English 644: Fall 2004
Borders, Crossings, and Frontiers: from Early America to the Present

“The frontiers are not east or west, north or south; but wherever a person fronts a fact." Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Starting with Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Hypothesis,” we will examine notions of the American “frontier,” that site where different cultures or realities meet at some geographic, social, linguistic, or cultural border. We’ll examine texts from different periods, genres, and cultural perspectives about frontier sites, seeking to understand each in its historical/cultural context. Along the way, we’ll develop interpretive/theoretical strategies (American Studies, feminism, ecocriticism, post-modern notions of “hybridity”) for illuminating these texts and terms. What do we mean when we use the word “frontier”? Where do our ideas about it come from? How have they changed? How did early Americans respond to and describe the landscapes of North America during the first centuries of its non-native exploration and settlement? We’ll be particularly interested in how “cartographic texts” (those with come kind of spatial narrative) negotiate natural, contested spaces as sites of possession and dispossession.

Readings:

Native American Oral Narratives from the Heath[1].

Bartolome de las Casas, Devastation of the Indies. Heath and Roots[2] sections by Christopher Columbus.

Mary Rowlandson and Elizabeth House Trist, from Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Women’s Narratives

Sections in Heath and Roots by Lewis and Clark, Jefferson, Crevecoeur, Fremont

James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers[3]

Margaret Fuller, Summer on the Lakes

Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain (and view film)

John G. Niehardt, Black Elk Speaks

John Ford, The Searchers (film)

Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

Molly Gloss, The Jump-Off Creeek*

Either Gloria Anzaldua, La frontera/Borderlands or Ronald Takaki, Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America

*a late entry, not ordered through the book store. Find at Amazon, Powell’s, Abebooks, or wherever.

Requirements:

Keep up with the ample reading load

Faithful attendance and participation

Responses posted to an electronic roundtable (alternating with responses from peers)

Serve as discussant or co-discussant to draw on research

1 close reading (4-6 pages)

1 seminar paper (8-12 pages)

Close Reading: Choose a single passage/scene/section from one of the required core readings. Offer a close reading of this passage that demonstrates the way in which your chosen passage illuminates the larger concerns of the full text. In other words, read your

selected passage as a way into understanding at least some of the major themes, plot workings, stylistic strategies, rhetorical strategies, and/or symbolic codes, etc. of the text as a whole. Be sure to focus, and don't try to write about everything in the entire work. Choose your passage carefully, and then focus on its major implications (as you see them).

You may--but are not required--to use secondary sources to help you develop your interpretive approach. Be sure to cite all ideas and quotations taken from secondary sources. Here’s a sample close reading from The Explicator on Cooper’s The Prairie.

Discussants: The goal here to learn how to clearly and concisely present the ideas of prior critics and scholars, developing a greater facility with critical discourses and methods. Also, you will help facilitate discussion for the first night of that week, by raising appropriate questions and reviewing the class’s initial responses. Try to “lead off” the posts by putting up three or so good prompts by Sunday, 4:00. You may distribute handouts if necessary. Draw on the suggested works, if appropriate/warranted, but you may (should?) also find others.

Posts/Ripostes: By 3:00 before Monday class, respond to the reading and/or a discussant’s question, getting in lots of textual evidence. We’ll divide the class in two, so there are posters and riposters. The riposters should respond to the initial round of posts and to Monday’s class discussion, more informally, by Wednesday 3:00. Only the posts will be examined qualitatively, for how well they 1) present a point of view or respond to a question 2) use evidence to support it. About a page and ½ in length. The ripostes count toward your class discussion grade. 5 posts (you can beg off at least two) x 3 pts = 15 plus 5 ripostes (at least, but you may do more) = 20

Seminar Paper: Write an 8-12 page paper with secondary research on a topic that grows out of our course.

Grading:

Close Reading	20
Posts and Ripostes	20
Discussant / discussion	20
Seminar Paper	40

Bibliography

Davis, Wiliam C. A Way through the Wilderness: The Natchez Trace and the Southern Frontier. Baton Rouge:, Louisiana State UP,: 1996.

Georgi-Findlay, Brigitte. The Frontiers of Women's Writing: Women's Narratives and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion. Tucson:, U of Arizona P,: 1996.

Heil, Patricia Leeuwenburg. The Frontier Heroine in American Literature, 1983.

Heyne, Eric. Desert, Garden, Margin, Range: Literature on the American Frontier, Twayne Publishers: New York, 1992.

Jensen, Joan M., ed. With These Hands: Women Working on the Land. New York:, The Feminist P,: 1996.

Krech, Shepard. The Ecological Indian: Myth and History

*Kolodny, Annette. The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984.

Lape, Noreen Groover. West of the Border: The Multicultural Literature of the Western American Frontiers, 2003.

Larson, Kelli A., Kirkland's Myth of the American Eve: Revisioning the Frontier Experience, 1992.

Pilkington, Tom. Fate and Free Will on the American Frontier: Cormac McCarthy's Western Fiction

Rosowski, Susan J., ed.Willa Cather's Ecological Imagination.

*Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration Through Violence: TheMythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860),1999.

*Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land; the American West as Symbol and Myth. NY: Vintage Books 1957, [1950].

Steele, Jeffrey. Transfiguring America: Myth, Ideology and Mourning in Margaret Fuller's Writing.

Hallock, Thomas. From the Fallen Tree: Frontier Narratives, Environmental Politics, and the Roots of a National Pastoral, 1749-1826

Taylor, Alan. William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic Knopf: New York, 1995.

See also this annotated bibliography of the American Frontier Heritage.

* = on reserve.

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[1] Refers to Heath Anthology of American Literature

[2] Reading the Roots: American Nature Writing Before Walden, Michael Branch, ed.

[3] Start reading like now because it’s a long #*%$ book.