When they describe the orientation to reality on the part of Indigenous people, Indigenous scholars point to how the natural and supernatural worlds are intertwined, and the fact that in order to live a good life, you had to have the right relation with that world in order to establish control over your living conditions.

Using that perspective as a frame, we will be looking at how European settlers in North America conceived of their relation to the supernatural, from settlement up to about 1900. Their theology taught them that the supernatural (in the form of witches, ghosts, spirits) didn't and couldn't exist. Yet they fell into witchhunt hysteria in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and eagerly read Gothic novels and ghost stories in the nineteenth; they invented a "cult of the dead" in the early nineteenth century and spiritualism and the idea of psychic research after that. 

Our object is to describe how European settlers conceived of their relation to both the natural and the supernatural while living in a society that alienated them from both. 

Understanding this disjunction requires wide reading in literature, history, anthropology, and folklore. We will be reading familiar novels and stories by Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, but also popular spiritualist and sentimental fiction and poetry across the eighteenth and nineteenth century, as well as accounts of witches and ghosts from the Salem witch trials forward. We will spend some time with "speaking" tombstones, mourning jewelry, and post-mortem photography. 

Throughout, we will juxtapose that settler world with Indigenous writers' accounts of their reality, with attention to how unsettled Indigenous people made settlers feel. 

Assignments include a mid-term and final, a research project, and brief assignments across the semester.