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Equiano’s Interesting Narrative and the Difficulties of Teaching the Early American Literature Survey Course Michael Pringle The undergraduate early American literature class poses unique problems for a professor teaching within the conventional literary historical periods: the era is not particularly “early” in relation to the British and European literature to which students have been exposed; the “American” designation is dubious for many of the texts they will read; and the category of “literature” necessarily must be expanded to include personal journals, relations, memoirs, pamphlets—in short, the primal stuff of history. Course readings will challenge students’ deeply internalized myths of America’s founding and force them to grapple with the nebulous categories of “history” and “literature”: therefore, teaching such a course requires a clearly defined methodology to help students contextualize antebellum American texts within an English-designated course. The problem is that the struggle for disciplinary clarity often comes at the expense of exploring the subtle ways genre distinctions fail us, and tends to privilege one discipline over another. how much can we poach on “historical” territory? how far can we muddy the waters and still provide a rich and useful coverage of the era? While there is no single, definitive methodology that will solve the stickier genre troubles for all teachers of early American literature, the demotion/promotion of portions of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (1789) from historical narrative to fiction provides a particularly useful way of framing the discussion.1 The upper-division early American literature course is necessarily a forum for discussing the nature of how the stuff of history becomes narrative, and how fiction becomes history. Perhaps in no other literature class do we expose students 240 Michael Pringle to so many non-literary texts in the form of relations, accounts, journals, personal narratives, and (of course) histories. i teach at a small liberal arts college, and we delineate the early American literary historical period from the Colonial period to the 1840s. The course could very easily be taught as a history class; indeed, i inevitably draw a group of history majors when i teach it. it is essential, therefore, that i have a clearly defined methodology for distinguishing what it is precisely that makes mine a literature course, without giving short shrift to the many primary historical texts. Equiano’s Interesting Narrative comes conveniently at midterm in a survey course set up on a literary historical model, and it offers an exemplary test case for trying out some of the theoretical concepts students have been exploring in earlier texts. At mid-semester they have already worked through the structure of historical texts such as Cabeza De vaca’s Relation, Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, rowlandson’s captivity narrative, and franklin’s Autobiography; likewise, they have also studied overtly literary texts such as Bradstreet’s poetry, Wigglesworth’s “Day of Doom,” and Taylor’s poetry. Equiano’s narrative marks a boundary in the course, the pivotal moment when we move from poetry and personal narrative to the study of prose fiction. Because the Interesting Narrative employs both personal narrative and fictional narrative prose, it is both useful and problematic in marking the shift. There are a number of possible ways to frame the discussion, and the fact that it is an American literature class places some institutional limits on interdisciplinary range. Nonetheless, to remain too firmly entrenched in a literary bunker raises some significant hurdles. One time-honored way to deal with the issue is to privilege the literary works and introduce the historical contexts as essential background material for fully grasping the great literature of the later periods. To understand hawthorne’s “The Maypole of Merry-Mount” or The Scarlet Letter, for example, one has to have read Of Plymouth Plantation, “A Model of Christian Charity,” and rowlandson’s A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, among other texts. The problems with such an approach are manifold. Most notably it devalues the majority of the course readings as simply contextual preparation for enjoying a few canonical works at the end of the semester . furthermore, less canonically accepted works, such as rowson’s Charlotte Temple, or foster’s The Coquette, do not fit comfortably into such a schema. English majors trained in a formalist tradition wince when they read the sentimental excesses of such works and justifiably wonder why we would read a novel that so [18.224...

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