American Literature I: From the Beginnings to the Civil War
Video Lectures
Displaying all 26 video lectures.
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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." |
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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. |
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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. |
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American Transcendentalism (III) Featuring discussions of Ralph Waldo Emerson; Henry David Thoreau; "Resistance to Civil Government"; and Walden. |
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American Transcendentalism (IV) Featuring discussions of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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Nathaniel Hawthorne (II) Featuring discussions of the logic of allegory and romance; liminality; and The Scarlet Letter. |
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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. |
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Moby-Dick (III) Featuring discussions of Melville's Moby-Dick; agency; free will; fate and destiny the logic of principal and agent |
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Moby-Dick (IV) Featuring discussions of Melville's Moby-Dick; race and slavery in nineteenth-century America; and Lemuel Shaw. |
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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. |