English 11: American Literature

        Expect to find your own face looking back at you and your own voice speaking to you from some characters you would never expect could do this to you. There is something strangely familiar to us when we read literature written by those who have shared the American experience with us. In this class we will meet men and women (sometimes children) who seem very different from us, almost as if they come from another world. But once we start to read, receiving what they want to show us and tell us, what first seemed to be differences become meeting places where we find an uncanny familiarity, sometimes so familiar as to make us very uncomfortable. That "other world" turns out the be the one we are actually living in. The American literary tradition teaches us many things, chief among them the seductive elusiveness of just what it means to be one of us. Americans do not reduce to a cliché or to a set of predictable characteristics, and those who have tried to reduce us have run into much trouble. In this land of the "melting pot" and freedom and tolerance, we don't put up with being reduced to our lowest common denominator. From time to time circumstances have tempted us with this, and occasionally some politician or preacher will attempt it, but we have so far (thank goodness!) said "No way!" to that. We value the self-definition of the individual, even when it costs us; this is a grand thing, to be sure.

            But there is a dark side to this, a smoldering undercurrent that pervades our literary discourse. In this land of the individual there is always the temptation to narcissism in its various forms. Our great writers have understood this, and they write about it because, if they fear anything, it is the temptation to lying and sentimentality. This ongoing magnificent experiment in freedom in the "land of the free" is rife with the fallen condition with all the violent force and compulsive insistence that marks the human experience from the moment things went wrong in the Garden of Eden. Thus the American literary tradition participates fully in and contributes substantially to the great tradition of world literature. Just as we must not pursue our individualism in isolation, so we cannot read our American literature apart from the context of the great literature that has nourished it. But we must actually read. If we refuse to read, we willfully impose ignorance on ourselves. I suggest that self-willed ignorance would spell the death of what makes America truly a place of hope and possibility. In our day, this danger is very real.

            Therefore I invite you into a sustained conversation with the mind and heart of America, a conversation in which you both receive (by reading) and give (by writing). Our conversation is not just with the texts, not just between you and me as the teacher, not even just between classroom peers and the teacher and the texts, but truly with the long history of readers and writers who have been engaging the American literary tradition for over two and half centuries. It is a remarkable, intelligent, and unpredictable conversation into which we enter. If you will read, the "you" that you encounter will at times lead you down a road that feels crazy at the same time that it feels familiar. If you will read, you will have the time of your life. When that  happens, writing will cease to be a chore and become one of things that you just have to do for yourself.

Bert Harrell

August 2010                                     return to the English 11 Main Page