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The Difference Teaching Equiano Makes: Notes on Teaching The Interesting Narrative in the Undergraduate American Literature Survey
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The Difference Teaching Equiano Makes: Notes on Teaching The Interesting Narrative in the Undergraduate American Literature Survey Lisa M. Logan So we must admit to our students that the study of literary works, great ones or otherwise, will neither make them behave more ethically nor lead them to the truth. Why, then, teach literature anyway ? Because, i would posit, literary study is the only discipline that teaches difference—from the linguistic difference between, say, the indefinite article and the definite one . . . or to the difference, constructed in language between one individual and another. . . . [i]n the end any poem or novel or autobiography that is of more than passing interest always escapes the system imposed on it, opening itself up to yet another system or set of norms down the road. in this context, the much maligned language-game know[n] as “close reading” is perhaps our first obligation to students. Close reading simply means reading attentively and bringing to the text in question as much knowledge and practice as possible. —Marjorie Perloff (January 5, 2009) Attention is “the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. . . . it implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in french is called ‘distraction.’” —William James (1890) 256 lisa M. logan i teach American literature i, which the University of Central florida’s undergraduate catalog defines as “[m]ajor American writers from beginning through Whitman.” Such description invites the kinds of questions literary scholars ask undergraduates to think about critically: What and/or who is American? What texts qualify as American literature? When did such literature “begin”? And what on earth is a “major” writer? During regular fifteen-week semesters, when we have time to read entire texts rather than excerpts from large anthologies, i approach this course using real and fictionalized personal narratives, which we consider as a sort of “literature of witness” and an extended dialogue about these questions. My current course description follows: American literature i surveys texts produced in what is now the United States from colonial settlement through the mid-19th century, a period when concepts of an American landscape, nation, citizens, and literature were being consciously formulated. We will examine how this literature depicts an animated and evolving conversation about definitions of American nation, geography, self, and literature by comparing texts by men and women writers from different socioeconomic, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds . Because the production of literatures is imbedded in particular historical moments, we will consider these texts in and be responsible for understanding the specific contexts from which they emerged. Primarily, we will explore the ways that the assigned texts struggle with definitions of “America” and “Americans” and what is at stake—for us and for the writers we read—in those definitions. Given this emphasis on personal narratives, we use online editions of texts and smaller anthologies, such as henry louis Gates Jr.’s The Classic Slave Narratives and William l. Andrews, Sargent Bush Jr., Annette Kolodny, Amy Schrager lang, and Daniel B. Shea’s Journeys in New Worlds: Early American Women’s Narratives . To get a feel for how personal narratives and histories operate, i begin with online excerpts from Cabeza de vaca’s Narrative, John Smith’s Description or General History, and Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation; in each case we consider how the narrator constructs a self with relation to the “American” landscape and the people he encounters. Students learn to recognize that none of these writers is “American,” and that America as an idea emerges from Western Europeans who [18.212.102.174] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:20 GMT) The Difference Teaching Equiano Makes 257 write for specific purposes. Using Journeys in New Worlds, we read rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God and other eighteenth-century representations of the self found in that volume, including the Journal of Madam Knight and Some Account of the Fore Part of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge. We also read franklin’s Autobiography, Samson Occom’s A Short Narrative of My Life (online), and the subject of this essay, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano. Equiano’s text reinforces the difficulty of the term “American,” as it resists firm placement in African, U.S., African American, British, and Caribbean literary canons. Personal narratives of...