For the seminar paper, I intend to continue my ongoing intellectual flirtation with problematizing our ideas about early American anxieties surrounding mobility. It is my sense that, especially when talking about American Gothic novels, the tendency to theorize about the catharsis of alleviating American anxieties about the “original sins” of settler-colonialism and the Transatlantic slave […]

I’d like to use the events detailed in the Long Walk of the Navahos from the first chapter of Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee as a backdrop for a larger inquiry into the language of banishment and its counter of resistance within the conflict-laden, west-expanding US borders during the mid-nineteenth century by juxtaposing the actual words of participants from […]

  Scenes of domestic sickness spread infectiously throughout the literature of postcolonial America. In fact, the threat of, treatments for, specific etiology, and physical locality of sickness can be seen as particularly vulnerable entry points for understanding the developing threads of an American identity (which is to say, an American literature). In three distinct “phases” […]

Maxine Krenzel April 11, 2106 Paper Proposal: Revolution and the World             My final term paper will take up some of the questions around captivity, fantasy, and identity that I left unanswered at the conclusion of my archival presentation on The Captivity of Mrs. Johnson. I ended my presentation by focusing on the ambiguity surrounding […]

            The narrative of the Haitian Revolution is often framed through a binary of African descended slaves successfully revolting against French colonists in order to establish the Republic of Haiti as a sovereign nation. As pointed out by Joan Dayan, the persistence of this binary framework of revolution creates “coercive dichotomies [such] as genteel and […]

It is a norm within the greater body of captivity literature for narratives of enslaved people to contain violent and graphic imagery. The accounts of these individuals experiences are threaded with and characterized by violence and suppression. Succumbing to and/or overcoming this oppression is a component the genre. These narratives are often first person and […]

On James Fenimore Cooper’s Understanding of American Political Culture in The American Democrat

Prospectus – Resistance in Early America

In The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault argues that the development of the “medical gaze” begins around the time of the French Revolution. The “brightness of [this] gaze” comes out of the general Enlightenment project of organizing knowledge, bringing to light what was once shrouded in mystery (Foucault 195). My research project will explore […]