Thomas Hallock
University of South Florida St. Petersburg
Kaylie’s song inhabits two voices from the American survey. The first stanza takes the perspective of Sarah Darnley, who flees a disastrous marriage and concubinage, wanders down the public road and knocks on a farm house door outside Dublin: Continue reading “Ghost Story”
Karen Woods Weierman
Worcester State University
In Fall 2015, I placed the Just Teach One text Sincerity at the center of my American Novel I course. The “Recovering Sincerity Project,” adapted from a JTO assignment by Jon Blandford, asked students to do the work of literary history and decide whether the novel deserved critical attention and inclusion in courses like ours.
The project spanned most of the semester and included the following phases:
Continue reading “Is it any good?: The Recovering Sincerity Project”
Caroline Woidat
State University of New York—Geneseo
Before the addition of Sincerity to Just Teach One, the syllabus for my upper-level undergraduate course on American women writers and nineteenth-century reform had always started with either Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple or Hannah Foster’s The Coquette as a means of introducing Republican era concerns and debates before our exploration of such topics as temperance, slavery, Indian removal, education, labor, immigration, health care, and women’s rights. As an alternative selection to Charlotte Temple, Rowson’s Sincerity presented new challenges to students thinking about the relationship between literature and social reform. Whereas Charlotte’s transatlantic passage juxtaposes her English and American identities, the action in Sincerity spans the American Revolution but appears isolated from it. Given its European setting and the characters’ seeming indifference to affairs on the other side of the Atlantic, how might we read Sincerity as an American novel concerned with social reform in the United States? Students examined Sarah’s conflict with European values and traditions, weighing the significance of her flight from England to Ireland, for example, and her fraught relationship to the Marquis of H—. Drawing from critical approaches to other early American novels, we asked whether Sincerity might construct a national allegory with Sarah’s struggle to survive and maintain her ideals while bound to unreliable “protectors.” Many of the issues that Sarah faces, of course, are ones that concerned early advocates of women’s rights—the moral double standard for women and men, the obstacles to women’s employment and economic independence, the pressure upon women to marry at all costs, etc. We explored these connections using the database/journal Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000, a collection of document projects with primary sources edited and introduced by historians. Students compared Sincerity to other works by Rowson and her contemporaries in Bonnie Laughlin Schultz’s document project How Did Susanna Rowson and Other Reformers Promote Higher Education as an Antidote to Women’s Sexual Vulnerability, 1780-1820? A presentation group selected documents of interest and led discussion of their relevance to Sincerity, focusing upon Rowson’s role as an educator and writer of textbooks, and the novel’s portrayal of Sarah’s own efforts to “teach” herself and others. Students found Sincerity less didactic than Charlotte Temple, in part because of the ambiguity created by the novel’s multivocal epistolarity—a form that also calls attention to the impact of reading and writing upon women’s lives. The course syllabus also paired Sincerity with Jan Lewis’s “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic” (1987), an essay that worked well to contextualize and problematize Sarah’s character as the “exemplary wife” (versus “mother”). Lewis’s argument sparked animated conversation about Sarah’s relationship to Darnley and the idea that women are responsible for “seducing” men into virtue. As we studied later nineteenth-century American women writers (such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, and Louisa May Alcott), students continued to make references to Sincerity, using it as a touchstone for considering evolving ideas about women and their role in social reform.
David Lawrimore
Idaho State University
I taught Susanna Rowson’s Sincerity in “Origins of the American Novel,” a once-a-week, 400/500-level seminar on American literature before 1800. The major goal of the course was to consider the causes and effects of early American novelists’ obsession with established British genres. We studied how American novels drew and developed from their British predecessors and considered the American authors’ reasons for writing within these well-worn genres. Sincerity was a particularly effective text for this seminar. Continue reading “Format, Genre, and Nosebleeds, Reconsidered”
Brian Yothers
University of Texas at El Paso
My experience of teaching Susanna Haswell Rowson’s Sincerity in a graduate seminar in the early Atlantic novel was marked by the unexpected. As the initial call for participants noted, this novel defeats the expectations we have for Rowson’s work when we come straight to it from Charlotte Temple: its unsentimental, explicit, and forceful critique of the injustices in the institution of marriage at the start of the nineteenth-century seems worlds away from the tears and exhortations to filial piety in Charlotte Temple, and my students picked up on this rather quickly. Continue reading “Teaching Sincerity, Finding Serendipity”
Jon Blandford
Bellarmine University
As I did the previous two times I’ve participated in “Just Teach One,” I incorporated this year’s selection into the survey course I offer every fall, which covers American literature from its beginnings through 1865. This course draws mostly majors who are mostly at the sophomore level, though there are always a handful of upperclassmen who didn’t take it earlier and a few intrepid non-majors who take it to fulfill their general education literature requirement. Like any survey, it sacrifices depth for breadth, aiming to familiarize students with a wide range of authors, texts, and critical problems and thus laying the necessary foundation for more sustained inquiry in upper-level courses. Continue reading “Serial Blogging a Serial Novel”
Lisa West
Drake University
I taught the Just Teach One text Sincerity by Susanna Rowson in two different classes fall 2015 at Drake University. The first course was Approaches to American Literature Before 1900, which I was teaching with a focus on 1820s social issues, and the second was a First Year Seminar on Jane Austen and issues of “property” and “propriety.” Continue reading “Sincerity, Mary Kelley, and Jane Austen”
Jonathan Beecher Field
Clemson University
I taught the Columbian Magazine issue at the end of a semester where I was trying out a lot of new things on the syllabus. Continue reading “Digital Enhancements”
Michael Ditmore
Pepperdine University
I sandwiched Columbian Magazine into an upper-division survey of eighteenth-century American literature, 1730-1830 (“The Great Awakening to Rip Van Winkle and Nat Turner”), between Crevecoeur and Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason/Thomas Jefferson’s Bible(s); we devoted a week to the magazine.
Truth to tell, as much as I admire the Just Teach One project, virtually every text, with the possible exception of Franklin’s Autobiography, felt like a “neglected” text. The Contrast? Letters from an American Farmer? The Coquette? Wieland? The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon? As familiar as these are to scholars-teachers, for my well-read undergrads, not so much. They knew some titles from earlier surveys; they’d read an excerpt or two; but otherwise, there was little-to-less-than-little familiarity. I can’t say they were ready to appreciate a “neglected” early American text. Please don’t misunderstand; I had a very sharp group of undergrads, but they didn’t enter with a built-in background for early American culture.
The Columbian definitely proved to be a rewarding challenge. Continue reading “Heterogenity and United States Public Formation”
Michelle Burnham
Santa Clara University
“Introduction to Literary History and Interpretation” is one of three foundation courses for the English major at Santa Clara University, and as such is probably a less than ideal pedagogical context in which to ask students to read and talk about the November 1786 issue of The Columbian Magazine. Indeed, the first thing I learned after assigning this material to my undergraduate students is that they don’t read magazines. I discovered this when I asked them to compare this eighteenth-century example to more contemporary and familiar ones. Continue reading “The Columbian Magazine and Genre”
