New GenEd Added: ENGL 2201 CA1B
COURSE DESCRIPTION
AMERICAN LIT. TO 1880 (ENGL 2201-001)
Fall 2024
Dr. Marta Werner
3.0 credit hours
Class: T/Th: 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Office hours: On campus: T: 1:00-1:50; Virtual hours, MW, by appointment (day and evening hours available)
Illocality: Deep Mapping the (North) American Land-Mind-Scape to 1880
“It’s not down in any map; true places never are.” —Herman Melville
“How can one both move and carry along with one the fermenting depths which are also, at every point, influenced by the pressure of events around them? And how can one possibly do this so that the result is readable? —Hugh Trevor-Roper
“Mapping” should be construed very widely. Maps represent the relationships among the elements of any kind of topography — those of a terrestrial landscape, or of a metaphoric “landscape” of texts, ideas, or networks of relations among people. —Philip J. Ethington and Nobuko Toyosawa
Course Description
Deep maps go beyond the documentation of topography to include and interweave natural history, myth, archaeology, narrative, autobiography, memory, emotion, and weather. Sometimes it is even possible for a deep map to connect the material and immaterial worlds. This fall we will attempt to compose many-layered maps - necessarily rough around the edges, forever changing and incomplete — of our imagination of “America” by plumbing the archive of a few of its surviving texts and related cultural materials. While the textual witnesses that will serve as our focal points are now part of a standard canon — William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation (1651), Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798), Frederick Douglass’s Narrative (1845), Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Herman Melville’s “Bartleby” (1853) and/or “Benito Cereno” (1855), H.D. Thoreau’s Walden (1854), and selected poems by Walt Whitman (1855 +) and Emily Dickinson (1858-1886) — the maps we make of and with them will destabilize, complicate, and enlarge our understanding of the multiple cultural forces that shape them and the claims they (still) have on us. Our maps will vary in form— some will be textual or narrative, others possibly visual or digital—and in scale, from the seemingly very small—e.g., the coordinates of a single fascicle-poem by Emily Dickinson—to the unimaginably vast—the breadth of an ocean crossed by captives of the transatlantic slave trade. Often, they will touch on social spaces and open hidden ones. Some maps will be dream-maps, and some will be ghost-maps. Ultimately, our maps — and the process of conceiving and making them — will allow us a more deeply embodied experience of our textual inheritance.
Protocol: Lecture & discussion. We will approach these works through historical and cultural contextualization, bibliographical study, and close — and distant — reading techniques. We will report our findings in traditional ways — via short analysis/response papers — and in new ways — specifically through the work of deep mapping. We will work alone, and we will work together in small, collaborative groups.
For more information, contact: ENGL Department at english@uconn.edu