English 347-A: Studies in American Literature - Special Topic: The Literary Construction of Early America: Writing New England and Myths of America

Despite popular mythologies to the contrary, New England was born far less from conformity and homogeneity than it was by collisions and conflict. This course will begin by understanding the Algonquian-speaking peoples' ways of knowing prior to the arrival of Europeans. It will then look at the construction of New England colonies as a dynamic exchange between vibrant Indigenous cultures seeking to re-establish a political world disrupted by epidemic disease, and the so-called Puritans whose desperate attempts at forging uniformity led to factionalism and political skullduggery. As the region developed, pernicious notions regarding property, voice, personhood, and morality infused Euro-American modes of self- and community expression, but which ultimately gave birth to a body of materials recognized by many scholars as classics. Women challenged patriarchal constructions of society; American Indians developed on their long-held and still-active conceptions of sovereignty; Black writers wrote against and rewrote forms of captivity; and society fumbled about from crisis to crisis until civil wars resulted in an infant US. Then the contest for the soul of that nation continued on in script and print, as well as other modes of communicating. In the meantime, the voices of marginalized groups took on distinctive forms in English, which incorporated the logics of colonialism as a means to resist the process, while also developing ideas of self-expression to foreground their own values, aesthetics, and lifeways.