July 3 – July 20, 2017
Alexia Schemien
Visiting Professor
University of DuisburgEssen, Germany
[email protected]
Gender and Nationality in American Literature, 1776-1865
Course Description
In this course we will concentrate on American literature written in the time frame between the
Declaration of Independence (1776) and the end of the Civil War (1865). We will focus on the major
modes and themes in American literature from this time period and especially take a look at
constructions of gender and national identity within literary texts of various genres. By doing so, we
will try to better understand the socio-economic, ideological, and historical developments that had
an influence on the writers of the time. Notions of masculinity have had a great impact on U.S.
American national identity as well as on its literature. This can for example be seen in Crèvecœur’s
Letters from an American Farmer (1782), which is not only a well-known manifesto of early American
nationalism but it also gives us an insight into the ambivalence that men felt about this newly
developing American nation and their own identities as men. Understanding these dynamics of
gender intertwined with national identity will be at the center of our discussions. Texts to be
included in this course are: excerpts from Crèvecœur’s Letters from an American Farmer, poems
from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, excerpts from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
William Hall Brown’s The Power of Sympathy, Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, George L. Aiken’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Royall Tyler’s The Contrast, William Dunlap’s André, and James Nelson Barker’s
The Indian Princess. By taking a look at drama, poetry, and narrative, we will also examine the
development of American literature as a tradition in its own right. Hence, we will study the tension
between European traditions on the one hand and a literary emancipation movement in postrevolutionary America on the other. These texts – which oscillate between tradition and innovation,
between Europe and America – demonstrate how national identity was formed in America during
this era.
Reading List
Crèvecœur, Hector St. John. Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century
America. New York: Penguin Classics, 1981.
Hall Brown, William. The Power of Sympathy and the Coquette. New York: Penguin Classics, 1996.
Richards, Jeffery H. Early American Drama. New York: Penguin Classics, 1997.
Rowson, Susanna Haswell. Charlotte Temple. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass: The First (1855) Edition. New York: Penguin Classics, 1961.
Requirements/Evaluation
30% Regular Attendance, Well-Prepared In-Class Participation
30% Three Quizzes
20% Contribution to the Project Session
20&Study Journal and Portfolio
Bio
Alexia Schemien is a lecturer at the University of Duisburg-Essen in North American and literary
studies. She recently recently finished her dissertation entitled “Doing Religion: The Politics of
Spirituality in Mexican American Literature” and it will be published with Bilingual Press, Tempe as
well as Winter Verlag Trier, Germany in the spring of 2017. Complementary to her work at the
University of Duisburg-Essen, she is the website and newsletter coordinator of the International
Association of Inter-American Studies. In the summer of 2011 she conducted a research stay at the
Arizona State University in Tempe and in 2012 she did extensive research at the Library of Congress
in Washington, D.C. In 2013 she co-taught a course on “Indigenous Identities” at the Graz
International Summer School Seggau. Between 2010 and 2015 I was one of the organizers of the
“Ruhr PhD Forum,” a PhD conference organized by the Ruhr University of Bochum, the Technical
University of Dortmund, and the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. Her teaching and research
interests include Mexican American literature, inter-American studies, race and ethnicity, religion,
gender and queer studies, and early American drama. She recently started to work on her
postdoctoral thesis with the working title “Masculinities and Nationality in Early American Drama.”