American Literature I: From the Beginnings to the Civil War

Video Lectures

Displaying all 26 video lectures.
Lecture 1
Introduction
Play Video		 Introduction
Featuring discussions of cosmopolitanism and deliberative democracy; Raymond Williams's model of dominant, residual, and emergent cultures; Puritanism and Jeffersonianism; the horizon of expectations and the aesthetics of reception; canonization; ideology; and American Exceptionalism.
Lecture 2
Moby-Dick (I)
Play Video		 Moby-Dick (I)
Featuring discussions of New York and cosmopolitanism; paralipsis; exempla; synecdoche and metonomy; Stephen Greenblatt and the New Historicism; Michel Foucault; humanism; and the opening chapter of Moby-Dick.
Lecture 3
The Literature of Settlement
Play Video		 The Literature of Settlement
Featuring discussions of oral vs. written literary cultures; Native American creation stories; typological hermeneutics; the covenants of works and grace; original sin; John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion; the Synod of Dort; and TULIP.
Lecture 4
American Puritanism (I)
Play Video		 American Puritanism (I)
Featuring discussions of typology; John Calvin; Arminianism; materialism and idealism; phenomenal vs. noumenal; Puritan "plain style"; the form of the Puritan sermons; the Great Migration; William Bradford; and John Winthrop.
Lecture 5
American Puritanism (II)
Play Video		 American Puritanism (II)
Featuring discussions of Anne Hutchinson and Antinomianism; preparationism; justification vs. sanctification ; morphology of conversion; The "Half-Way Covenant"; election sermons; the jeremiad; and Mary Rowlandson.
Lecture 6
American Puritanism (III)
Play Video		 American Puritanism (III)
Featuring discussions of Puritan poetry; The Bay Psalm Book; English metaphysical poetry, including John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw; Samuel Johnson on Wit; intertextuality; paratext; Michael Wigglesworth; Anne Bradstreet; and Edward Taylor.
Lecture 7
American Neoclassicism
Play Video		 American Neoclassicism
Featuring discussions of Augustan and neoclassical poetic style; John Dryden; Alexander Pope; Samuel Johnson; Aristotle's Poetics; mimesis; Francis Scott Key's "Defense of Fort McHenry"; Phillis Wheatley.
Lecture 8
Edwards and the Transition to Enlightenment
Play Video		 Edwards and the Transition to Enlightenment
Featuring discussions of Raymond Williams's model of culture; Edward Taylor; Jonathan Edwards; Benjamin Franklin; George Whitefield; and the Great Awakening.
Lecture 9
The American Enlightenment
Play Video		 The American Enlightenment
Featuring discussions of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress; perfectionism; Deism; Benjamin Franklin; errata; Thomas Jefferson; syllogisms; John Locke; and the Declaration of Independence.
Lecture 10
American Gothic (I)
Play Video		 American Gothic (I)
Featuring discussions of the transition from Neoclassicism to Romanticism; Alexander Pope's "Windsor-Forest"; pastoralism; the graveyard school; fancy and imagination; Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"; Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads; William Cullen Bryant; and the Doppelgänger.
Lecture 11
American Gothic (II)
Play Video		 American Gothic (II)
Featuring discussions of the Copyright Act of 1790 and the marketplace for books; literature of virtue; Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and the English Gothic Novel; Edmund Burke; Samuel Richardson; and Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly.
Lecture 12
American Gothic (III)
Play Video		 American Gothic (III)
Featuring discussions of copyright law and the profession of authorship; Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly; Philip Freneau's "To a New England Poet"; Washington Irving's History of New York, "Rip Van Winkle," and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow."
Lecture 13
American Transcendentalism (I)
Play Video		 American Transcendentalism (I)
Featuring discussions of Ralph Waldo Emerson; ontological individualism and the state of nature; Alexis de Tocqueville; Immanuel Kant; philosophical idealism; Unitarianism; Transcendentalism; Lockean psychology; and Neo-Platonism.
Lecture 14
American Transcendentalism (II)
Play Video		 American Transcendentalism (II)
Featuring discussions of Ralph Waldo Emerson; "The American Scholar" and "Self-Reliance," and "Experience"; John Locke's view of property; and possessive individualism.
Lecture 15
American Transcendentalism (III)
Play Video		 American Transcendentalism (III)
Featuring discussions of Ralph Waldo Emerson; Henry David Thoreau; "Resistance to Civil Government"; and Walden.
Lecture 16
American Transcendentalism (IV)
Play Video		 American Transcendentalism (IV)
Featuring discussions of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman.
Lecture 17
American Transcendentalism (V)
Play Video		 American Transcendentalism (V)
Featuring discussions of Emerson, Whitman, and slavery; the Wilmot Proviso; Henry Clay, John Calhoun, Daniel Webster, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore; the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Law; and Lemuel Shaw.
Lecture 18
Frederick Douglass
Play Video		 Frederick Douglass
Featuring discussions of Frederick Douglass's 1845 Narrative as well as John Locke's Second Treatises of Government (1690); ontological individualism and possessive individualism ; Orlando Patterson and the idea of social death.
Lecture 19
Uncle Tom's Cabin (I)
Play Video		 Uncle Tom's Cabin (I)
Featuring discussions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin; the Fugtive Slave Law; sentimental fiction; anti-slavery narratives; and domestic slavery.
Lecture 20
Uncle Tom's Cabin (II)
Play Video		 Uncle Tom's Cabin (II)
Featuring discussions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin; the Fugtive Slave Law; sentimental fiction; anti-slavery narratives; and domestic slavery.
Lecture 21
Nathaniel Hawthorne (I)
Play Video		 Nathaniel Hawthorne (I)
Featuring discussions of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories; American romance; allegory; dream-visions; Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene; and John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.
Lecture 22
Nathaniel Hawthorne (II)
Play Video		 Nathaniel Hawthorne (II)
Featuring discussions of the logic of allegory and romance; liminality; and The Scarlet Letter.
Lecture 23
Moby-Dick (II)
Play Video		 Moby-Dick (II)
Featuring discussions of Melville's Moby-Dick; intertextuality; Owen Chase's narrative of the sinking of the whaleship Essex; cenotaphs; Biblical culture; and typology.
Lecture 24
Moby-Dick (III)
Play Video		 Moby-Dick (III)
Featuring discussions of Melville's Moby-Dick; agency; free will; fate and destiny the logic of principal and agent
Lecture 25
Moby-Dick (IV)
Play Video		 Moby-Dick (IV)
Featuring discussions of Melville's Moby-Dick; race and slavery in nineteenth-century America; and Lemuel Shaw.
Lecture 26
Moby-Dick (V)
Play Video		 Moby-Dick (V)
Featuring discussions of Melville's Moby-Dick, as well as John William De Forest and the idea of the Great American Novel; cosmopolitanism and deliberative democracy; Raymond Williams; the horizon of expectations; the Melville Revival; and Zoroastrianism.