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The Great Gallery, Horseshoe Canyon, Utah.
Image taken from http://www.so-utah.com/capitol/horsshoe/panorama.jpg
American Literature
Beginnings
 
I.                   Examine your assumptions regarding the History of American Literature:
1.      History
—A single, unified history?
—About whom? Who are Americans?
—Who wrote it? How? For what purpose?
2.      American
—the United States vs. America or the North American continent
3.      Literature
—How would you define the literary art? What is “literature”?
4.       Language
—English only? Should non-English writings be included, such as the
 350 languages spoken by Native Americans at their first encounter with the
Europeans, or the languages of the Spanish and French colonizers?
—Only in the written form? How about oral narratives?
5.       Beginning
        —Does it start from 1776 when the United States became independent?
—Does it start from 1452 when Columbus “discovered” the New World?
—Or earlier? But how far does it date back to?
 
II.                Possible origins:
1.      Indian cave art
The Columbia Literary History of the United States represents the revisionist view that aims to include works of previously marginalized groups: “The literary history of this nation began when the first human living in what has since become the United States used language creatively” (“General Introduction” xv).
 
“Presumably, that moment occurred many centuries ago when one of the members of the numerous Native American tribes formulated a poetic expression or told a story” (“General Introduction” xv).
  
In “The Native Voice,” N. Scott Momaday suggests one such beginning to be Indian cave paintings found in the American Southwest:
At Barrier Canyon, Utah, there are some twenty sites upon which are preserved prehistoric rock art. One of these, known as the Great Gallery, is particularly arresting. Among arched alcoves and long ledges of rock is a wide sandstone wall on which are drawn large, tapering anthropomorphic forms colored in dark red pigment. There on the ancient picture plane is a procession of gods approaching inexorably from the earth. They are informed with irresistible power; they are beyond our understanding, masks, if you will, of infinite possibility. We do not know what they mean, but we know that we are involved in their meaning. They persist through time in the imagination, and we cannot doubt that they are invested with the very essence of language, the language of story and myth. They are two thousand years old, more or less, and they remark as closely as anything can the origin of American literature. (Columbia Literary History of the United States 6; see also http://ag.arizona.edu/oals/ALN/aln50/momaday.html)
 
2.      Viking Sagas
The earliest explorers of America were not English, Spanish, or French, but the Vikings. The first European record of exploration in America is in a Scandinavian language (VanSpanckeren 2). America appeared recurrently in Norse geographical and historical tracts, though archeological evidence of Norse settlements in the tenth century was not established until the 1960s. The Viking discovery and settlement of Vinland, the name of America at that time, is most fully documented in two sagas:
 
A.    The Greenlanders' Saga: about 1190.
B.     The Saga of Erík the Red: about 1269
 
Sagas originally referred to oral prose narratives which seem to have been derived from the epics. Lawson-Peebles observes that the Norse sagas are characterized by a combination of the factual and the fabular, or the real and the legendary, which is one of the hallmarks of American literature (48).
 
III.             European Literary Imagination: the land and the heroes
1.      A new Eden: the virgin land, the earthly paradise, the garden of the world, a landscape of abundance, a space of pastoral innocence
the American Adam (before the Fall)
the American Farmer
the noble savage
2.      Wilderness: the wild West, the frontier
   the frontiersman, the backwoodsman
3.      Atlantis: a legend recounted by Plato in Timaeus and Critias. It was an island that reached the pinnacle of civilization but, as punishment for human wickedness, suffered great earthquakes and floods, and sank into the sea one day. In Francis Bacon's political utopia The New Atlantis (1626), Atlantis re-emerged as America.
   the American Adam (after the Fall)
 
 
Works Cited
Elliott, Emory et al, eds. Columbia Literary History of the United States. New York: Columbia UP, 1988.
Gray, Richard. A History of American Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.
Lawson-Peebles, Robert. American Literature Before 1880. Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2003.
VanSpanckeren, Kathryn. “Early American and Colonial Period to 1776: Introduction.” An Outline of American Literature. http://odur.let.rug.nl/~usa/LIT/ch1_p2.htm
 
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