Weekly Focus

Week 1 focuses on Puritan literature, early American religious imagination, and the relationship between belief and daily life. Through Bradstreet and Taylor, students will examine how early American writing addresses piety, suffering, vocation, spiritual struggle, renewal, and the power of belief in shaping both individuals and communities. This focus aligns with the week’s written analysis of the Christian worldview and the discussion of disciplined reflection, meaningful expression, and personal and professional growth.

Required Reading

1. The Path to Piety in Anne Bradstreet’s _Here Follows Some Verses Upon the Burning of our House July 10 1666 (For your week 1 assignment).

2. Poetic Procreation in Edward Taylor's Meditations

Weekly Focus

Week 2 focuses on revolutionary and early national writing as public argument. Through Franklin, Paine, Patrick Henry, and Crèvecoeur, students will examine how autobiography, political prose, and public speech shaped ideas about virtue, citizenship, freedom, moral leadership, national identity, and the tension between liberty and responsibility. This focus aligns with the oral argument on Paine and the discussion of how literature and public writing helped shape a nation.

Required Reading

• Thomas Paine, Common Sense, Part III-IV, 1776, excerpts (For your written assignment)
• Benjamin Franklin with excerpts from The Autobiography
• Patrick Henry Speech in the Virginia Convention, 17 June 1788
• “What Is an American?” Letter III of Letters from an American Farmer, Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur (as James Hector St. John)

Weekly Focus

Week 3 focuses on American Romanticism and Transcendentalism, with special attention to Emerson’s ideas and Irving’s treatment of national identity. Students will examine nature, selfhood, truth, imagination, freedom, and moral independence as they compare Transcendentalist thought with a Christian worldview. This focus aligns with the comparison presentation on Emerson and the discussion of Rip Van Winkle as a Romantic reflection on memory, identity, and freedom.

Required Reading

1. Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle: A Dangerous Critique of a New Nation

2. Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Relationship Between Nature and the Self

3. Ralph Waldo Emerson “Self-Reliance.”

4. NATURE BY R. W. EMERSON

Weekly Focus

Week 4 focuses on dark Romanticism, Hawthorne, and the moral complexity of the human heart. Students will examine how fiction explores sin, guilt, pride, alienation, obsession, hypocrisy, brokenness, and moral ambiguity without offering easy answers. This focus aligns with the two video discussion forums on Young Goodman Brown and The Scarlet Letter.

Required Reading

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne “Young Goodman Brown”: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/512/512-h/512-h.htm#chap04
2. Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter Excerpts
   1. THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25344/25344-h/25344-h.htm#Page_231
   2. The Prison Door: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25344/25344-h/25344-h.htm#Page_51
   3. THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25344/25344-h/25344-h.htm#Page_302

Weekly Focus

Week 5 focuses on slavery, abolition, and the American conscience. Through Jacobs and Douglass, students will analyze how literature and life writing expose oppression, defend human worth, and call readers to justice, moral courage, and social responsibility. This focus aligns with the objective discussion on justice and human dignity and the essay analyzing slavery as a crisis of public conscience.

Required Reading

1. The Pathway from Slavery to Freedom

2. The Portrayal of Living Into Slavery in Harriet Ann Jacobs’s and Frederick Douglass’s Autobiographies

Weekly Focus

Week 6 focuses on Whitman, democracy, and the changing American experience in the aftermath of national conflict. Students will examine how Song of Myself engages labor, class, race, urban life, social diversity, and the gap between democratic ideals and lived reality, while also using Whitman as a bridge toward realism and regionalism. This focus aligns with the historical discussion of Whitman and the oral essay comparing Whitman with a later realism or regionalism text.

Required Reading

1. Song of Myself: With a Complete Commentary

2. Introduction: Reading Song of Myself

3. Song of Myself: Text and Commentary

Weekly Focus

Week 7 focuses on synthesis, reflection, and comparative analysis. Students will revisit recurring themes such as freedom, faith, sin, redemption, justice, belonging, and the search for meaning, then use those themes to explain how American literature tells the story of the nation’s aspirations and failures. This focus aligns with the capstone video discussion, the written comparative analysis, and the video explanation of that analysis.

Required Readings

• You will use all of the required readings from weeks 1-6.