Location: [Reed College] [Department of English] [Laura Arnold][ Nation and Narration]Daily Readings
1. For Friday please finish reading Fuller's Summer on the Lakes and
read pp. ix-xx and 226-235 of Werner Sollors' The Invention of
Ethnicity. What sort of identity does Fuller "invent" for American
Indians? What is their role within the nation's invented identity? Do
American Indians help Fuller invent a white space and identity as well? How
so? How does her portraits of American Indians compare to the portraits of
American Indians made by George Catlin?
2. In "Towards a Feminist Poetics" (Essentials of the Theory of Fiction 380-402), Elaine Showalter identifies three stages of women's writing: feminine, feminist, and female. In which category does Fuller belong?
3. In the introduction to our text, Jeffrey Steele suggests that Fuller writes in a female poetics when she
4. Engendering the Sublime. In Women Poets and the American Sublime, Joanne Diehl suggests that the sublime meant different things for women and men. She argues
Transformed by the universe flowing through him, the new man experiences the apotheosis of the Emersonian Sublime--one with the world, he assumes its authority, his speech achieving the clarity of cosmic law. Implicit in this wondrous transformation is Emerson's faith in the self's ability to open doors, experience the flood, and speak with a voice of thunder in language bold as it is clear, a language where sign and signification are one. Yet Emerson's assertion presents difficulties not easily overcome by poets of lesser confidence or by those who lack support of a tradition....Women poets experience the burden of these difficulties in ways that bar their free access to the Sublime, for gender blocks the identification Emerson so fluently assumes (Diehl 3).How does Fuller's experience of the sublime differ from Emerson, Hawthorne, and Shelley's? Is gender the only factor here?
5. Why Travel? In class Wed. we discussed reasons why people travel. Click here for more information on pilgrimages, captivity narratives, Jeremiads.
Other useful hotlinks:
Laura.Arnold@Reed.edu