English 4371

Spring 2005

Starting Paper #1:

Understanding and Analyzing Armstrong and Tennenhouse’s “Why Categories Thrive”

Background: You have read “Why Categories Thrive,” the concluding chapter of Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse’s The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life, in which the authors claim that “a revolution in reading habits during the eighteenth century changed the notion of what it meant to be English.” They argue that this change meant that English speakers ceased to locate their identity exclusively in the ruling English aristocracy. “Instead,” they write, “the survival of respectable people and the perpetuation of their domestic way of life began to matter” (202). The objective for this paper is that you demonstrate 1) that you understand Armstrong and Tennenhouse’s argument and 2) that you can apply that argument to texts (or parts of texts) not discussed explicitly by them.

Understanding the Argument: Consider the following quotations taken from Armstrong and Tennenhouse’s essay.

1. “To discover precisely where the printed word first began not only to refer back to a source in an epistolary heroine but also to derive extraordinary authority from qualities that supposedly inhered in that individual alone, one has to go to British America. One has to go to America, in other words, to understand where novels come from” (199).

2. “The difference between Defoe’s narratives and the domestic fiction that flourished later in the century boils down to a difference in their use of gender” (201).

3. “Where, if anywhere prior to Pamela, did Englishness come to be embodied in a nonaristocratic female? And where, if anywhere prior to Pamela, was the female in question a virtually inexhaustible source of English prose? Certainly not in England. But such a woman does appear in captivity narratives written in the North American colonies during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” (203).

4. “Rowlandson’s narrative demonstrates how an individual could acquire value quite apart from wealth and station simply because she was the source of writing” (208).

5. “The captivity narrative requires the captive to ward off the threat of another culture by preserving the tie to her mother culture through writing alone. But there is another requirement for Pamela’s prototype, which is directly related to the gender of the individual from whom writing comes. The captivity narrative requires that the detached—and thereby individuated—individual be reincorporated into the culture from which she has been separated” (211).

6. “The captive’s return transforms that community into one in which the individual counts” (212).

Tasks:

• Paraphrase each of these ideas in your own words, focusing on rendering the concepts in language you understand.
• Write an outline that shows the logical steps Armstrong and Tennenhouse use to make their argument. Include the ideas stated in the quotations above.
• What main points do Armstrong and Tennenhouse make by referring to each of the following texts: Pamela; The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, and Robinson Crusoe?