Early American Literature: The Puritan Heritage (Capstone eligible)—online [***]

Note: This is an asynchronous online course

One could say that the Puritans have something of an image problem. "Puritanical” has become an adjective for a host of negative qualities: judgmental, moralizing, prudish, and even hypocritical. But are we more like the Puritans than we think?

This course will explore the “Puritan Heritage” by examining a range of Puritan genres and texts but put them into dialogue with novels, plays, poetry and speeches from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries that explicitly or implicitly engage with Puritans. Puritan culture becomes an adaptable lens through which to see our own culture and its issues. 

For example, we will explore how modern American political leaders have engaged with the utopian promise of the Puritan “city upon a hill”; how we think about the Puritan vision of settlement as an “errand into the wilderness” in our current vision of the environment; how the Indigenous peoples are still negotiating terms set by the Puritan contact; how playwrights have adapted the Puritan witchcraft trials to think about the McCarthy era and the #MeToo movement.  

Possible post-Puritan texts/authors include: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lydia Maria Child, Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, Emily Dickinson, Arthur Miller, Adrienne Rich, Kimberly Belflower, Lauren Groff, Tommy Orange.

Assignments: Weekly discussion boards, short essays in a variety of modes (interpretative/analytic, creative, reflective, etc.), and a final project that derives from one of the shorter essays.