Letteratura Americana

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN FARMER

letter 3: WHAT IS AN AMERICAN? ~ homo americanus = melting pot + frontier + inauguration of a

→

middle-american agricolture (→ farmer) 1st time deep concern about who they are

• 1782: important question, need for identity, belonging in a multicultural (religious, ethnic) society /

anticipates Lady Liberty words “where there is bread. there you’ll find home

→

• rationalize notion of frontier 1st to identify development of identity of Am through frontier / eu

tend to reproduce eu stuff, they stay on coast / pioneers travel through the land (no

→

communication/infrastructures NATURE!), they’re settlers / frontier men are those who open yup

the way to the Pacific Ocean. they’re hunters, adventurers, without real civilization. they’re the

ones who open the way for pioneers →

• VIRTUE (farmers) is between SETTLERS (eu) and ADVENTURERS (out of civilization)

→

farmers come, civilize land, then sell it and move to the left (west) and so on replace idea of

static eu (borders) with frontiers, movable westward with possibility of improvement

letter 12 ~ he’s going to live with his family with indians, a state inferior yet closer to nature, where

inhabitants live with more peace / fiction of the dream of integration in the indian culture / takes a

position: wrote he’s better move in with natAm, who were the only people respectful of nature,

nomadic by choice in order not to exploit land

history of andrew the hebridean ~ scottish, comes to am with nothing manages to take piece of

land (people help him built a house), in 4 years he can show the economic value of his experience

→ →

capitalistic accumulation // built as a story, not a real figure symbolically speaking, model of

am identity enforced through fiction + reassures the reader that the story is true (counts money) /

→

natAm pacified with eu, 2 cultures that can live together side by side anti-slavery movement

letter 9 ~ challenged slavery / visits a farmer friend, sees a slave dying being punished. asks

(?)

owners why è offers a eu based philosophical approach about slavery. owners don’t understand it,

they’re too used to slavery

→

• slavery economic! slaves come from Africa where Af men took them, put them on boats for

money / sold stuff everywhere during the trip / AfAm slaves already in 1611, Spanish + Portuguese

captains did the triangular trade / says the price for the renovation of reg is the slave trade

• before him there is no anti-slavery movement that addressed the natAm issue

→ →

• conversion people captured by natAm put responsibility to God block of faith / coming back

to community meant going back to religion

→ city life almost european / social and judicial system / nothing new in literature

HALF 700 → →

secularization preoccupation about freedom polemic prose (journals/articles)

→ querelles on political question of authority and individual rights + philosophical

FROM 1760-70 →

background of human nature new languages, more articulated and specialistic

after 1770 (boston massacre) harsher confrontation between motherland and colonies, loyalists

and independentists, led to → →

traumatic time En still there, some cookies wanted freedom:

1776 AMERICAN REVOLUTION

LOYALIST (yay, en!) vs INDIPENDENTISTS (nope, en!)

→

+ declaration of independence of thomas jefferson radical manifest in favor of human rights

political independence =/= cultural independence

oratory/prophetic tendency + heroic detachment / genre: burlesque + mock epic

theatre! →

almanacks principal vehicle of diffusion of frontier humor

charles brockden down (1771) philly, precursor of figure of professional writer / influences:

sentimentalism + epistolary novel of richardson + english gothic + godwin’s rationalism + jacobian’s

novels + wollstonecraft’s picaresque novel / his fiction reflects the confused life of the time

WIELAND; OR THE TRANSFORMATION / AN AMERICAN TALE

religion obsession in a modern sense, murder that takes place thanks to the voice of a ventriloquist

→

stereotype of American writer people who spoke about their work (lectures, public readings) /

• paved the way for public authors (Mark Twain)

→

American (=/= Eu) sense of mobility Am intellectual is someone who lives in the world (talks to

• people, feels the way, etc) →

huge novel / genre: gothic dark side of romanticism (Eng: Wordsworth / dark ages of eu

• associated with Italy (plotting, magic) / Edgar Allan Poe classical british =/= from Brockden

Brown, famous for American gothic)

talks about present: pseudo-science / philosophical ideas that created a lot of spasmodic

• →

curiosity / guilt complex about extermination of natAm / awareness of cruelty of slavery dark

side of America (even though Puritanism is done, puritans ideas are still there)

Political independence from Eng, but no cultural

• →

subtitle eng: wants to find the americanness of the story

• →

text opens up saying it’s about a grey area (religion / miracles) / talks about ventriloquism (guy

• enters a family by using it, then induces someone to kill their wife and children by pretending it’s

→

the voice of God) / epistolary form / at first installment on editorials / acusmatics voice

speaking without a body (ventriloquist), associated with God

→

invents prequels memoir of ?!??!?

• →

stories with paintings/photographs/radio (→ acusmatic)/cinema as characters (~ Dorian Gray)

→

transpose of puritan idea of 1 man with 1 soul in 1 body challenge of God (man wants to

→

become a creator) this is why natives didn’t want to be photographed (2 bodies)

→ series of tales that seem to aspire at the organicity of the novel

1800 → expansion: population grows / technologic innovation / cultural progress / foundation of

1820-60

new universities and journals

am takes conscience of its own literature, language and history

all people of letters ended up gravitating around the same circles

→ all maximum works of 800 had been composed in 15 years, from a small

AM RENAISSANCE

group of writers who all knew each other and that frequented the same Bostonian places

♡

washington irving ny, rich scottish father, last of 11 brothers / english literature of 700 / lived

between eu and am / background in journalism / used structures from cultural traditions in eu and

→

moved the location to am (americanized version) made “old” eu storytelling “new” by bringing it

→

to am made possible the acknowledging/recognition of characters/places (imagination of

symbolic landscapes) / not a gothic writer, but refers to eu romanticism (who loved gothic) / use of

→

irony (never used in gothic) / short stories doesn’t write novels, but legend-oriented stuff / eu

→

saw american literature as being rough and infantile his stories become classics / invented role

of storyteller

THE SKETCHBOOK (1819) sketches and drafts of english life, already published on magazines /

only relates stories already having been told / letters/stories found: literary stratagem to give up

responsibility for inventing plot / authorship given to Crayon, a character

rip van winkle + the legend of sleepy hollow ~ re-adaptation of german classicalness, set in the

Catskill Mountains

the legend of sleepy hollow ~ protagonist: educator / diedreitch knickerbocker: dutch background /

idea of myth/storytelling: air of dream/nightmare/legend / relation with wilderness: dangerous, you

→

pray everything will be fine / frontier man stereotype / tellability: everything =/= from normal /

hints at guilt complex: eu taking land + killing natives / typical horror story topos: profanation of nat

am burying grounds / references to revolutionary war / characters potentially true

rip van winkle ~ story of a good-for-nothing haunted by his wife’s reproaches, that goes with his

dog and rifle on the hills, drinks some potion, sleeps for 20 years and wakes up in a completely

different world: his village is different, there has been the revolution, his wife is dead, his house in

ruins and almost no one recognizes him / different meanings: burlesque / political (nostalgic about

the ex order) / autobiographical/meta-letterary

frontier man (lazy / likes to go hunting), subject to a turbulent wife

• autobiographical elements / irony / self-irony (mocks himself)

• →

question of economy short story: economizes to make the right setting

• →needed →

• magical to explain how it was references

→

doubleness negative + positive, mentions more than once the same adjective

• village with dutch people

• →

big picture to detail more we proceed, more specificity: well constructed

• → →

replication of place new holland with real dutch stones idea of am as another eu but

• newer →

convention author connects to readership until 19th century to educate them

• Van Winkle (story-teller: important in a community, keeps it together) is dutch but adapts to

• →

Am breaking of continuity with eu

beginning: portrait of King of Eng = colonial Am / at some point he falls asleep and sleeps

• for 12 years / wakes up and sees a portrait of George Washington = independent Am

→ → →

strange strong word, estraneo / alien / other belongs to realms connection to horror

• stories → new england, 1/2 800 / bostonian intellectuals become revolutionaries

TRANSCENDENTALISM

without meaning to, ask democratization of society, a collective liberation, the true american dream

ideal / transcendentalists disdain fiction / enjoy pedagogical writings, polemics, utopias / feminist

discourses of Margaret Fuller / coincides with nationalistic ideas: each country pushed on with the

examination of cultural roots and authors looked for old literary heritage / since there is no past of

am Hawthorne thinks they have to start from puritan am

nathaniel hawthorne margins of transcendentalism / took part of utopian experiment of Brook

Farm / protagonist with self-reliance of glorified individual of transcendentalism / solitude as

conviction, involuntary choice // salem, 1804 / orphan of father at 4 / economic difficulties /

becomes consul of liverpool + went to eng / has lectures, meets people / italy / still fixated with new

england’s gothic obsessions / some relative of his participated in salem’s witchcrafts trial, where

witches were considered demons and sentenced to death). he had a guilt complex about that and

towards all Puritan culture

style: gothic / faustian/demoniac pacts / sense of guilt/sin that can send back to puritan times

YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN short story / names Salem / “errand into the wilderness&rdqu