ENGL 4140

Office Hours: M (1-4), T (9-10 & 3:30-4:30), W (9-10 & 1-4), TR (12:30-1:30), and by appointment

Alternately known as the American Renaissance and the Era of Reform, the middle decades of the nineteenth century might also be called the Age of Manifest Destiny, for it was during this period that feelings of romantic nationalism and a desire for territorial expansion reached their fullest expression in America. Underwritten by the ambition to create new markets, exploit the continent’s vast material resources, and disperse the eastern seaboard’s urban poor over large areas of land, the doctrine of Manifest Destiny rejected any limits to individual or national growth and argued against anything that might restrict the development of what John O’Sullivan called “the great experiment of liberty.” While Emerson encouraged “Young Americans” to create “the country of the Future” by inventing new technologies and harnessing “the sleeping energies of land and water,” other writers looked more warily at western expansion and territorial conquest. This course examines the way in which Manifest Destiny and American expansionism were both elaborated and challenged in the American Romantic literary tradition, as well as in the art, political discourse, and popular culture of the middle-nineteenth century. We will look with specific interest at representations of the Other, particularly Native Americans and African Americans, and the way in which various constructions of the Other ministered to the formation of white republican identity even as they complicated the very idea of American nationhood.

This course will be conducted as a seminar; therefore, active participation in discussion, critical reading of the material, and theoretical engagement with the issues and themes of the course are required. Formal assignments consist of two oral presentation, six one-page response papers, and 10 page essay that uses at least two outside sources and incorporates some form of original archival research. Quizzes and reading journals will largely determine your participation grade. You cannot pass the class without earning a quiz average of at least 60%.

Critical works to include Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence and The Fatal Environment; Richard Drinnon, Facing West; Peter Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire; Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian; Robert Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian; Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land; Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest; Gregory Nobles, American Frontiers; Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land; Roy Harvey Pearce, The Savages of North America; Haynes and Morris, Manifest Destiny and Empire.

Departmental Course Goals

· Students will become familiar with a range of American literary works representing different genres from the nineteenth century, understanding how these works are related to each other and to the historical literary traditions of European and world literature.

· Students will know the distinctive properties of literary expression in America during the nineteenth century.

· Students will understand how social, political, economic, and historical conditions influence the production of literary works.

· Students will demonstrate in both oral and written work a discipline-specific critical facility through convincing and well-supported analysis of related material.

· Students will demonstrate their command of academic English and the tenets of sound composition by means of thesis-driven analytical prose.

· Students will learn to use discipline-specific computer technologies related to the study of language such as listservs, word processing, and internet research.

Program Goals

· This course fulfills one of the departmental requirements for the completion of the English major.

· Students will develop the analytical, oral and written skills to pursue graduate study or careers in teaching, writing, business and a variety of other fields.

· Students will be able to define and pursue independent research agendas.

· This course contributes to the program goal of equipping students with a foundation in literary history and the issues surrounding literary study in contemporary culture.

· This course broadens students' desire and ability to take pleasure in their encounter with literature.

Assessment activities

· Students will display their command of academic English and of the tenets of sound composition by means of thesis-driven analytical prose, including at least ten pages of research-based writing.

Other policies

· Departmental plagiarism policies (see http://www.westga.edu/~engdept/Plagiarism/index.html

· Students should be expected to come to class, prepared and able to participate.

· MLA style should be emphasized and required on out-of-class essays.

Final Grade: To pass the course, students must turn in all papers and earn a passing quiz grade. If you average less than 60% on quizzes or fail to turn in all writing assignments, you will not pass the course. Your final grade will be broken down the following way: short papers and oral reports (25%); term paper (50%); participation—including contributions to discussion, attendance, group work, and quiz score (20%); final exam (5%).

Term Paper: Your basic task for this paper is to produce a well-written, coherent essay whose central argument is both interesting and significant. You will be responsible for devising your own topic, choosing a book (or books) from our reading list, and creating your own research agenda. I ask that each student meet with me at least once during the rough-draft stage of the papers. You will also be expected to participate in a small group tutorial, in which you will read, discuss, and critique two of your peers' essays while receiving feedback on your own work from them. Late papers will be penalized one-third of a letter grade for each weekday they are late.

Discussion: Because this is a seminar, students should attend every class and arrive on time, prepared, and eager to discuss the day’s reading. Your participation grade is partly based upon your performance in discussions. I expect you to demonstrate genuine engagement with the material, actively contribute to discussion topics, show adequate preparation for each class, and respect the arguments and ideas of your classmates. Be sure to bring the text under discussion to every class (and turn your cell phones off!).

Quizzes: Quiz scores will be factored into your participation grade. Over the course of the semester, there will be ten unannounced quizzes, all of which are open note. If you arrive late, you will not be allowed to take the quiz. If you are absent on a day when a quiz is given, you will not be allowed to retake it. Under no circumstances will I give make-up quizzes. When I give a quiz, you will also turn in your reading notes on the day's reading assignment and your response to the day's reading question. These will be factored into your quiz grade. If at anytime during the semester it becomes mathematically impossible for a student to earn a passing quiz score (at least a 60%), he or she will be automatically withdrawn from the class. This policy is absolutely and utterly inflexible. Each quiz is worth 15 points (10 for the quiz, 5 for reading journal and response), which means that you must earn at least 90 points. At the end of the semester, assuming that you've got at least 90 points, I will then drop your lowest quiz score when determining your quiz average.

Absences: I understand that illnesses and emergencies are a part of life, and therefore you are allowed to miss three classes without penalty. More absences than two will result in a lowered participation grade.

Reading Assignments, Response Questions, and WebCT: Reading assignments and paper due dates will be posted each month on WebCT. You can access this page by going to the WebCT page at UWG's homepage, logging in, clicking on our course, and then choosing one of the options ("Calendar," "Bulletin Board," "Dr. Masters' Web Page," etc.). For each new reading assignment, you must go to WebCT at least 24 hours before the assignment is due and read the posting on the bulletin board. The posting will contain a question or two about the reading (and any important information about the class you might need), which you should think about as you're reading--or after you've read--the assignment. In your reading journal, you should plan to write a brief overview of the reading, identifying important events, characters, and/or themes. You should then write a few sentences in response to the reading question. For each assignment, you should have approximately one handwritten page. Also, please purchase a three-ring binder just like mine. Everything you write and every handout you receive should be kept in this binder.

The reading questions posted on WebCT are meant to get you thinking about the reading from a particular angle and to suggest a path for class discussion. Some of these questions will be quite specific. For instance, I might ask you to examine a particular issue or theme, such as the motif of whiteness in Hope Leslie or the nature of violence in The Last of the Mohicans. Others will be fairly open-ended, perhaps asking you to select a passage or an image that you found particularly compelling. After you’ve completed the reading, you will then write out a brief response to the question in your reading journal. Remember, all quizzes are open note, and you are expected to jot down character descriptions, central events, recurring images, and your own thoughts before class. Your binder should also contain your discussion and lecture notes.

Should you decide to submit your response for credit, you will need to develop your ideas and organize them into a short, one-page paper. You must turn in one of these papers during each of the four months (your first will be due by September 3 rather than August 30th, however). These must be typed, and they must be turned in on the day the reading assignment is due. In general, these papers should be two to three paragraphs long and structured around a central premise or argument. Your goal in these papers is to write an analytical, reflective, and even creative response to my question. Assume that your audience is the entire class and that we’ve all read the text, which means there’s no need to summarize. We’re most interested in your ideas, thoughts, and reflections. The only requirement is that you cite at least one passage in your response and that you explain how it fits into your overall thinking or thesis. Ideally, this will help you to hone your skills in textual analysis. Should you come up with a question or topic on your own that interests you, please feel free to pursue it.

Twice during the semester, you will be giving an oral presentation and writing a short paper based on an “artifact search” of your own devising. As you will discover, each of our texts is richly grounded in America’s cultural and material history: they contain references to song lyrics, folk tales, historical events, political figures, legal statutes, law cases, broad social movements, and, of course, other works of literature. One of our tasks as readers is to search out some of these references in order to understand the texts’ social and historical contexts and to flesh out our sense of the characters’ and/or the writers' experiences. At the beginning of the semester, you will be signing up for two books on which you would like to do original research (and on which you might like to write your term paper). You will then be responsible for giving a presentation on an artifact that you have researched and which you feel is somehow relevant to our understanding of the book (it might be a photograph, painting, advertisement, movie clip, piece of music, historical document, legal decision, etc.). This artifact will also form the foundation of a short (2 page) paper which explains the artifact’s relevance to the text and further explores its significance. On either the last day or second to last day of our discussion on the book you've chosen, you should plan to give a five minute oral presentation. The paper will then be due the following week. In terms of the actual research, I am not expecting you to spend hours in in Ingram's special collection archives, but I would like to see you do a little more than a Google search.