A funny thing about American literature is that it is understood to begin several hundred years before there was even a United States in existence. Bearing this in mind, in this course we will read American literature from the Colonial period to the start of the Civil War with an eye towards how literature represents, or fails to represent, a nation that doesn't yet exist--or that, in the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War, is very much debating exactly how it exists.  We will focus, among other things, on how American literature addresses the very different groups that both do an don't have a purchase on national belonging: settlers from different countries, enslaved Africans, members of tribes whose putatively empty land the United States seeks to settle, and so forth. Because this is first and foremost a literature class, we will also think about the different forms of writing—sermons, speeches, and other kinds of writing in addition to more common forms like fiction and poetry—that constituted “literature” though the middle of the nineteenth century, and how these forms’ aesthetic qualities (ie, what makes them “art”) are shaped by their imagined audiences and uses. Students will be graded on in-class reading quizzes, a research project on a self-chosen area of particular interest, and two out of three short papers on works on the syllabus.