The American Errand
Elisa New profile
W 12-3
Ever since Perry Miller's monumental inquiries into the Puritan mind, scholars of American literature have been concerned to identify the meaning and then the legacy of the American "Errand into the Wilderness." Indeed, students of early America have long taken for granted that the meaning of the Puritan errand is best discerned in its later ripenings : study of the Puritans is almost always a starting point for larger theories of American culture. Thus, for instance, Sacvan Bercovitch will locate the origins of the American "self" in the peculiar Puritan collectivization of loneliness and alienation, but he will devote much of his career after *The American Jeremiad* to describing the realization of Puritan selfhood in such secular autobiographies as Franklin's and in the classic romances of the 19th century. More recently, on the other hand, scholars have begun to notice another strain of Puritanism, one descending from John Cotton through Edwards and Emerson to William James and realizing itself in a variety of related ways: in less "original" and "self authorizing" manifestations of the American Will; in a strain of highly sensitive, though also tough minded, nature writing; in a distinctive tradition of poetic ethics; and finally, in the idea of the primacy of "experience" eventually codified by William James as Pragmatism. In this seminar we will devote ourselves to tracing out these separate, but also co-mingling, strands of the Protestant legacy, testing these two lines of Puritan inheritance--one running through Edwards and the one running through Franklin-- on such texts as Thoreau's *Walden*, James's "The Will to Believe," Washington's *Up from Slavery*, Moore's "The Jerboa." Readings will include historical, homiletic, autobiographical, poetic and fictional texts by Bradford, Cotton, Taylor, Bradstreet, Mather Edwards,Franklin, Wheatley, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, Dickensian, Jewett, James, Washington, Dubois, Frost, Moore, Bishop and Lowell. Students will make two presentations: one addressed to primary materials and one to critical implications. One of these presentations will form the nucleus of a longer paper which will be due June 30.
updated 2006-03-28
