How Wide is the Atlantic? Arts and Humanities Interdisciplinary Seminar, Spring Semester 2010 Coordinator: Professor Geoffrey Plank School of American Studies Arts 1.38 01603 597 486 [email protected] Seminar Description: A generation ago the historian Alfred Crosby coined the phrase “Columbian Exchange” to describe the migration of plants, animals and pathogens across the Atlantic Ocean after Columbus reached the Americas in 1492. The ecologies of all the continents ringing the ocean were transformed, not simply by the migration of peoples but more broadly by the introduction of invasive species which provided humans new sources of food, animate power and illness. Crosby suggested that the disruptive impact of the “Columbian Exchange” peaked in the early modern period. By the nineteenth century the peoples and environments of Europe, the Americas and Africa were getting increasingly accustomed to transatlantic contact. Recently an array of scholars have analysed human cultures in Europe, the Americas and Africa within a frame of reference that resembles Crosby’s “Columbian Exchange.” They have identified the Age of Discovery as a destabilizing shock which altered nearly every aspect of life on both sides of the ocean. After the fifteenth century Africans, Europeans and Native Americans lived in a common “Atlantic World,” a circumstance which forced them to rethink their regional, ethnic, national and racial identities and for many people transformed their conception of the cosmos. Scholars of the Atlantic World emphasize cultural fluidity. The Atlantic World was an unsettling place, especially in the early modern period, but eventually things calmed down. Many scholars surveying the Atlantic World end their studies in the early nineteenth century. Is that because, by that time, we had all gotten used to each other and transatlantic contact no longer had the capacity to shock? The Faculty of Arts and Humanities Interdisciplinary Graduate Seminar provides scholars in a variety of disciplines an opportunity to consult with one another about the broad implications of their work. This year’s seminar revolves around the question, “How Wide is the Atlantic?” We will examine transatlantic travel, migration, commerce, cultural exchange, expropriation and miscommunication up to the twenty-first century. We will discuss novels, paintings and movies, diplomatic crises, insurrections and moral panics, assessing whether it continues to be appropriate to view Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas as component parts of a chaotic Atlantic World.

Seminar Schedule Wednesday, January 19 Introductions Wednesday, January 26 John Mack ART – Coastlines Robert Clark LIT – Defoe Readings: Crane, Stephen, ‘The Open Boat’ in The Red Badge of Courage and Other Stories (1899) (London, 2005), pp. 211-41 Dana, Richard Henry Jr., Two Years before the Mast: A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea (1840) (New York, 1981) Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick or The Whale, with a foreword by Nathaniel Philbrick (1851) (London, 2001), esp. pp. 3-8. Corbin, Alain, The Lure of the Sea (Cambridge 1994). Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe (1719) Gildon, Charles. The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Mr. D-De F--, of London, Hosier, Who Has liv'd above fifty Years by himself in the Kingdoms of North and South Britain. (London 1719) Mayer, Robert. History and the early English novel: Matters of fact from Bacon to Defoe. (CUP 1997) Rogers, Woodes. A Cruising Voyage Round the World (1712) Starkey, David. British Privateering Enterprise in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter, 1990) Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel (1957) Watt, Ian. "Robinson Crusoe as Myth" (Essays in Criticism, 1951) Wednesday, February 2 Common reading: John R. Chavez, Beyond Nations: Evolving Homelands in the North Atlantic World, 1400-2010 (Cambridge, 2009). Monday, February 7 Malcolm Gaskill HIS – England and America: Cultural Identity in the Seventeenth Century Michael Zuckerman, Department of History, University of Pennsylvania – Early Modern Childhood Readings: David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: the Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill NC, 1981), chap. 1. Richard Archer, Fissures in the Rock: New England in the Seventeenth Century (Hanover NH, 2001), chaps. 1 & 9.

David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between Old and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987), chaps. 2-3. Andrew Delbanco, 'Looking homeward, going home: the lure of England for the founders of New England', New England Quarterly, 59 (1986), pp. 358–86. Larry Dale Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted: the English Colonization of Barbados, 1627–1660 (Oxford, 2003), chap. 1. Norman Pettit, ‘God’s Englishman in New England: his enduring ties to the motherland’, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 101 (1989), pp. 56-70. Michael Zuckerman, “William Byrd’s Family,” Perspectives in American History 12 (1979) 253-311. Wednesday, February 16 John Thieme LIT – Derek Walcott and the Black Atlantic Rebecca Tillett AMS – Gloria Naylor's reworkings of The Tempest Wednesday, February 23 Geoffrey Plank AMS – Transatlantic Quakerism Polly Ha, HIS – Island Christianity Readings: Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction (New York: Knopf, 1986). Aaron Spencer Fogleman, “Jesus is Female: The Moravian Challenge in the German Communities of British North America,” William and Mary Quarterly 60 (2003) 295332. Geoffrey Plank, “The First Person in Antislavery Literature: John Woolman, his Clothes and his Journal,” Slavery and Abolition 30 (2009) 67-91. Karen Kupperman, “Errand to the Indies: Puritan Colonization from Providence Island through the Western Design,” William and Mary Quarterly 45 (1988) 70-99. Wednesday, March 2 Kate Campbell LIT – Henry James Thomas Ruys Smith AMS – Nineteenth-century American literature Readings: James, Henry, 'The Birthplace', can Google online, or else find in collections of the short stories, eg. Tom Paulin and Peter Messent, eds., Henry James: Selected Tales (Dent: 1982). T.J.Lustig, 'James, Arnold, 'Culture' and 'Modernity'; or, a Tale of Two Daschshunds', Cambridge Quarterly 37 (2008) 154-193. Jessica Berman, 'Cosmopolitanism', in David McWhirter, ed., Henry James in Context (Cambridge University Press: 2010). Kate Flint 'Transatlantic Studies and the Transatlantic Indian', Victorian Studies 52 (2010) 269279. Amanda Claybaugh, "Toward a New Transatlanticism: Dickens in the United States", Victorian Studies, 48:3 (Spring 2006), 439-460.

Helen Heineman, "Frances Trollope in the New World: Domestic Manners of the Americans", American Quarterly, 21:3 (Autumn, 1969), 544-559. Thomas Ruys Smith, ''The river now began to bear upon our imaginations", Revue Franciase d'Etudes Americaines, No.98 (2003), 20-30. Lawrence Buell, "American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon", American Literary History (1992) 4:3, 411-442. Wednesday, March 9 David Peters Corbett – American Urban landscapes Sarah Churchwell AMS – F. Scott Fitzgerald Wednesday, March 16 Larry Butler HIS – Decolonization in Africa Wendy McMahon AMS – Negritude in Contemporary Writing from the Caribbean Wednesday, March 23 David Milne PSI – American diplomacy Thomas Otte HIS – British Diplomacy Readings: H. W. Brands, What America Owes the World: The Struggle for the Soul of Foreign Policy (1998). Bruce Kuklick, Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger (2006). David Milne, America's 'Intellectual Diplomacy,' International Affairs, 86 (2010) 49-61. Wednesday, March 30 Peter Kramer FTV “Two Controversies: The Reception of A Clockwork Orange (1971) in the US and the UK” Malcolm McLaughlin AMS – 1919 Red Summer in Liverpool and Chicago Readings: Campbell, Anne, Steven Munce and John Galea. “American Gangs and British Subcultures: A Comparison”, International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology, 26 (1982) 76-89. Pearson, Geoffrey. “Falling Standards: A Short, Sharp History of Moral Decline”, The Video Nasties: Freedom and Censorship in the Media, ed. Martin Barker (London: Pluto, 1984), 88-103. Robertson, James C., The Hidden Cinema: British Film Censorship in Action, 1913-1972 (London: Routledge, 1989), Ch. 4: “The Later Talkies, 1950-1972”, pp. 104-149 (esp. pp. 143-49 on A Clockwork Orange.) Wednesday, April 6 Concluding session