Off Book with Dr. Echols

This episode discusses close reading strategies, including 4 easy steps: Paraphrase, Describe, Contextualize, and Analyze. Really, it's all about looking, listening, and collecting your thoughts and observations before jumping to conclusions. Think of it as practicing good manners with the text. Remember: Always read out loud (if you can), and always read it twice.

In this lecture, I introduce Harriett Jacobs, a gifted and important writer whose work captures the particularly traumatic conditions faced by enslaved women in America during the nineteenth century. Just as Frederick Douglass exposes the hypocrisy of slaveholding religion and patriotism, so does Jacobs point out the ways in which slavery undermines the idealized American institutions of the family and notions of sexual "purity."  

In this lecture, I'll introduce the remarkable writing and life of Frederick Douglass, an extremely powerful writer, speaker, and advocate for racial justice. Douglass excels at calling out American idols—the ideas of independence and equality that fueled the Revolution, and the Christian ideals of brotherhood dating back to the Puritan colonies—that he saw being used to prop up and justify the inhuman practice of slavery. I quote briefly from a poem by the wonderful contemporary poet Martín Espada, which you can find here if you are interested. 

This episode explores the rhetorical strategies of Revolutionary writer Thomas Paine in his explosive pamphlet series The Crisis and Common Sense. We draw connections between the growing emphasis on the individual in the wake of the Protestant Reformation and the secular emergence of "reason" as a natural extension of this in the Enlightenment. Paine, along with Thomas Jefferson, draws on these ideals of individual reason and liberty to justify (and animate) the American Revolution. His texts carefully employ a rhetoric of "common sense" to present opinions that any "reasonable" audience might find hard to disagree with. This is why, I'll suggest, we have to be particularly careful as readers not to get swept up in this rhetoric or take things at face value: we always must keep in mind the complexity (and compromises) of this fascinating historical period. 

This lecture introduces the voices of Roger Williams and Anne Bradstreet as important examples of the complexity of Puritan life. While Winthrop offered a utopian vision of Christian (and American) society, these voices suggest that Puritan values were far from universal or homogenous. Williams' emphasis on individual conscience in religious experience leads to a vital practice of tolerance (and one which would get him in trouble with authorities like Winthrop), and Bradstreet's moving poetry suggests a more human, embodied experience of faith that is often marked by a tension between piety and the lived experience of pain and suffering. 

In this episode, we explore further narratives of encounter in the decades following Columbus' "Letter of Discovery", thinking about how explorers like Sir Francis Drake and his captain might deliver narratives to an eager European marketplace who were beginning to develop expectations and assumptions about what encounters between the old and new worlds looked like. We will also consider the striking absence of indigenous perspectives from these narratives, and puzzle over the elusive line between fact and fiction; story and sales pitch; representation and repression. 

This episode introduces the famous "Letter of Discovery" of Christopher Columbus, and explores the rhetorical strategies the author employs in his representation of the New World and its inhabitants. Through reading this letter alongside the account of Bartholome de las Casas—which offers a starkly contrasting vision of colonization and its violence—and by considering other pairings, conversations, debates and revisions evident in so-called "discovery narratives", we begin to see the ways in which writing and rhetoric shaped European perspectives of both the New World and its indigenous residents. 

This is a short welcome to the course, and a brief introduction to three American poets revising both each other's work and the visions of American identity they contain.