Commonplace


Just Teach One

Canon Fire and Gender Trouble

Christopher J. Lukasik

Purdue University

We all know the course. Survey of Literature in America to 1865. Or at least that’s what I call it. It goes by different names and assumes other shapes of course—as longstanding institutional forces tend to do–, but for many of us, it remains, for better or worse, a staple of our undergraduate teaching lives. And this is where I decided to teach The Story of Constantius and Pulchera.

I was worried at first. Perhaps I was asking too much of it. But there it stood on the syllabus. Taking its place–or shall I say–shoved into line alongside the usual suspects; all those authors my students had already learned to associate with the first half of the undergraduate American literature survey: Franklin. Emerson. Poe. Hawthorne. Douglass. Melville. Whitman. Dickinson. I tried to take it easy on Constantius and Pulchera by creating a “unit” on the culture of performance and the limitations of self-fashioning (pairing it with texts by Franklin, Equiano, and Occom among others). Little did I know (more…)

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