Lecture

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.


Course Lectures
  • Introduction
    Cyrus Patell

    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.

  • Moby-Dick (I)
    Cyrus Patell

    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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • American Neoclassicism
    Cyrus Patell

    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.

  • Featuring discussions of Raymond Williams's model of culture; Edward Taylor; Jonathan Edwards; Benjamin Franklin; George Whitefield; and the Great Awakening.

  • Featuring discussions of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress; perfectionism; Deism; Benjamin Franklin; errata; Thomas Jefferson; syllogisms; John Locke; and the Declaration of Independence.

  • American Gothic (I)
    Cyrus Patell

    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.

  • American Gothic (II)
    Cyrus Patell

    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.

  • American Gothic (III)
    Cyrus Patell

    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."

  • 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.

  • Featuring discussions of Ralph Waldo Emerson; "The American Scholar" and "Self-Reliance," and "Experience"; John Locke's view of property; and possessive individualism.

  • Featuring discussions of Ralph Waldo Emerson; Henry David Thoreau; "Resistance to Civil Government"; and Walden.

  • Featuring discussions of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman.

  • 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.

  • Frederick Douglass
    Cyrus Patell

    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.

  • Uncle Tom's Cabin (I)
    Cyrus Patell

    Featuring discussions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin; the Fugtive Slave Law; sentimental fiction; anti-slavery narratives; and domestic slavery.

  • Uncle Tom's Cabin (II)
    Cyrus Patell

    Featuring discussions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin; the Fugtive Slave Law; sentimental fiction; anti-slavery narratives; and domestic slavery.

  • 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.

  • Featuring discussions of the logic of allegory and romance; liminality; and The Scarlet Letter.

  • Moby-Dick (II)
    Cyrus Patell

    Featuring discussions of Melville's Moby-Dick; intertextuality; Owen Chase's narrative of the sinking of the whaleship Essex; cenotaphs; Biblical culture; and typology.

  • Moby-Dick (III)
    Cyrus Patell

    Featuring discussions of Melville's Moby-Dick; agency; free will; fate and destiny the logic of principal and agent

  • Moby-Dick (IV)
    Cyrus Patell

    Featuring discussions of Melville's Moby-Dick; race and slavery in nineteenth-century America; and Lemuel Shaw.

  • Moby-Dick (V)
    Cyrus Patell

    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.