"One Question Is Who Is Responsible? Another Is Can You Read?" Reading and Responding to Seventeenth-Century Texts Using Toni Morrison's Historical Reconstructions in A Mercy

Although I am an early Americanist by training, I teach mainly first-year writing and introduction to literature courses for beginning college students, who for the most part are not English majors. As I began to teach at my current institution, I thought that introducing early American writings in a writing class would be easy. It took me a very short time to realize that the task was instead a very hard one. Every time I used early American texts in the context of a writing course, I found that developing a positive response on the part of the students was difficult, a discovery that promptly led me to stop teaching them. Using Toni Morrison's historical novel A Mercy has allowed me to revisit my original idea to teach early American writings in a first-year composition course. I have done so by using Morrison's reconstruction of the late seventeenth-century environment, its sociopolitical structures, and the individual struggles of the characters in this short novel as interpretive tools with which students can discover approaches to reading original American texts written in the early period. Adopting A Mercy in my first-year writing course has allowed me to introduce students to the colonial American past and link this past to their present.

The choice of a historical novel to teach writing came after I used A Mercy in a literature course entitled "American Cosmopolitans." One of my goals with this class was to make students understand the idea of cosmopolitanism as something that is produced in rhetorical as well as in cultural and historical terms. I wanted students to tease out the idea of cosmopolitanism from texts that spanned the course of American literary history. Rather than beginning from the early colonial period, I turned the course's chronology around and began the course with contemporary texts that served as the lens through which to examine the earliest ones. A Mercy was the first assigned reading.

The small community of individuals that surrounds the Dutch-English settler Jacob Vaark in the late seventeenth-century colonial world is cosmopolitan in a way that reflects our contemporary understanding of the term.¹ I see the novel as representing a cosmopolitan community that emerges from a lack of rootedness in place and a universalizing sense of belonging. Yet I also see A Mercy as representing cosmopolitanism's connections to forced geographical movements, to economic developments, and to socially and racially determined disparities. A Mercy questions the way the characters communicate with each other, the way the reader wants to understand the characters' relationships with one another, and the characters' connections to the places they come from or inhabit. I used these ideas in order to help students see that they were not working with an easily definable concept. I introduced them to an idea of cosmopolitanism that is defined by the contexts in which it manifests itself and that is in itself extremely contradictory because of the different alliances in which we find comsopolitanism involved. For the class, the students analyzed Morrison's literary and historical revision, her use of different voices, and her engagement with the history of settlements. We then located all of this within a reassessment of what cosmopolitanism is and the role it plays in American literary and cultural history. This teaching experience made me choose to use Morrison's involvement with contemporary interpretations of early colonial history as a theoretical tool to help students become acquainted with the early colonial world.

In my writing courses, my focus is on exposing students to a number of writing styles and genres and to have them practice finding their own place and their voices within these various forms of writing. I am also interested in raising students' awareness that we can understand our present socio-cultural and political realities only if we understand our past. I assigned A Mercy and other colonial texts in the context of a writing project that I call...