Introductory

lesson
American Literature
Saturday shift
Learning Objective

Students will take a first approach to what

American Literature means and represents.
Contents 1 Getting to know each other and general information

2 Part 1 - Literature of the New World

3 Part 2 - First Impressions

4 Part 3 - (Mis)Interpretations

5 Part 4 - Accounts of the New World

6 Questions
 Getting to know each other
Think of a book or story you've read. Introduce yourself as your favorite character from that
work.

What do you What are you What's your role Why should
look like? like? in the story? people read the
story you're part
of?
 Part 1

Literature of the
New World
Early American literature has a lot to teach about the lives, hopes, wishes, and values of the
early colonists who settled in America. The intensity of their religious devotion was reflected in
their poetry, their extreme suffering in the New World ran deep throughout their personal diaries
and captivity narratives, and their belief in their religious experiment blazed through their
sermons. The sermons and poems produced during this era were united by an attempt to keep
faith strong and remind colonists of their purpose in the face of a harsh and harrowing new
experience trying to survive in the New World.
 Part 1

Literature of the
New World
Alongside these early Puritan settlers were other groups of people, too—people who came for
entirely different reasons than religious refuge. Some came to seek adventure, some came to
better their economic status, some came to escape imprisonment at home. And of course, there
were the people already living here—the Native Americans. All of their lives, stories, and voices
are part of the fabric of early American literature. In this chapter, you will read selections that
reflect their stories and voices and the changing modes of understanding the world that were
developing almost as soon as the first English settlers established their colonies on the Eastern
Seaboard in the early seventeenth century.
Part 2
First Impressions
When European explorers met with the
natives of these new continents, there
was much more at stake than a simple
exchange of information—for all parties.
The Europeans arrived with an agenda:
to conquer new territory to call their own.
This was a clash of epic proportions, and
no one would be left unchanged. The
natives’ agenda? To survive.
 Part 3

(Mis)Interpretations
One literary scholar, Mary Louise Pratt, has a term for these types of interactions where cultures meet and a
power struggle ensues. She calls this the “contact zone.” When two cultures meet, the records of their
exchanges are fraught with the attitudes, beliefs, and agenda of each culture. In these contact zones, Pratt
claims, there is much at stake, and the texts must be read carefully for clues of dominance and submission,
power and oppression. For a complete history, the voices from both sides are needed.

When Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1492–1584) wrote his The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, he
certainly was staking his claim in the history of Spanish conquest of Mexico. Diaz, who spent most of his life
in the West Indies, accompanied both Hernando de Soto and Hernán Cortés on expeditions to lay claim to
new land. These bloody missions left an indelible mark on Díaz, who later said he could not sleep through the
night. At the age of eighty-four, blind and deaf, Díaz sat down to write his story. In the True History, he tells
of how the Aztecs presented the Spaniards with gifts:
 Part 3

(Mis)Interpretations
The [Aztec] prince Quintalbor . . . bore . . . presents . . . The first was a disk in the shape of a sun, as big as a
cartwheel and made of a very fine gold . . . There was another larger disk of brightly shining silver in the
shape of a moon, with other figures on it, and this was worth a great deal for it was very heavy. . .
Quintalbor also brought back [a] helmet full of small grains of gold, just as they come from the mines and
worth three thousand pesos. The gold in the helmet was worth more than twenty thousand pesos to us,
because it proved to us that there were good mines in the country.

In this passage we can see that Díaz, as with many other Spanish soldiers of the conquest, had one interest
in mind: what he stood to gain after the Aztecs were conquered. In this simple exchange of gifts, Díaz was
less interested in what the Aztecs meant by presenting these gifts and more interested in what the gifts
suggested about the presence of gold in the country, and subsequently, the riches they could keep for
themselves and send back home to Spain.
 Part 3

(Mis)Interpretations
How would Quintalbor’s account of this exchange read? Much differently one could suppose! What did
Quintalbor mean by presenting the gifts? What did the gifts mean to the Aztec culture? What message did
the gifts send?

If Quintalbor had written an account of the dominance, destruction, and enslavement of his people by Díaz
and his fellow conquistadores, his text would be an example of autoethnography (don’t get too distracted by
the term). In an autoethnographic text, an author tells and connects his or her own story to the wider
historical context of which it is a part. Quintalbor would in a sense “recapture” his story and the story of the
Aztecs from Díaz’s account, which has made its way down in history as the story of the “winner.”
 Part 3

(Mis)Interpretations
Autoethnography is made up of the prefix auto, meaning “self,” and the word ethnography, which refers to
the scientific description of the customs of individuals and cultures.

In fact, natives of the New World did eventually create their own accounts of their first encounters with
European conquerors. Within a few dozen years of the arrival of the Spanish, Aztecs began to learn the
Spanish language and Roman alphabet, and in their own literature, they documented the horrors of their
captivity and destruction. Perhaps the earliest account is this Nahuatl (Aztec) poem from 1528:

Broken spears lie in the roads;

we have torn our hair in grief.
The houses are roofless now,
and their walls are red with blood.
Part 4
Accounts of the New World
Díaz’s account was just one of many explorers’ accounts of the New
World. Of course, we all know of Columbus, who “in 1492 sailed the
ocean blue” and his texts. And thanks to the invention of the
printing press in the mid-1400s, we have a number of other texts,
including formal statements to the kings and queens financing the
expeditions back in Europe, letters, diary entries, and narratives
that survive from this age telling the stories of these “voyages of
discovery.” It’s important to remember that these texts all had a
purpose: They were written to influence policymakers back home,
to convince financiers that their investments in these voyages were
successful and bearing fruit, and some were more personal, to
provide firsthand testimony of the destruction and horror explorers’
bore witness to.
Part 4
Accounts of the New World
Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566) De Las Casas is an example of
an explorer who came to regret his actions in the New World. He
came to the New World from Spain in 1502 on a mission to
Hispaniola and later wrote about his exploitations in an effort to
reform brutal Spanish policy overseas. He wrote in his The Very
Brief Relation of the Devastation of the Indies how “Christians, with
their horses and swords and pikes began to carry out massacres
and strange cruelties” against natives, and described in detail
practices that would horrify readers today. De Las Casas wrote
that natives’ weapons were “weak” and “because of this, the wars
of Indians against each other were little more than games played
by children,” giving a glimpse into the world that the Spanish
destroyed.
Questions

?
Thank you!

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