A Road Course in Early American Literature: Travel and Teaching
from Atzlan to Amherst explores a two-part question: what does
travel teach us about literature, and how can reading guide us to a
deeper understanding of place and identity? Thomas Hallock charts a
teacher's journey to answering these questions, framing personal
experiences around the continued need for a survey course covering
early American literature up to the 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 Lowcountry of Georgia and South
Carolina, following a circular structure of reflection. He weaves
his journey through a wide swath of American literatures and
authors: from Native American and African American oral traditions,
to Wheatley and Equiano, through Emerson, Poe, and Dickinson, among
others. A series of longer, place-oriented narratives explore
familiar and lesser-known literary works from the sixteenth-century
invasion of Florida through the Mexican War of 1846-1848 and the
American Civil War. 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 draws inspiration
from a tradition of travel, place-oriented, and literature-based
works ranging from William Carlos Williams's 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 Hallock's website.
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