A Road Course in Early American Literature

Essays that fuse traditional scholarship and narrative nonfiction and explore US literature A Road Course in Early American Literature: Travel and Teaching from Atzl n to Amherst follows a two-part question: what does travel teach us about literature, and how can reading guide us to a deeper understanding of place? Thomas Hallock offers a teacher's journey to answering these questions, framing personal experience around the continued need for a course like the American literature survey to mid-nineteenth century. Hallock approaches literary study from the overlapping perspectives of pedagogue, scholar, unrepentant tourist, husband, father, friend, and son. Building on Ralph Waldo Emerson's premise that there is "creative reading as well as creative writing," Hallock turns to the vibrant and accessible tradition of American travel writing, employing the form of biblio-memoir to bridge the impasse between public and academic discourse and reintroduce the dynamic field of early American literature to wider audiences. Hallock's own road course begins and ends at the low country of Georgia and South Carolina, following a circular structure of reflection. A series of longer, place-oriented narratives explore familiar and lesser-known literary works from the sixteenth-century invasion of Florida through the Mexican and Civil Wars. Shorter chapters bridge the book's central themes--the mapping of cognitive and physical space, our personal stake in reading, the tensions that follow earlier acts of erasure, and the impossibility of ever fully shutting out the past. Exploring complex cultural histories and contemporary landscapes filled with ghosts and new voices, this volume builds on a tradition of travel, place-oriented, and literature-based works ranging from William Carlos Williams' In the American Grain and Jack Kerouac's On the Road to Alice Walker's In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, Wendy Lesser's Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books and Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch. An accompanying bibliographic essay is periodically updated and available at the project website, www.roadcourse.us.