Colonialism

ENGL 520

Dr. Fike

1. Bacon and Drayton

• How does the point of view differ in the selections by Bacon and Drayton?
• What values inform these two selections? 
• What do you make of the fact that the Other is absent from Bacon’s essay and Drayton’s poem?

2. Drayton

• How might you divide the poem into sections?  What titles would you assign to the sections?
• What actually happened to the Virginia colony?  Do some research to support your answer.

  http://www.google.com/search?q=virginia+colony&hl=en&prmd=ivnsbm&tbs=tl:1&tbo=u&ei=zd6hTZqbOqHi0gHbm72kBQ&sa=X&oi=timeline_result&ct=title&resnum=16&ved=0CFsQ5wIwDw;

  http://www.celebrateboston.com/history/virginia.htm

• What do you make of the mention of Hakluyt in the final stanza?  In particular, how does reading need to be part of our interpretation of the poem?  A reader-response approach is definitely in order.

3. Watts and Rowlandson

• This work and the next are captivity narratives.  How would you classify this genre?  What are its characteristics?
• What does Watts’s narrative have in common with Rowlandson’s?  How are they different?
• Are the Africans who abduct Watts like or unlike the “Indians” who abduct Rowlandson?  Or are they both similar and different?
• Textuality:  There is an allusion to St. Paul on 1271 in Watts’s account, but biblical references are on every page in Rowlandson’s narrative.  What do you make of her experience as an act of reading?  What Bible stories do you think are most significant to her?  (1076 bottom right).  Are we reading R. as R is reading the Bible and her abductors?
• What sense of justice emerges from these two selections?

4. Rowlandson

• What do you make of Rowlandson’s comments on the evils of smoking on 1075?  (This part of the narrative is quoted in Jane Tompkins’s famous essay “‘Indians’: Textuality, Morality, and the Problem of History,” found, for example, in Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers [any edition].  Having a look at what Tompkins says about perspective might enhance your answer.)
• How does she describe the Native Americans, and what does this description teach us about Rowlandson’s point of view?
• What conclusions does R. reach re. human suffering?
• Whereas the English ransom Watts from spear-wielding Africans for “forty-five copper bars and iron bars” (1271), Rowlandson’s release is for 20 pounds from gun-toting Native Americans.  What can you make of this difference?
• How do the elements of critical thinking inform Rowlandson's narrative?