Wall of Separation Between Church and US Nation-State?

Monday, 22 September

Today we engage literature of the nineteenth century and dig into two very different approaches to addressing one of the most contentious political issues of the day: slavery. We with the manifesto produced by David Walker and from Stowe particularly in the ways that they use rhetorical strategies that are similar to and different from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century predecessors. Having read the rationalist approaches of the late-Enlightenment thinkers, we assess the ways that dissenting voices challenged the status quo using both religious and secular political rhetoric.

     For Wednesday (9.24):

• Read Stowe, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Chapter 1, 5, 7 (B, 559-576)
• Record one entry in your common-place book

Wednesday, 24 September

NO CLASS – CBD

      For Friday (9.26):

• Read Stowe, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Chapters 9, 11 (B, 576-592)
• Record one entry in your common-place book

Friday, 26 September

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sentimentalist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared in serialized form in 1851 and 1852, gaining a reading public that far exceeded the author’s expectations and performing a new type of cultural work hardly seen before on U.S. soil. To what degree a work of fiction can transform the hearts and minds of the people inhabiting an entire nation and lead them to a whole new understanding of themselves, Uncle Tom’s Cabin provides a remarkable case study. The famous yet apocryphal anecdote that captures this phenomenon features an 1862 conversation between President Abraham Lincoln and the novelist, in which the former greets his White House guest with the words, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!” We use this session to consider ways that Stowe’s novel depends upon some combination of church and state to bring about its desired outcomes. 

We also discuss the take-home essay prompt.

      For Monday (9.29):

• Read Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown” (B, 274-281)
• Record two entries in your common-place book
• Work on Take-Home Essay and prep for Exam #1