No More Alone with America:Early American Literary Studies and the Classroom

Early American literary studies has for decades been synonymous with Puritanism, American exceptionalism, and nationalist monology. Its contemporary reconfiguration as transnational and multicultural puts it in the avant-garde. At the same time, the explosion of texts that are now encompassed by early American literary studies presents a challenge to teachers who hope to offer their students a fair understanding of the field. The transnational framework of early American literary studies, however, threatens to construct its own totalizing narrative. One way of resisting the hardening of diversity into identity in teaching early American literary studies is in situatedness, which in this case is both a methodological project and a goal that contrasts theory with experience, location, and a specificity in time, place, and persons. I end this essay by imagining a course on early American literatures informed by both transnational analysis and situatedness.