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Drawing on pedagogical and classroom realities, it explains why forcing non-specialist students to read canonical early texts and scholarly sources is difficult, yet proposes an approach using cinematic excerpts. Examples from Ridley Scott’s 1492, Conquest of Paradise and Bruce Beresford’s Black Robe illustrate how film rhetoric can subtly modernize historical cultures and support teaching.",{"@graph":69,"@context":126},[70,84,105],{"@type":71,"itemListElement":72},"BreadcrumbList",[73,77,79,82],{"item":74,"name":75,"@type":76,"position":8},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",{"item":78,"name":9,"@type":76,"position":14},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/",{"item":80,"name":40,"@type":76,"position":81},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/",3,{"item":83,"name":65,"@type":76,"position":19},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/the-cea-forum-summerfall-2010-designing-the-early-american-literature-component-of-the-undergraduate-american-literature-survey-course/597759/",{"url":83,"name":65,"@type":85,"image":86,"author":91,"headline":65,"publisher":94,"fileFormat":97,"inLanguage":63,"description":67,"dateModified":98,"datePublished":99,"encodingFormat":97,"isAccessibleForFree":100,"interactionStatistic":101},"DigitalDocument",{"url":87,"@type":88,"width":89,"height":90},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/the-cea-forum-summerfall-2010-designing-the-early-american-literature-component-of-the-undergraduate-american-literature-survey-course/597759.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":92,"@type":93},"SANS","Person",{"url":74,"name":95,"@type":96},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-11-01","2026-10-15",true,{"@type":102,"interactionType":103,"userInteractionCount":19},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":104},"ViewAction",{"@type":106,"mainEntity":107},"FAQPage",[108,114,118,122],{"name":109,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":111},"Why does the paper resist conceptualizing early American literature as “modern American literature in embryo”?","Question",{"text":112,"@type":113},"It cites philosophical, methodological, and empirical objections, plus political and pedagogical reasons. The author argues the approach fails to work for non-specialist, general-education students in classrooms.","Answer",{"name":115,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":116},"What teaching problem does the author highlight about reading canonical early texts and scholarship?",{"text":117,"@type":113},"The author stresses that forcing students to read primary works like Benjamin Franklin, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards is very difficult, and compelling them to engage secondary scholarship can feel like “child abuse.”",{"name":119,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":120},"How does the author propose using cinema in teaching early American literature?",{"text":121,"@type":113},"The author suggests showing cinematic excerpts and then “defamiliarizing” them so students can recognize how film rhetoric modernizes historical portrayals. The strategy aims to make early American topics accessible within about half an hour.",{"name":123,"@type":110,"acceptedAnswer":124},"What films are used as examples, and what do the opening credits illustrate?",{"text":125,"@type":113},"The author uses Ridley Scott’s 1492, Conquest of Paradise and Bruce Beresford’s Black Robe. The opening credits are described as initiating modernization through musical and visual choices before the main action begins.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":83,"og:type":128,"og:title":65,"og:site_name":95,"og:description":67},"article",{"robots":130,"canonical":83},"index,follow",{"doc_id":132,"site_id":62},597759,1792853921,{"code":4,"msg":5,"data":135},{"doc_id":132,"user_id":136,"nickname":92,"user_avatar":137,"doc_module":4,"category_id":39,"category_name":40,"doc_title":65,"doc_description":67,"doc_content":138,"file_id":139,"file_url":140,"file_type":141,"file_size":142,"view_count":19,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":8,"is_downloadable":8,"audit_status":8,"page_count":143,"language":144,"language_code":63,"site_id":62,"html_lang":63,"table_of_contents":145,"faqs":146,"seo_title":147,"seo_description":67,"update_tm":148,"read_time":149,"preview_page_count":4},962090760505,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/davatar_155a257f0dc6eb9ab79c44ca47cae57d","THE CEA FORUM  \nSummer/Fall 2010  \nDesigning the Early American Literature Component of the Undergraduate American Literature Survey Course  \nR. C. De PROSPO Washington College  \nThe latest American literary histories published by Columbia and Cambridge University Presses and designed by a variety of prominent Americanist scholars employed by a variety of prominent American and English universities introduce early American literature as modern American literature in embryo. The latest anthologies of American literature, under the general editorshipsof a variety of prominent Americanist scholars and designed by a variety of younger scholars trained by them, do likewise.  \nThere are several esoteric philosophical, methodological, and empirical reasons, and even a few more obvious political reasons, to resist this way of conceptualizing the relationship between the surviving written record of the European colonies of North America and the literature of the modern U.S. These objections are to be raised, on the relatively rare occasions when they are permitted to be raised, in specialized scholarly journals and monographs addressed to specialists in American literary historiography.  \nThere is another, pedagogical, reason to resist it: it doesn’t work in classrooms filled with non-specialist, never-to-become-specialist, fickle, browsing, general-education students who will never become convinced—I have become convinced after over thirty years trying to teach them  \nTHE CEA FORUM  \nSummer/Fall 2010  \n—that Mary Rowlandson’s seventeenth-century account of the death in her arms of her six-yearold daughter Sarah after Rowlandson’s capture by an Algonkian war party anticipates William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice or that Jonathan Edwards’s eighteenth-century letter to an acolyte describing his childhood fondness for retiring to a “booth in the swamp” for religious contemplation anticipates Thoreau’s Walden.  \nBut how, then, are these same students to be exposed, in all pedagogical responsibility and fairness, to what may not work for them, but which has been a remarkably successful—virtually the unanimous—approach to early American literature since certain nationalist midnineteenth-century journalists began developing an amateur interest in American literary antiquities? How to expose students, as quickly and as painlessly as possible, to the wisdom received from any number of dry, scholarly, emphatically non-belletristic sources extending back even long before Perry Miller and the Harvard American Civilization program?  \nForcing them to read anything is hard. Forcing them to read Benjamin Franklin or (try this some time) Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards is very, very, hard. Forcing them to read secondary sources—in the case of my courses it would have to be a sampling of the modern scholarship that is responsible for establishing the canon of early American literature that  \nincludes men like Franklin, Mather, and Edwards—you might call child abuse.  \nGetting them to sit through the openings of Ridley Scott’s 1492, Conquest of Paradise and Bruce Beresford’s Black Robe is a cinch. And afterward it's only a little harder to get them to recognize how the rhetoric of what is doubtless to them the most familiar of all current media—  \nTHE CEA FORUM  \nSummer/Fall 2010  \nthat is, motion picture, along with all of its equally familiar para-cinematic ancilla (music, movement, titles, sound, etc.)—might be functioning subtly to modernize what seems on the surface a transparent, scrupulously faithful representation of various archaisms ofthe medieval counter-Reformation Catholic culture that sponsored the Spanish and French explorations of what would eventually be known as North America.  \nIt takes about ten minutes to show both excerpts and maybe another ten to try to defamiliarize them. So in about a half hour I think I can manage to unpack several cinematic manipulations the way I have been trying to unpack—over many many years in what has becom","cbCaita4EqIVGT44","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaita4EqIVGT44","pdf",150166,14,"English","# Designing the Early American Literature Component\n## Resistance to “modern in embryo” framing\n## Classroom pedagogy and canon formation challenges\n## Using film excerpts to teach early American texts\n## Case study: 1492, Conquest of Paradise and Black Robe","[{\"question\":\"Why does the paper resist conceptualizing early American literature as “modern American literature in embryo”?\",\"answer\":\"It cites philosophical, methodological, and empirical objections, plus political and pedagogical reasons. The author argues the approach fails to work for non-specialist, general-education students in classrooms.\"},{\"question\":\"What teaching problem does the author highlight about reading canonical early texts and scholarship?\",\"answer\":\"The author stresses that forcing students to read primary works like Benjamin Franklin, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards is very difficult, and compelling them to engage secondary scholarship can feel like “child abuse.”\"},{\"question\":\"How does the author propose using cinema in teaching early American literature?\",\"answer\":\"The author suggests showing cinematic excerpts and then “defamiliarizing” them so students can recognize how film rhetoric modernizes historical portrayals. The strategy aims to make early American topics accessible within about half an hour.\"},{\"question\":\"What films are used as examples, and what do the opening credits illustrate?\",\"answer\":\"The author uses Ridley Scott’s 1492, Conquest of Paradise and Bruce Beresford’s Black Robe. The opening credits are described as initiating modernization through musical and visual choices before the main action begins.\"}]","THE CEA FORUM - Summer/Fall 2010 - Designing the Early American Literature Component of the Undergraduate American Literature Survey Course | PDF",1792085649,35]