Study Questions and Discussion Ideas for Week One:

We discussed many ideas during our first day of class, including the following:

• What date is the beginning of American literary history?

• Must we have writing to have a national literature?

• Must this national literature be a subject of academic study to be considered valid or, in fact, existent?

• What do we do with European accusations, prominent throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, that Americans have no history or culture, thus cannot have a national literature?

• If we do have a national literature, what are its distinguishing features? How is it different from other national literatures?

Many scholars have examined the history of American literature as a subject of study,

including, in recent years, William C. Spengemann (A Mirror for Americanists:

Reflections on the Idea of Literature), David R. Shumway (Creating American

Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline), and Kermit Vanderbilt (American Literature and the Academy: The Roots Growth and Maturity of a Discipline). These three books are a brief sampling of the scholarly activity dedicated to the study of the genesis of American literature as a field of study. These books help to answer the question, “Why do we study American literature in college?”

Worth mentioning is Vernon Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought, published in 1928, and another book that was published in 1923 by an Englishman, D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence’s Studies in Classic American Literature and Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought contended with the question of what made American writing markedly American. Peruse these texts to see what features the authors identified!