Teaching

English 351 (Illinois Wesleyan University): “Manifest Destinies: American Literature to 1865”

“Manifest Destinies” is a survey course that will focus on US literature up to the Civil War to enable students to form a coherent view of a formative period in the nation’s history. We will consider writers’ early attempts to forge a national identity and literary tradition in a land that did not belong to them. In the process, we will examine quintessentially “American” doctrines—such as self-reliance and individualism—which continue to inform ideas (and ideals) of “Americanness.” Indeed, we will interrogate the very concept of “America,” paying close attention to the work of those who have embraced this designation and those who have contested its tendency to homogenize and exclude. While we will discuss several texts written by Euro-American authors, we will also concern ourselves with more recent additions to the national literary canon, in particular texts by Native Americans and African Americans. Through group activities, seminar-style conversations, and short presentations, students will think critically about the ways that historical developments and intellectual currents shaped early understandings of the “American self” across a wide range of literary genres—from poetry and fiction to life writing and more.

Though technically a survey course, “Manifest Destinies” employs a “less is more” approach. In other words, the course is far more concerned with the emergence of visions of national progress and identity in early America—and with the historical and cultural realities that complicated or contradicted those visions—than with simply exposing you to a long list of literary texts, however canonical they may be. To discern this developing discourse of American nationhood more clearly, and to consider its relationship to present-day social dynamics, we will read works that comment directly on it, whether written contemporaneously or long after 1865. These texts will help us contextualize early American literature, providing historical and theoretical perspectives and illuminating the assumptions, blind spots, and evasions embedded in the literary works under consideration. Given these interlocking emphases on American culture, literary history, discourse analysis, ideology critique, and historicization, “Manifest Destinies” ultimately doubles as both an interdisciplinary English course and an introduction to the field of American studies.

English 220 (IWU): “Literature and Its Signs: Speculative Fiction of the Working Class”

In this course, we will study the work of authors who tried to imagine a future beyond the constraints of the capitalist present—a future without class divisions, alienation, and exploitation. Such work will prompt us to consider the historicity, and hence the contingency, of capitalist society, indeed of all social formations. Through texts that explore the prospect of major structural change, we will interrogate the “naturalness” not only of capitalism as such, but also of ideas and belief systems that appear timeless but that are in fact products of a society ruled by profit. We will pay special attention to the thematic and formal strategies that writers have devised to illustrate how cultural and social norms can shape and reshape human nature. Our inquiry will also require us to historicize our primary texts—that is, to view them, despite their speculative nature, as artifacts of the capitalist age and therefore subject to biases and blinds spots particular to the historical moment from which they emerged. In guided group activities and seminar-style discussions, we will ultimately concern ourselves with questions that remain vitally important today: from the link between relations of property ownership and “structures in dominance”—such as white supremacy and heteropatriarchy—to the complex relationship between political commitment and the literary imagination.