Sarah Salter
Just Teach One Reflection

Is Texas a country unto itself? A region? A “state of mind,” as bumper stickers, t-shirts, and country classics proclaim? I teach multiethnic US literatures in an English Department on the South Texas Gulf Coast. This means that my students and I learn together hundreds of miles into what was, in the period I study, often mythologized as The Republic of Texas.

Many students at my university articulate complex regional identities, tied to US institutions and cultures, developed from logics and orientations of borderlands, underwritten by multilingualism. In the American Literature survey where we read JTO’s Fall 2017 offering, an anonymous satirical novel titled Rosa, or American Genius and Education, our syllabus is organized into regional units, each unfolding on their own chronological trajectory. Thus, the Texas/California/Mexico unit moves from Spanish American folktales to Cabeza de Vaca to the US Invasion of Mexico to the carved-wall poetry of Angel Island before we double back, starting again with John Smith in Virginia on the way to Douglass, Jacobs, and Chesnutt. In this context, students are authorized to embrace regional specificity from a range of perspectives: they teach me about local religions and folklores, about Texas public education, about the grade-school mythos of Davy Crockett. Meanwhile, I have (I hope!) curated for them a selection of regional identities can seem beautifully specific in their potentials and depressingly similar in their limitations.

We encountered Rosa, or American Genius and Education at the start of a “Mid Atlantic/Middle America” unit. The unit marked the point in the semester where we began to read more broadly in regional terms and to think more broadly in conceptual ones. Our experience exemplified for me the value and importance of the Just Teach One project. Rosa was, after all, a text that I didn’t know very well. Introducing the novella, I told the students that I too would be reading it through for the first time, having skimmed it in anticipation of the course and of the unit. Faced with this shocking news of professorial experimentation, one of my boldest students asked how, then, I knew it was a worthwhile text at all. That I trusted in JTO editors Duncan Faherty and ED White, that I trusted in the purpose of Just Teach One, that I had faith in scholarly community and collective knowledge making, all seemed to mollify the questioner. The question re-affirmed for me that opening a course to the JTO project constitutes an invitation to share pedagogical authority in a range of generative ways.

Rosa acted as an ideal pivot between reading in the survey and reflecting on the survey. “In what terms would you argue for Rosa’s inclusion in any survey course?” I asked them, “What does it add to our learning experience?”

By teaching a text without conventional canonical clout, I enabled my students to explore the terms of their own engagement. Some suggested that the value of the text was its humor. The satirical content and stylistic play offered a welcome contrast to the brutality of Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition and the cruelty of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. Others emphasized the ways that genre indeterminacy spoke across our survey: was Rosa didactic and activist like the work of Harriet Jacobs or Margaret Fuller? Was it darkly funny fiction like “Bartleby,” or oddly fluffy social commentary like “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”? A third avenue made use of character elements to imagine cross-regional connection: how does the presence of Sol, a powerful example of indigenous intellect, speak back to Anglo-American expectations of the type articulated by Jefferson? How does Sol’s denunciation of American ambition and political relativism (not to say hypocrisy) remind us of José María Tornel and Frederick Douglass rejecting the 1840s logic of Manifest Destiny or William Apess recounting the history of King Philip? Was the widow Charmion feminist like Angelina Grimké? Finally, what was the condition or context for early nineteenth-century Baltimore? Since our survey proceeded in a kind of circular chronology—starting with regional contact narratives again and again, moving to postbellum social debates again and again, only to start over with contact in a new place—our wide-ranging discussion of Rosa could be both locally specific and transregional, both temporally concrete and transhistorical. My students, some of whom have never left South Texas, seemed to relish the chance to draw connections fast and loose, or clear and indisputable, or undeniably speculative, across the sweep of US literary and cultural history.

We began the course with the literatures of South Texas and the Mexican Republic, exploring histories with which my students were often intimately acquainted. Although our work with Rosa led them to an unfamiliar region, developing inter-regional meaning and exploring the intertextual connections of the text enabled a different iteration of scholarly power. By taking on the job of providing the “final takeaway” for our engagement with Rosa, students could experiment with a version of meta-conceptualizing that offered them educational authority. Naming this authority, and encouraging historically devalued populations (women, indigenous and minoritized individuals, the economically vulnerable) to take hold of it, is part of the educational mission of Rosa; facilitating canon expansion in the classroom is part of the educational mission of Just Teach One; helping create new knowledge structures for individual students and for classroom communities are part and parcel of my own educational mission. I suspect that many of my colleagues and peers feel similarly. For me, the chance to Just Teach One is also the chance to Just Teach with, alongside, and in the good company of Many. It is also the chance to Just Learn from Many—from texts lost to history, from students, from those who will post here their own reflections and responses to this ongoing educational experiment.

Thank you to Duncan Faherty and Ed White, and to Common-Place, for creating and sharing this wonderful educational project for lo these many years.

Julie R. Voss, Associate Professor of English
Lenoir-Rhyne University

Studying early American literature has come a long way since my undergraduate days, when the “Origins to Civil War” survey of American literature pretty much skipped from the Puritans to Nathaniel Hawthorne, with maybe a little dip into works of the Revolutionary period.  Until I got to graduate school, I really thought there was no American fiction until Hawthorne started writing.  Thankfully, scholars of early American culture have brought more texts to light, and projects like this one make teaching early American fiction more accessible.

I included Rosa in an upper-division seminar on early American literature, after reading Cabeza de Vaca’s Relacion, Mary Rowlandson’s narrative, and Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, and before students created their own modern editions of out-of-print texts selected from Early American Imprints.  For this class, the JTO project was a great segway for students between looking at the products of other editors and becoming editors themselves.  They paid attention to the direction the editors take with a little-known text by an anonymous author, and some of them borrowed moves from this project in their own work.

The novel itself also provided great fodder for discussion.  Several of the students had taken previous English or history classes on the 19^th century, and they brought to our conversation the contrast between “accepted storylines” and the novel.  Particularly in the character of Sol, the students saw something different going on in this novel than what they expected.  They also found elements they did expect—like the sentimental daughter fainting away and the coincidences that wrapped things up—but they found interesting how those familiar elements were used differently in Rosa.  As one student wrote in a class forum, “Rosa is such a gem. It is remarkably different, surprisingly progressive, and beautifully written (even though the plot is wonky and sinuous). Its imperfection as a narrative only further endears me to it. Rosa pushes the limits of our genre-boxes and predetermined plot lines as much as it pushes the limits of its society racially, sexually, and intellectually. I am ‘queer’ by the editors’ definition, and as such, I like my books to be queer also—unusual and unique.”

Reading a novel with my students with which I was unfamiliar was an enjoyable exercise, as well.  We could approach the novel together, as explorers investigating something new, and students posed questions and speculated about answers on a more equal footing (rather than trying to find the “right” answer that they think I’m waiting for them to produce).  The question of “genre-boxes” became a fruitful avenue of discussion.  When we agreed that the novel wasn’t what we expected, that made us reflect on we did expect and why.  This, in turn, led to a discussion of what gets included in and left out of the canon and how the canon impacts our understanding of any given literary period.

Which brings me back to where I started.  My students left this class knowing that early American writers crafted fiction, of various kinds, even if not all of it has persisted.  They have a sense that there’s a wealth of literature out there that doesn’t make it into their classes.  And they’ve gained an appreciation for what they can glean from texts that maybe aren’t exactly “great literature.”  As much as I enjoyed my American Literature Survey as a college student, I have enjoyed much more the exploration of under-studied texts, and I appreciate this vehicle through which I can share this joy with my students.

Matthew Teutsch, Ph.D.
Auburn University

At first, teaching Rosa, or American Genius and Education (1810) in an early American literature survey course seemed somewhat daunting. I frame my courses around conversations, typically beginning with David Walker and Thomas Jefferson then moving around through time and region back and forth from the colonial to the early nineteenth century. I do this to show students that even though these texts appear decades, and sometimes even centuries, apart they still connect to one another through thematic issues that repeatedly show up again and again. As the nature of survey course does not allow for an in-depth discussion of very aspect in Rosa, I chose to highlight a couple of important points that had become reoccurring themes throughout the semester.

We read Rosa about a month into the semester after reading Walker, Jefferson, Samson Occom, Mary Rowlandson, Sarah Kemble Knight, William Apess, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, and a few others. As usual discussions began to center around the definition of who gets to be labeled as “American” in these early texts. Along with this aspect, issues surrounding calls for a distinctly American literature surfaced in our conversations. These two topics intertwine with one another to create explorations of constructions of Americanness during the early part of the nineteenth century.

Every two weeks, I have students post to a discussion board. They must ask a question about a reading and then respond to a fellow student’s question. For Rosa, one student specifically asked how the novel attempts to display an emerging Americanness and American literature. At this point, we had only read the first three chapters, and some students responded by saying that the opening chapter and the descriptions of Baltimore showed America as a “melting pot.” One responder, however, noted a sentence that compared “civilized Americans” to the British: “The manners of the civilized Americans, speaking with exceptions, are English.” The students’ questions and comments paved the way for further exploration of Rosa and how the novel approaches questions of Americanness and American literature.

During his travels from Baltimore to Boston, Richard encounters a struggling author. The man gives Richard a prospectus for his novel, “Views by Starlight,” telling the young traveler that the tale is original. Richard asks the man if he has ever printed the book, and the man replies that he had; however, “nobody would buy it.” At this, Richard offers the man some advice. He tells him,

In the first place, In the first place you are wrong to announce, as you have done in this prospectus, that the work was written by an American, or even that it was composed in America. That, I dare say, is what ruined the sale of your former novel. Your title, too, is much too plain. If you would call it “The Jug with Forty Handles” or something of that sort, and insert in the title page, that it is from the pen of a celebrated English or French writer, and that it is reprinted from the one hundred and forty-ninth European edition, you will infallibly succeed.

The man promises to follow Richard’s guidance and departs. Later, Richard hears that the man heeded the advice and “people had purchased up his books as fast as he could have them printed.”

When covering Sarah Kemble Knight, I make it a point to highlight for students the fact that her journal did not appear until 1825 when Theodore Dwight had it published. Five years before the public appearance of Knight’s journal, Sydney Smith inquired, “In the four corners of the globe, who reads an American book?” In the introduction, Dwight tells readers, “The object proposed in printing this little work is not only to please those who have particularly studied the progressive history of our country, but to direct the attention of others to subjects of that description, unfashionable as they still are; and also to remind the public that documents, even as unpretending as the following, may possess real value, if they contain facts which will be hereafter sought for to illustrate periods in our history.” Dwight’s objective is to highlight the rich literature of America, and by choosing Knight, he shows that that literature has a more significant background than some may have thought.

However, even after 1825, questions about whether or not America had a distinct literature continued to abound. To set America apart, writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Lydia Maria Child, John Augustus Stone, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and more, turned to the colonial past, most notably King Philip’s War, to help construct and define an American literature separated from Europe. In her 1830 short story “Chocorua’s Curse,” Child describes Mount Chocorua by telling readers, “Had it been in Scotland, perhaps the genius of Sir Walter would have hallowed it, and Americans would have crowded there to kindle fancy on the heart of memory.” However, that was not the case. European literature still reigned supreme.

In class, we trace these movements in the calls for a distinctly American literature and we work to define what exactly that literature entailed for the early nineteenth century. Even when we get to William Apess, I have students think about this issue. For Apess, we read An Indian’s Looking Glass for the White Man, and during my lecture, I bring up his Eulogy of King Philip (1836) for a couple of reasons. The main reason is because he mentions Rowlandson and challenges how we read her narrative. The other motive for bringing up Apess’ speech is the subject matter. For a myriad of reasons, Apess would call attention his ancestry as being tied to King Philip. Yet, I contend there is one main reason he does this rhetorical maneuver, to add to the ongoing debates centered around the construction of what constitutes American literature because most of the authors mentioned above turned to King Philip as a subject, beginning with Washington Irving in the Sketchbook (1819).

Along with this connection, the incorporation of Apess in relation to Rosa calls upon students to think about who is an American according to individuals in the early nineteenth century. Reading Jefferson, de Crèvecœur, John Adams, and others, students begin to see that American became defined as white, landowning males of European descent. Walker, Apess, Child, and more challenge this definition through their writings, and the anonymous author of Rosa does as well with the introduction of the Peruvian Sol into the narrative. The plot hinges, essentially, on Sol’s “experiment” to prove that as an individual native to the New World and of Incan descent that his daughter Rosa is just as capable of intellectual growth and expression as Europeans.

This aspect, particularly his speech to the committee in England who asked him questions in order to judge “the extent of his intellectual capacity,” correlates to the continued conversations that sought to outline who gets classified as American. Sol answers all of the inquisitors’ questions sufficiently then launches into a speech that calls to mind the fiery rhetoric of Walker, Apess, and Frederick Douglass in both tone and scope. Notably, Sol deploys arguments related to the history of Europe and the Incas, beginning by describing how the history of America and the defining of an “American” comes from those ultimately in power. If you would like to see ore about Sol’s speech, I have written about it in depth elsewhere.

Rosa, ultimately, ends with an egalitarian representation of America, sans individuals of African descent. The novel works to try and define Americanness both in terms of citizenship and cultural production. What stands out in the former construction arises not necessarily when Sol speaks in front of the committee but when he tells everyone about why he burned the house down and placed Rosa in the field. At the end of the novel, the narrator defines Sol as American even though he is from Peru. The narrator says, “[Sol] had wanted to convince the world that the faculties of the native American were as susceptible of improvement and embellishment s those of the natives of Europe.” Obviously, this reference relates to individuals in the New World; however, after this statement, the narrator drops “native” and when stating, that Sol’s experiment to prove “the equality of the American mind with that of Europe” became problematic when he lost some of his money.

We did not come to a clear, concise answer about the author’s labelling of Sol as American, but the topic warrants discussion in relation to a myriad of factors. For one, we need to think about it regarding how authors of the Early Republic sought to define the term American. As well, we need to consider it in relation to debates about Native American removal that began to reach a zenith during the 1820s and 1830s. Apess, Elias Boudinot, and others worked tirelessly to highlight the humanity of Native Americans in the context of an American history and culture. While these are not the only aspects of Rosa that one could cover, they present important components of a nation working to construct its identity separate from the rest of the world.