Literature Majors Seminar
Term 1
W, 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Gender, masculinity and femininity were ideas thought to be firmly understood in eighteenth-century North America; the idea of race, however, was only coming to be theorized in scientific terms in the second half of the century, and in popular and literary terms, ideas of difference yielded wildly conflicting notions and accounts. One of the most intriguing sites for this contest was in the breakout genre of the captivity narrative: a combination of elements of fiction, history, ethnography, conduct book, and sermon that both asserts specific normative ideologies in early North America, and reflects on the cultural values from “back home” in Europe. Our seminar group will examine literary, historical and theoretical texts to engage constructions of race and gender originating in and imported to the North American colonial context. We will consider how these constructions were used as a preliminary vocabulary for imagining and reporting upon the Indigenous nations and individuals encountered there. Captivity narratives were written in their time to be something between religiously edifying and exciting popular reading about exoticized groups and widely misunderstood conflicts and communities. Captivity narratives contain scenes of violence and may be disturbing to some readers; reader discretion is advised.
Reading ahead? Choose Mary Rowlandson’s Captivity account and Robert Rogers’ play Ponteach.
