Arnold Krupat

Inventing American Literature

2007-2008

In 1815 the Treaty of Ghent concluded the War of 1812 with England ending any external threat to a United States not yet forty years old. In 1830, Congress granted President Andrew Jackson the authority to make treaties for the “removal” of the eastern Indian tribes west of the Mississippi River, thus attending to a perceived internal threat and expanding the American nation. War with Mexico in 1848 expanded it even further adding lands in New Mexico, Arizona, and California. In these years, a number of American authors set out to “invent” American literature as a specifically national literature rather than just an English literature written elsewhere. Thoreau began his experiment living at Walden Pond just exactly on July 4. Walt Whitman, in his Song of Myself, denominates himself “Walt Whitman, American,” an American bard, something like what Emerson had earlier called the “American Scholar.” All this, while the country founded on the premise that “all men are created equal” had to deal with the Constitution’s provision that some men were to count as only three-fifth of a man; the land of liberty was also a land of slavery, and the bloody Civil War of 1861-1865 again altered the possibilities and potentialities of an American literature. This course examines the invention of American literature from roughly the 1830’s to 1890, the year when Sioux Indians were massacred at Wounded Knee, and the year as well that the Bureau of the Census announced the “closing” of the American frontier. Our authors include Frederick Douglass, Hawthorne, Dickinson, William Apess, Margaret Fuller, and Twain. For sophomores, juniors, and seniors with some college background in literature.