SUNY Fredonia
Division of Arts and Humanities
ENGL 427-02/580-04: Major Writers: Postcolonial Hawthorne
Fall 2007
Dods 101, TTh 2-3:20
Office: Fenton 279; MW 10:30-12, TTh 9:30-11, and by appointment; 673-3125
E-mail: simon@fredonia.edu, brucesimon18@yahoo.com
Web Page: www.fredonia.edu/department/english/simon/
ANGEL space: https://fredonia.sln.suny.edu

About the Course Web Site

This web site is designed to help you get as much out of this course as possible--you can use it to find out how you will be graded, how to join and use the course ANGEL space, what reading and writing assignments are due and when, what books are on reserve for your use in Reed Library, and how to use the world-wide web for research. Please take the time over the weekend after the first week of classes to read this page carefully and to familiarize yourself with the other pages for this course. Please get in the habit of checking back to this web site to keep track of changes to the tentative schedule (see below) and to find advice on papers and projects, as well as to surf the ever-expanding list of links to interesting web pages related to the course. And please contact me any time (see above for my coordinates) if you have ideas about how to improve these pages or the course as a whole. I hope you enjoy taking this course as much as I enjoy teaching it!

I. Course Description

Study of the works of up to three major writers. This section focuses on Nathaniel Hawthorne, a major antebellum American writer known for his fictional explorations of colonial America, who has been a key figure in American literary studies for many generations. Many important American writers have been influenced by and have responded to his short stories and novels; many influential American literary critics have made an engagement with his works a central part of their careers. Recently, postcolonial writers and critics have shown an interest in rereading and rewriting Hawthorne. In this course, we will explore the postcolonial dimensions of Hawthorne, using both historical and comparative methods.

This course fulfills the "major author in context" requirement for undergraduates majoring in English or English Adolescence Education, and, with permission of the chair, may count toward the "major author" requirement (ENGL 510) for graduate students taking this course as ENGL 580.

II. Rationale

In ENGL 427, as in most courses offered by the English Department, students from a range of majors, minors, and concentrations interact, and the goals of the professional programs are integrated with specific course goals. Achieving these goals (described in Section IV, below) will require us to foster academic skills and intellectual habits of reading closely and attentively, thinking critically and creatively, listening actively and carefully, speaking thoughtfully and concisely, and writing clearly and analytically--skills and habits of importance to everyone, including English Adolescence Education majors.

III. Textbooks. The textbooks adopted for this course are:

• Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco (Vintage)
• Mahasweta Devi, Imaginary Maps (Routledge)
• Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (Norton)
• Bharati Mukherjee, The Holder of the World (Fawcett Columbine)

IV. Course Objectives and Outcomes.

ENGL 427 is designed to help students decide whether or not Nathaniel Hawthorne should be considered a postcolonial writer and consider what's at stake in this decision. In the course of doing so, they will develop their abilities to (1) appreciate and analyze an author's aesthetics and historical sense; (2) compare and contrast different authors' literary and political projects and analyze them in the context of the authors' cultures and historical eras; (3) identify and analyze patterns in and relations between American and postcolonial literature; and (4) understand and analyze the theoretical dimensions of literary texts. Students will typically try to fulfill goals (1) and (2) in class and ANGEL discussions, and the critical essay; and goals (3) and (4) in class and ANGEL discussions, and the final research project (see Section VI, below, for more on these assignments).

V. Instructional Methods and Activities

The methods used in the classroom will include lecture, in-class writing, guided discovery, open discussion, cooperative group work, and other discussion-oriented activities.

VI. Evaluation and Grade Assignment

Attendance/Preparation/In-class Participation (20%). Regular attendance to and thoughtful participation in class are crucial to your enjoyment of and success in this course. If there is absolutely no way for you to avoid missing a class, you must contact me ahead of time or soon after your absence, preferably by email. Even more important than showing up on time, of course, is coming to class prepared and focused. I expect you to read what has been assigned for a given date at least once by the time we begin to discuss it in class. This is a discussion rather than a lecture course, after all; although I will provide some context and background for our reading, the bulk of class time will be spent in small- or large-group discussions and activities. Since it's difficult to make good contributions to discussions about a text if you haven't read it carefully or thought about it extensively, how well you budget your time outside of class will to a large degree determine how well you do in this class in general and how well you do on this portion of your course grade in particular.

Your grade for this segment of the course will be based on a combination of your attendance, the quality of your participation in class and on the course ANGEL space (described below), and your preparation, effort, and improvement over the course of the semester. As there is no final exam in this course, think of my evaluation of your preparation/participation as a different but equally important method of assessing your overall performance in the course. Due to the importance of attendance and participation, more than two unexcused absences will hurt your preparation/participation grade and each non-emergency absence after the third will lower your final course grade by a full grade (e.g., with four absences a B+ will become a C+; with seven, it will become an E). Please see Section VIIIB, below, for definitions of excused and emergency absences.

Online Participation (20%). To supplement and prepare for our class discussions and activities, I have created a discussion board on our course ANGEL space. You should use it to develop your writing and critical thinking skills, demonstrate your engagement with the course material, and consider and respond to others' ideas and interpretations. For instance, you can

• post a specific question about one of the readings--or respond to someone else's previously-posted question;
• pick up and develop a topic of conversation from our in-class discussions--or respond to someone else's previously-posted idea;
• share an insight from a small-group discussion or activity that those outside your team didn't have the chance to hear--or respond to someone else's previously-posted idea;
• introduce a new topic of conversation that you feel is relevant to the course--or respond to someone else's previously-posted topic.

Critical Essay (25%). Undergraduates are required to write a 4-to-6-page critical essay; graduate students are required to write a 7-to-10-page critical essay. The assignment sheet and advice for the critical essay can be found at http://www.fredonia.edu/department/english/simon/mw6/ce.htm.

Your grade for this segment of the course will be determined by the coherence and validity of your paper's arguments, the effectiveness of its structures in conveying your ideas and convincing your audience, and the quality of its prose (including grammar, syntax, and punctuation).

Final Research Project (35%). The topic and format for your 7-to-10-page final essay (12 to 16 pages for graduate students) is open. Further information and advice on the final research project can be found on the course web site at http://www.fredonia.edu/department/english/simon/mw6/frp.htm.

Your grade for this segment of the course will be based on the coherence and validity of the paper's arguments, the effectiveness of its structure in conveying your ideas and convincing your audience, and the quality of its prose (including grammar, syntax, and punctuation).

B. Grading. All work during the semester will be graded on a letter basis (A=outstanding, B=good, C=average, D=bad, F=awful) and converted into a number for purposes of calculating final grades. I use the following conversion system (the number in parentheses is the "typical" or "normal" conversion, but any number in the range may be assigned to a given letter grade):

A+=97-100 (98); A=93-96.99 (95); A-=90-92.99 (91); B+=87-89.99 (88); B=83-86.99 (85); B-=80-82.99 (81); C+=77-79.99 (78); C=73-76.99 (75); C-=70-72.99 (71); D+=67-69.99 (68); D=63-66.99 (65); D-=60-62.99 (61); F=0-59.99 (55)

Your final grade is determined by converting the weighted numerical average of the above assignments into a letter grade, according to the above scale.

C. Portfolio. English majors should be aware of the English Department's guidelines for ongoing portfolio submissions; it is highly recommended that a paper or other writing from this course be included in your portfolio.

VII. Bibliography. See the list of reserve readings for a fuller bibliography.

A. Contemporary References

• Renee Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects
• Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature
• Anna Brickhouse, Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere
• Russ Castronovo, Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom
• Mike Davis, Reading the Text That Isn't There: Paranoia in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
• Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia
• Amy Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire
• Anthony Hall, The American Empire and the Fourth World
• Barbara Harlow and Mia Carter, eds., Archives of Empire, 2 v.
• Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of American Culture
• C. Richard King, Postcolonial America
• Neil Lazarus, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies
• Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialis
• Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat, eds., Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives
• Gretchen Murphy, Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives of American Empire
• Sangeeta Ray and Henry Schwarz, A Companion to Postcolonial Studies
• John Carlos Rowe, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism
• Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt, eds., Postcolonial Theory and the United States
• William Spanos, America's Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire
• Gayatri Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason

B. Classic References

• Michael Davitt Bell, Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England
• Sacvan Bercovitch, The Office of The Scarlet Letter
• Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture
• --, ed., Nation and Narration
• Michael Colacurcio, The Province of Piety
• Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen, eds., Ideology and Classic American Literature
• Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy
• Richard Brodhead, The School of Hawthorne
• Emily Miller Budick, Engendering Romance
• Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance
• Evan Carton, The Marble Faun: Hawthorne's Transformations
• Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition
• Frederick Crews, The Sins of the Fathers
• J. Donald Crowley, ed., Hawthorne: The Critical Heritage
• George Dekker, The American Historical Romance
• Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building
• Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel
• Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism
• D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature
• Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness
• R.W.B. Lewis, The American Adam
• Lucy Maddox, Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Politics of Indian Affairs
• Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden
• F.O. Matthiessen, The American Renaissance
• James Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times
• Walter Benn Michaels and Donald Pease, eds., The American Renaissance Reconsidered
• Perry Miller, Nature's Nation
• Dana Nelson, The Word in Black and White
• Donald Pease, Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context
• Joel Pfister, The Production of Personal Life
• David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance
• John Carlos Rowe, At Emerson's Tomb: The Politics of Classic American Literature
• Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism
• --, Orientalism
• Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land
• Gayatri Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine
• Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860
• Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory
• William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain

C. Key Journals

• American Literary History
• American Literature
• American Quarterly
• Cultural Critique
• Ethnic and Racial Studies
• MELUS
• The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review
• PMLA

VIII. Course Schedule and Policies

A. Tentative Course Schedule. The following course schedule is subject to revision--please refer here regularly for updates to this schedule, notes on the texts, and suggestions for further reading. If a reading is starred (*), it can be found in the Readings folder in the Lessons area on the course ANGEL space.

T 9/11 Puritans and Their Others. We'll be reading Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown"* in order to continue exploring his representations of the wilderness and begin exploring his representations of Puritans' responses to difference and their stakes.
Th 9/13 Puritans and Their Others. We'll be reading Hawthorne's "The Maypole of Merry Mount"* in order to continue exploring his representations of Puritans' responses to difference and their stakes.

T 9/18 Puritans and Their Others. We'll be reading Devi's "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha" (Imaginary Maps 95-196) as a counterpoint to "Young Goodman Brown" and "The Maypole of Merry Mount."
Th 9/20 We'll continue reading Devi's "Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha" (Imaginary Maps 95-196) as a counterpoint to "Young Goodman Brown" and "The Maypole of Merry Mount."

T 9/25 Puritans and Their Others. We'll be reading Chamoiseau's Texaco 7-27 as a counterpoint to "Young Goodman Brown" and "The Maypole of Merry Mount."
Th 9/27 Rewriting American Colonial History. We'll be reading Hawthorne's "Main-Street,"* which focuses on Indian removals, to continue the discussions of Hawthorne and Native Americans begun the previous two weeks.

T 10/2 Rewriting American Colonial History. We'll be reading Hawthorne's "Old News,"* which focuses in part on slavery, in order to further explore his representations of African Americans and their stakes for American nationalism in the revolutionary, early national, and antebellum periods.
Th 10/4 Rewriting American Colonial History. We'll be reading Hawthorne's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux"* in order to continue exploring his engagements with early American nationalism.

T 10/9 Postcolonial Gendering. We'll be reading Hawthorne's "The Birth-mark"* in order to explore his representations of the construction of femininity and their stakes.
Th 10/11 NO CLASS: FALL BREAK

T 10/16 Postcolonial Gendering. We'll be reading Hawthorne's "Rappaccini's Daughter"* in order to continue exploring his representations of the construction of femininity and their stakes, this time with a focus on mixing rather than marking.
Th 10/18 Postcolonial Gendering. We'll be reading Devi's "Douloti the Bountiful" (Imaginary Maps 19-93) as a counterpoint to "The Birth-mark" and "Rappaccini's Daughter."

T 10/30 Transatlantic Hester. We'll be discussing various aspects of Hawthorne's treatment of Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter; of her relation to earlier female figures in Hawthorne's fiction; and of her relation to related characters in Chamoiseau's/Mukherjee's novels.
Th 11/1 Transatlantic Hester. We'll continue discussing various aspects of Hawthorne's treatment of Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter; of her relation to earlier female figures in Hawthorne's fiction; and of her relation to related characters in Chamoiseau's/Mukherjee's novels.
F 11/2 CRITICAL ESSAY due no later than 11 pm in dropbox on course ANGEL site

T 11/6 Transatlantic Hester. We'll continue discussing various aspects of Hawthorne's treatment of Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter; of her relation to earlier female figures in Hawthorne's fiction; and of her relation to various characters in Chamoiseau's/Mukherjee's novels.
Th 11/8 Chillingworth in/and/as the Wilderness. We'll be discussing various aspects of Hawthorne's treatment of Roger Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter; of his relation to earlier male figures in Hawthorne's fiction; and of his relation to various characters in Chamoiseau's/Mukherjee's novels.

T 11/13 Chillingworth in/and/as the Wilderness. We'll continue discussing various aspects of Hawthorne's treatment of Roger Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter; of his relation to earlier male figures in Hawthorne's fiction; and of his relation to various characters in Chamoiseau's/Mukherjee's novels.
Th 11/15 Pearl and the Problem of/with Purity I. We'll be discussing various aspects of Hawthorne's treatment of Pearl in The Scarlet Letter; of her relation to earlier figures in Hawthorne's fiction; and of her relation to various characters in Chamoiseau's/Mukherjee's novels.

M 11/19-F 11/23 NO CLASSES: THANKSGIVING BREAK

T 11/27 Pearl and the Problem of/with Purity I. We'll continue discussing various aspects of Hawthorne's treatment of Pearl in The Scarlet Letter; of her relation to earlier figures in Hawthorne's fiction; and of her relation to various characters in Chamoiseau's/Mukherjee's novels. PROPOSAL for FINAL RESEARCH PROJECT due in class (consider turning it in much earlier in the semester, however).
Th 11/29 Dimmesdale and the Problem of/with Purity II. We'll be discussing various aspects of Hawthorne's treatment of Pearl and Reverend Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter; of his relation to earlier figures in Hawthorne's fiction; and of his relation to various characters in Chamoiseau's/Mukherjee's novels.

T 12/4 Dimmesdale and the Problem of/with Purity II. We'll continue discussing various aspects of Hawthorne's treatment of Reverend Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter; of his relation to earlier figures in Hawthorne's fiction; and of his relation to various characters in Chamoiseau's/Mukherjee's novels.
Th 12/6 The Badge, the Brand, the Monument. We'll be discussing various aspects of Hawthorne's treatment of the scarlet letter itself in his first novel; of its relation to earlier symbolic figures in Hawthorne's fiction; and of its relation to symbolic figures from Chamoiseau's/Mukherjee's novels.

T 12/11 The Badge, the Brand, the Monument. We'll continue discussing various aspects of Hawthorne's treatment of the scarlet letter itself in his first novel; of its relation to earlier symbolic figures in Hawthorne's fiction; and of its relation to symbolic figures from Chamoiseau's/Mukherjee's novels.
Th 12/13 The Badge, the Brand, the Monument. We'll continue discussing various aspects of Hawthorne's treatment of the scarlet letter itself in his first novel; of its relation to earlier symbolic figures in Hawthorne's fiction; and of its relation to symbolic figures from Chamoiseau's/Mukherjee's novels.

F 12/21 FINAL PROJECT due no later than 11 pm in dropbox on course ANGEL space

B. Class Policies

1. Attendance. As stated in Section VI above, barring emergencies each absence after the fourth will lower your final course grade by a full grade. Be aware that absences due to emergencies are the only absences that will not be counted toward your total for the semester. Emergencies include but are not limited to death in the family, hospitalization or serious illness, and natural disasters; scheduled and unavoidable school-sponsored events (games, meets, performances, etc.) are also counted as emergencies for the purpose of this attendance policy. Besides emergencies, the only other absences that won't affect your participation/preparation grade are excused absences. Please notify the instructor over email, in advance if possible and, if not, as soon after the absence as possible, if you wish an absence to be considered as an emergency or excused absence; the decision will be made at the instructor's discretion.

2. Online Participation. Please familiarize yourself with the college's "Computer and Network Usage Policy" (College Catalog 2007-2009, pp. 240-247) and check with your instructor first before posting something to the course ANGEL space that is not directly related to the course.

3. Late Assignments. Online posts that are not well-timed with the course material and fail to spark other students' interest and responses will not count the same as well-timed posts or posts that do inspire further discussion. Late critical essays and final research projects will not be accepted or graded. Only students who ask for an extension at least two days before the due date of any written project will be granted an extension; asking for an extension on the final project means that your final grade for the semester will be an incomplete (I), and that you must turn in your final project before the end of the following semester so that the I becomes a grade other than an F.

4. Plagiarism and Academic Integrity. To plagiarize is "to steal and pass off as one's own the ideas or words of another" (Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary). SUNY Fredonia strongly condemns plagiarism and takes severe action against those who plagiarize. Disciplinary action may extend to suspension from privileges or expulsion from college. Please familiarize yourself with the college's "Academic Integrity Policy" (College Catalog 2007-2009, pp. 236-239, see also p. 222) and check with your instructor if you have any questions about it.