On Presentations

One of the most important assignments in the course is the in-class presentation. Over the course of the semester, you must do a five-to-ten-minute in-class presentation and turn in a one-to-two-page follow-up paper within two class periods of the presentation (worth 15% of your final course grade). You must choose from among the following options: describe writers influenced by or responding to a selected author or text (or, with my permission, writers "overshadowed" by the "landmark" text); analyze how a selected critic from the 1920s through the 1965 defined a given workıs "American-ness" or its place in the national literary canon; analyze how a given critic from 1966 through the 1990s re-examined or re-interpreted a "landmark" text and/or "classic" school of interpretation. You must meet with me at least three days before your presentation for advice and directions. Once you've chosen a date on which you want to give a presentation, simply email me at bruce.simon@fredonia.edu and we can make arrangements from there.

The purpose of the presentations is for the entire class to gain access to critical debates and discussions in American literary studies without sacrificing attention to the literary texts themselves. Rather than assign loads of additional criticism as required readings, I want you to get access to "landmark" works of literary criticism through your own and your peers' presentations. Presenters should generally attempt to summarize, analyze, and comment on a given critic's arguments (both explicit and implicit) about why (or why not) a given work should be considered an "American landmark." The best presentations will do each of these three things concisely and effectively--and also find a way to link discussion of the critic's arguments to the specific passages from the literary text scheduled for discussion the day of the presentation. In other words, think of the end of your presentation as providing a segue into class discussion.

The purpose of the one-to-two-page follow-up paper is to give presenters the opportunity to further develop their own responses to their critic's arguments by comparing them with their own response to the literary text in question. Rather than an outline or summary of your in-class presentation, the follow-up paper is your opportunity to expand on your analysis of and commentary on your critic's ideas. I expect that you will take up at least one of the following approaches in your follow-up paper: relating one of the key ideas or issues you broached in your presentation to a passage or pattern from the literary text itself (for example, finding a passage or pattern that supports or calls into question your critic's interpretation of the text, or puts it in a new light); developing your own reasons for why or why not the literary text should be considered an "American landmark" and relating them to the critic's own reasons. Excellent follow-up papers will find a way to accomplish both tasks effectively within the spece constraints of the assignment. As this short, reflective essay is due no later than two class periods after your presentation, I will expect you to have developed your ideas since your presentation and thought carefully about the focus and structure of your paper.

Finally, remember that during the presentation listeners have responsibilities, as well: I expect you all to be taking notes, thinking of passages from the text that relate to the ideas being presented, keeping track of the kinds of arguments that critics have made about why the text is an "American landmark." You have a unique opportunity to get a sense of what the most important scholars of American literature have had to say about some of the most important works in the tradition, so don't waste it. You should be thinking about whether you would want to find out what a critic someone else is presenting on might have to say about another writer, as well about techniques for class presentations that you might want to incorporate into your own presentations (or avoid doing). Finally, being aware of the range of arguments about what constitutes an "American landmark" can help you as you write your personal response essays and consider topics for your final paper or project.

What follows are suggested presentation topics. Feel free to offer alternatives or variations on the ideas below, so long as you run them by me first. A quick search through the MLA Bibliography can help you identify major topics and critics to focus on in a presentation. Once you click on the above link, simply go down to the "First Search" section and click on the link there. You should be able to do database searches automatically from there--just select MLA Bibliography and type in some keywords. If you run into any problems doing this, contact the library for help.

Melville (as of 9/25/00)

You are free to suggest your own presentation topics (subject to the above limitations), but in particular I think the class would benefit from hearing three kinds of presentations. First, we're looking for presentations on the following early canonizers (see the main page for critics not listed here who were the subjects of presentations):

• Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel
• Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden
• Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land

We're also looking for presenters on the politics of the canonization process and the creation of the literary period known as the "American Renaissance" (see the main page for critics not listed here who were the subjects of presentations):

• Gerald Graff, Professing Literature
• Russell Reising, The Unusable Past: Theory and the Study of American Literature
• David Shumway, Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline
• William V. Spanos, The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies
• Paul Lauter, "Melville Climbs the Canon" (see me for a copy)
• Marc Dolan, "The 'Wholeness' of the Whale: Melville, Matthiessen, and the Semiotics of Critical Revisionism" (see me for a copy)

Finally, we're looking for presenters on critics of the canonization of Moby-Dick as the centerpiece of the American Renaissance for its exclusion or marginalization of other important writers, and who propose other writers and models for understanding antebellum American literature (see the main page for critics not listed here who were the subjects of presentations):

• Paul Lauter, Canons and Contexts
• David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance

Finally, be aware that there are a million books on Melville on reserve for my EN 426: Melville and Silko course, beyond what's on reserve for this course. So there are many potential topics out there I haven't even mentioned here.

Whitman (as of 9/25/00)

We definitely need to hear several overviews of how Whitman came to be seen as a quintessentially American poet and Leaves of Grass came to be known as an "American landmark." We can accomplish this goal in several ways:

• The Norton Critical Edition features excerpts from some of the most influential pre-1965 critical engagements with Whitman, as does the book A Century of Whitman Criticism, so you can take an essay or two from one of those collections and compare the different cases critics make for the "landmark" status of Leaves of Grass. It might be good to choose essays that are from different decades or present radically different perspectives.
• You might instead look to the originals themselves--D.H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature, F.O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance, R.W.B. Lewis's The American Adam, Roy Harvey Pearce's The Continuity of American Poetry are good examples, and can either be found on reserve or in my office--since the editors who selected essays to include in the collections above may have skipped some of these major figures.
• Another way to get a good perspective on the canonization of Whitman is to get ahold of recent essays that describe the process. I can lend you John Vanderslice's "The Canonization of Whitman," for instance. One popular mode of criticism is to reexamine F.O. Matthiessen's arguments in American Renaissance in light of evidence that both Whitman and Matthiessen were gay. See, for instance, Jonathan Arac's "F.O. Matthiessen and American Studies: Authorizing a Renaissance" in Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies (NY: Columbia UP, 1987), Eric Cheyfitz's "Matthiessen's American Renaissance: Circumscribing the Revolution," in American Quarterly 41 (June 1989), or--for an essay I can lend you--Jay Grossman's "The Canon in the Closet: Matthiessen's Whitman, Whitman's Matthiessen," in American Literature 70.4 (December 1998). Check the MLA Bibliography for other directions in studies of the canonization of Whitman.

We also need to hear what's new(er) in Whitman criticism by focusing on works like Donald Pease's Visionary Compacts and, as well as on collections like James Woodress's edited collection Critical Essays on Walt Whitman (1983) or the collection Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies.

Another fruitful line of inquiry is for presenters to discuss some of the American poets whom Whitman has influenced, from Langston Hughes to the Beats and beyond. See me for a copy of Peter Erickson's "Singing America: From Walt Whitman to Adrienne Rich," or check the MLA Bibliography.

Twain (as of 10/11/00)

Several kinds of presentation options spring to mind here: 1) focus on major arguments that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an "American landmark" (such as Hemingway's in Green Hills of Africa and Fiedler's in Love and Death in the American Novel and Ellison's in Shadow and Act) or pair them with more critical assessments (like Jonathan Arac's on the novel's "hypercanonization" or Myra Jehlen's in The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain); 2) focus on the public debates over censoring Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (looking through the essays in the Norton Critical Edition of the novel and the books Satire or Evasion? and The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain can give you some good background on these debates, as can using the Lexis-Nexis search engine of newspapers and magazines for the past two decades or so, which is available by going to the library's OnLine Databases page); 3) focus on pedagogical debates over whether and how Adventures of Huckleberry Finn should be taught (again, some of the essays in the Norton Critical Edition of the novel and in the book Satire or Evasion? are very useful on this); 4) focus on academic debates over whether Mark Twain's novel is racist or anti-racist, pro- or anti-abolitionist, and how the book comments on racial politics in the Reconstruction era (pairing arguments by David Lionel Smith and Eric Lott, or by Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Jonathan Arac, would be the way to go here); 5) focus on debates over the consequences of making Adventures of Huckleberry Finn "THE American landmark novel" and the effect on other worthy writers and works overshadowed by this landmark (see Jane Smiley and Jonathan Arac for a start on this); 6) focus on critics who relate Twain's novel to realism, regionalism, or local color in American literature.

Faulkner (as of 10/26/00)

Unlike the nineteenth-century works, the twentieth-century ones haven't yet come out in Norton Critical Editions. Hence, finding critics to analyze for your presentation will involve a little more work. You should explore the works on Faulkner on reserve at Reed Library, and use the MLA Bibliography to identify relevant articles. I expect that more than one presenter may want to make use of Lawrence Schwartz's Creating Faulkner's Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism, a study of how Faulkner came to be seen as a major American author. The collection edited by Philip Weinstein, The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, will give you a sense of recent currents in Faulkner criticism, and Richard Brodhead, ed., Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays and Arnold Goldman, ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of Absalom, Absalom! A Collection of Critical Essays will introduce you to classic Faulkner criticism.

Presentation topics you might consider are 1) the process by which Faulkner came to be seen as a major American writer (either drawing on Schwartz's book or analyzing for yourself the early positive critical assessments; 2) critics' arguments about the ways in which Faulkner engages the legacy of slavery in the U.S.; 3) critics' arguments about the ways in which Faulkner rewrites "classic" nineteenth-century American literature; 4) critics' arguments about Faulkner and modernism; 5) critics' arguments about Faulkner and Southern literature.

Ellison (as of 10/24/00)

Just as Schwartz is crucial to our understanding of Faulkner's relation to the American literary canon, so, too, is Alan Nadel's Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the American Canon (on reserve). Two major collections of essays include John Hersey, ed., Ralph Ellison: A Collection of Critical Essays and Kimberly Benston, ed., Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison (both on reserve). You will find plenty of potential presentation topics within these works.

Among these possibilities are 1) examining critics who read Invisible Man as a commentary on segregation-era America or in the context of Cold War-era America; 2) presenting critics' arguments on ways in which Ellison rewrites Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and/or Richard Wright in Invisible Man; 3) presenting critics' arguments concerning Toni Morrison's or Ishmael Reed's revisions of and responses to Invisible Man; 4) exploring reasons for the embrace of Ellison's Invisible Man by the U.S. academy (Mary Helen Washington has a few interesting pages contrasting the reception of Ellison's novel by the critical and publishing establishment with Brooks's Maud Martha in the collection Reading Black, Reading Feminist, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and there are many other sources on this topic; Barbara Foley has a major critique of Invisible Man in Radical Representations); 5) exploring reasons for the ambivalence toward Ellison among theorists of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s; 6) exploring relations between the formation of an African American literary canon and an American literary canon by examining critics' assessments of Ellison's participation and changing position in both literary traditions; 7) analyzing conflicts over interpreting the "Trueblood" episode by such critics as Houston Baker, Michael Awkward, and others.

EN 399-03: American Landmarks, Fall 2000
Created: 9/7/00 10:35 am
Last modified: 12/8/00 11:55 am