American Literature Course Page
Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain
I’m writing to invite you to join me in a reading group on American literature.
Not only has X / Twitter removed the speaking barrier for the smartphone-less elite, it has now removed the hosting barrier. So, I’m going to be hosting an every other week reading group, principally on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. We’ll read some short stories and poetry along the way as well.
Because I’ll be hosting the spaces, it will be much easier for me share the recordings with you here than it was for a reading group on the Odyssey. We will use this page as a course page. So if you can’t join live and want to hear the recordings, they will all be here. In addition, if you have comments, questions, or disagreements with what is said in the recordings, please post them here and I will respond in detail to all of them.
The course will go from the Fall to the Spring. You should feel very free to join even if you can’t make it to some of the sessions. I.e., if the Fall is busy, and you don’t have time for Hawthorne, come back in the Winter when we turn to Melville.
The class sessions will be part lecture and part seminar style. I’ll summarize the assigned reading, then read out loud some key passages, and then offer some interpretive remarks on them. This will last approximately 30 minutes. After that, I’ll pose a larger thematic question from that sessions reading for us to discuss as a group, though, you should you should definitely note questions / comments that arise for you when I interpret key passages.
You will get a LOT more out of this experience if you are able to read in advance of joining or listening to the recordings. To that end, I’m assigning what I take to be relatively modest chunks of text to digest. If you can make time to read roughly 5 pages a day, you will be able to keep up with the course pacing. (or listen to an audio book on the way home from work!)
We will use the Dover Thrift editions for The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick, and the Puffin Classics version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. These are the least expensive editions and because we have the great privilege of not having to read them in translation, we don’t need to worry about making sure we get the Allan Bloom translation of Plato’s Republic, etc.
I will update the schedule soon. But for starters, please set aside time for a special kick-off session on Saturday, August 24th at 12:00pm EST. There won’t be any reading assigned for that session. I’ll introduce the course and mark out a few big themes for the class / how I approach interpreting literature. The first session will be on Wednesday, August 28th at 7pm EST. From then on, I will host a discussion every other Wednesday night (so the second regular session will be on September 11th — we will cover the entire “Custom House” section of the Scarlet Letter).
If you want to join the discussions live, you should follow me on X in order to be part of the conversation. If you can’t attend live, I will be sure to post the recordings here soon after they take place. I will keep this page pinned to the top of the site page.
The reading for the August 28th session will be Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Earth’s Holocaust.” You can find a free and well-edited copy here. This is an incredible story that helps highlight the difference between a French Revolution and the American Revolution, and helps expose the limitations of of progressivism as such. It is funny and terrifying.
There might be a few bonus sessions on Saturdays with special guests, but I will get back to you on that.
Calendar / List of Recordings
Saturday, August 24th at 12:00pm EST: Kick-off Session! (no reading) Session 1
Wednesday, August 28th at 7:00pm EST: Hawthorne’s “Earth’s Holocaust”
Wednesday, September 11th at 7:00pm EST: Hawthorne’s “Custom House” (the introduction of The Scarlet Letter)
Wednesday, September 25th at 7:00pm EST: pgs of The Scarlet Letter TBA