to gaze on his firmament. Curse thee, thou quadrant!" dashing it to the deck, "no longer will I guide my earthly way by thee;" meant to exist on horizontal not vertical plane Lo! ye believers in gods all goodness, and in man all ill, lo you! see the omniscient gods oblivious of suffering man; and man, though idiotic, and knowing not what he does, yet full of the sweet things of love and gratitude. Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearth-stone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board!—lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!" Authority of humans must come from humans themselves: imminent rather than transcendent otherness Collective relocation of ultimate value from an absolute god to the horizontal access on which humans and nonhumans are plotted

William Cullen Bryant, "The Prairies", 2

Still this great solitude is quick with life. Myriads of insects, gaudy as the flowers They flutter over, gentle quadrupeds, And birds, that scarce have learned the fear of man, Are here, and sliding reptiles of the ground, Startlingly beautiful. The graceful deer Bounds to the wood at my approach. The bee, A more adventurous colonist than man, With whom he came across the eastern deep, Fills the savannas with his murmurings, And hides his sweets, as in the golden age, Within the hollow oak. I listen long To his domestic hum, and think I hear The sound of that advancing multitude Which soon shall fill these deserts. From the ground Comes up the laugh of children, the soft voice Of maidens, and the sweet and solemn hymn Of Sabbath worshippers. The low of herds Blends with the rustling of the heavy grain Over the dark brown furrows. All at once A fresher winds sweeps by, and breaks my dream, And I am in the wilderness alone. -Depicts the solitude as ready for the onset of settlers; fertile, virgin, when in reality this is so untrue

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance" 2

This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms. All things real are so by so much virtue as they contain. Commerce, husbandry, hunting, whaling, war, eloquence, personal weight, are somewhat, and engage my respect as examples of its presence and impure action. I see the same law working in nature for conservation and growth. Power is in nature the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying soul. Thus all concentrates: let us not rove; let us sit at home with the cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions, by a simple declaration of the divine fact. Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, for God is here within. Let our simplicity judge them, and our docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of nature and fortune beside our native riches. (Self-Reliance)

William Apess, "Eulogy on King Philip" 2

This, if now done, it would be called an insult, and every white man would be called to go out and act the part of a patriot, to defend their country's rights (280)

Wendell Phillips, "Philosophy of the Abolition Movement" 3

Transformative power of language alone; American citizens have been by created by the slave power and cannot speak back to the slave power in its own terms (conventional means like voting and lobbying) Every thoughtful and unprejudiced mind must see that such an evil as slavery will yield only to the most radical treatment. If you consider the work we have to do, you will not think us needlessly aggressive, or that we dig down unnecessarily deep in laying the foundations of our enterprise. A money power of two thousand millions of dollars, as the prices of slaves now range, held by a small body of able and desperate men; that body raised into a political aristocracy by special constitutional provisions; cotton, the product of slave labor, forming the basis of our whole foreign commerce, and the commercial class thus subsidized; the press bought up, the pulpit reduced to vassalage, the heart of the common people chilled by a bitter prejudice against the black race; our leading men bribed, by ambition, either to silence or open hostility--in such a land, on what shall an Abolitionist rely? On a few cold prayers, mere lip service, and never from the heart? On a Church Resolution, hidden often in its records, and meant only as a decent cover for servility in daily practice? On political parties, with their superficial influence at best, and seeking, ordinarily, only to use existing prejudices to the best advantage? Slavery has deeper root here than any aristocratic institution has in Europe; and Politics is but the common pulse beat of which Revolution is the fever spasm. Yet we have seen European aristocracy survive storms which seemed to reach down to the primal strata of European life. Shall we then trust to mere Politics, where even Revolution has failed? How shall the stream rise above its fountain? Where shall our church organizations or parties get strength to attack their great parent and moulder, the Slave Power? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?

William Apess, "Eulogy on King Philip" 1

What would you think if some foreign nation, unknown to you, should come and carry away from you three lovely children, whom you had dandled on the knee, and at some future time you should behold them and break forth in sorrow, with your heart broken, and merely ask," Sirs, where are my little ones?" and some one should reply: "It was passion, great passion." What would you think of them? Should you not think they were beings made more like rocks than men? (280)

Herman Melville, Moby Dick 2

Two narratives - ahab and ishmael contradict; monomania vs. omniscience Cetology chapters - bulk of reading assignment Interrogating idea of omniscience - what can one know, what does one know, how? 8 moves made from beginning of cetology chapter to the end (the tale/tail) substratum of cytological data - American and Melvillian passion for informative unfamiliar lore "compact round body of its roots..." rhetorical intensification of data "could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it" metaphorization of the data, so as to begin to dissolve the shipboard context series of comparisons between whale tail and elephant trunk mythification of the sea "out of the bottomless profundities that gigantic tale seems spasmodically snatching at the highest heaven....flame Baltic of hell" complication of the mythic framework to introduce the possibility of solipsism "but in gazing at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in...if in that of Isaiah, the archangels" comic disruption of mythic framework tongue in cheek image of whales "praying with peaked flukes" self conscious proclamation of scribal inadequacy "the more i consider his mighty tail, the more do I deplore my inability to express it" ambiguous reformulation of the whale as mystery "dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not, and never will...I say again he has no face"

Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills 1

Wage slavery - capitalist exploitation of the underclass Frames of the story / literal frames Exterior frame - narrator (and the middle class reader with whom she identifies) I open the window, and, looking out, can scarcely see through the rain the grocer's shop opposite, where a crowd of drunken Irishmen are puffing Lynchburg tobacco in their pipes. I can detect the scent through all the foul smells ranging loose in the air. The idiosyncrasy of this town is smoke. It rolls sullenly in slow folds from the great chimneys of the iron-foundries, and settles down in black, slimy pools on the muddy streets. Smoke on the wharves, smoke on the dingy boats, on the yellow river,—clinging in a coating of greasy soot to the house-front, the two faded poplars, the faces of the passers-by. The long train of mules, dragging masses of pig-iron through the narrow street, have a foul vapor hanging to their reeking sides. Here, inside, is a little broken figure of an angel pointing upward from the mantel-shelf; but even its wings are covered with smoke, clotted and black. Smoke everywhere! A dirty canary chirps desolately in a cage beside me. Its dream of green fields and sunshine is a very old dream,—almost worn out, I think. From the back-window I can see a narrow brick-yard sloping down to the river-side, strewed with rain-butts and tubs. The river, dull and tawny-colored, (la belle riviere!) drags itself sluggishly along, tired of the heavy weight of boats and coal-barges. What wonder? When I was a child, I used to fancy a look of weary, dumb appeal upon the face of the negro-like river slavishly bearing its burden day after day. Something of the same idle notion comes to me to-day, when from the street-window I look on the slow stream of human life creeping past, night and morning, to the great mills. Masses of men, with dull, besotted faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or cunning; skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes; stooping all night over boiling caldrons of metal, laired by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy; breathing from infancy to death an air saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness for soul and body. What do you make of a case like that, amateur psychologist?

Washington Irving, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" 4

What passed at this interview I will not say, for in fact I do not know. (56) Narrator's cluelessness with info is crucial to the plot of the story; another symptom of abundance is that the story is told at many removes. Washington Irving → The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon → the papers of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker → oral narrative of a pleasant, shabby, gentlemanly old fellow → oral stories of the diverse residents of Sleepy Hollow

Rebecca Harding Davis, Life in the Iron Mills 6

What shall we do to be saved? question is its own reply - acknowledge the necessity of a mediation and remediation, to be saved is to be located in a mediated system of mutual dependence on a benevolent god Deborah did not doubt her. As the evening wore on, she leaned against the iron bars, looking at the hills that rose far off, through the thick sodden clouds, like a bright, unattainable calm. As she looked, a shadow of their solemn repose fell on her face; its fierce discontent faded into a pitiful, humble quiet. Argument that deborah is a redeemed narrator, fulfilling criteria of christian reform

Washington Irving, "The Art of Bookmaking" 2

What was formerly a ponderous history revives in the shape of a romance, an old legend changes into a modern play, and a sober philosophical treatise furnishes the body fr a whole series of bouncing and sparkling essays. Thus it is in the clearing of our American woodlands,; where we burn down a forest of stately pines, a progeny of dwarf oaks start up in their place, and we never see the prostrate trunk of a tree moldering into soil, but it gives birth to a whole tribe of fungi. (81)

Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass B:1294-1311, "Song of Myself" B:1312-56, poems from Drum-Taps B:1376-82, selections from Democratic Vistas B:1406-10

Whitman = hyper identified with America and Americana, shows literary nationalism as it transformed across the Civil War and shifting rhythms of literary nationalism across the period How does his sense of the timeframe change- how does this shifting sense of the nation's fortunes register in the prosody of his poems, and how does his work democratic change in terms of form and content as he lives through the Civil War? Antebellum - 1855 leaves of grass the united states themselves....of the citizen (B:1298) greatness linked to amplitude The American poets are to enclose old and new for America is the race of races. Of them a bard is to be commensurate with a people. To him the other continents arrive as contributions . . . he gives them reception for their sake and his own sake. His spirit responds to his country's spirit american exceptionalism hinges on largeness reflected somehow in mores and manners of people greatness in natural fact corresponds with specific cultural qualities The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it. What's at stake in making us a poem? question of how to create a national literature is reframed but the genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors . . . but always most in the common people...it awaits the gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it (B: 1298) Unrhymed, gigantic, generous Conveniently modeled in the expansiveness of the passage at hand Parataxis - very few dependent clauses - open ended stringing of conjunctions together sense of a potentially infinite catalogue - side by side, nonhierarchical parallelism and i know that...prisoner, fancy-man, rowdy, lawyer, physician, or priest (B:1323-24) Anaphora pt 2 - reflections on the fractured nations drum taps - rough chronological order beat! beat! drums!...so loud you bugles blow (1376) Bravado nationalism and bravura rhythms of the preface enactment of battlefield bravery arous'd and angry....silently watch the dead 1379 subsequent poems - departure when you my son and my comrade...never again on earth responding 1377 what you ask of my days....i onward go, i stop 1379-81 Hypertaxis; convoluted, multi clause sentences a sight in camp in the daybreak...here again he lies (B:1378) trochaic adjectives i know my words are weapons...to unsettle them 1381 science fiction of democracy the american expression is brawny enough and limber enough 1310-11 i feel, with dejectn and amazement that...entirely uncelebrated, unexpressed B:1408 what has fill'd...Genius of these States (B:1408) the fruition of democracy...in the future (B:1409) though not for us the joy...democratic principle 1410

Washington Irving, "Phillip of Pokanoket" 2

With heroic qualities and bold achievements that would have graced a civilized warrior and have rendered him the theme of the poet and the historian, he lived a wanderer and a fugitive in his native land, and went down, like a lonely bark foundering amidst darkness and tempest—without a pitying eye to weep his fall or a friendly hand to record his struggle. (299) To Irving, Philip is a missed literary opportunity, invoked to gratify ideas of the romantics; a literary escape from the foppishness of civilized life, where the happiness of man depends on the opinion of his fellow man

Gradualism

gradualists were focused on slow and steady liberation of slaves

Trans-American Renaissance

the formation of the American renaissance that continues to organize so many literary-historiographical narratives...more accurately reconfigures as a trans-american renaissance, a period of literary border crossing, intercontinental exchange, and complex political implications...tied as it has always been to a cultural moment of intense national self consciousness is inherently dependent upon and sustained not only by nationalist discourses but the underlying transnational desires and anxieties