American Renaissance

DUE: DEC 10

Throughout the second half of the semester, the readings have circled questions of individualism, society (including the city), nature (including the body and the emotions), and their relation. Each author that we have read engages the problem, albeit differently from others.

What I suggest for the essay is that you attend to either how Author Robert Montgomery Byrd’s Sheppard Lee problematizes the idea of a stable self/ through the protagonist’s narrated experiences and, as appropriate, his use of types, or by considering the ways in which Douglass’s writings, Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” or the testimony of Native American authors replies to, and complicates, that ideology of individual determination.