Please for your blog Sunday night, following the previous rubric re length and points on which it will be evaluated, relate the discovery of Glimmerglass (Otsego Lake) and the headwaters of the Susquehanna by Deerslayer (in Chaps. 1 and 2 of the Fenimore Cooper novel) with a passage of your choice from the Shamokin Diaries (either the handout or from the linked material).
Discuss the interaction between textual narrative and physical experience of place as an “overlay landscape” entwined with the people that inhabit that landscape. Fenimore Cooper is writing fictionally in an act of myth-making backwards in time from the place where he grew up and which was named for his family, Cooperstown, and of its development amid the destruction of the Eastern Woodlands and the military removal of Native Americans subsequent between the setting of the novel in the mid-1700s and his writing of it in the early 1840s. The Shamokin Diaries are motivated by a spiritual discipline of the Moravian Christian missionaries in writing regularly about their experiences at the Confluence of the Susquehanna in an attempt to write a universal history of their Church. The Diaries are meant to be an historical account but also operate within the framework of personal experience, and thus they become a kind of narrative of place or “overlay landscape” as well, though with distinctions. Remember that “country” in our course title has two overlapping meanings–landscape as well as a national community. Both relate to overlay landscapes.
Choose a passage or two from The Deerslayer opening chapters of no more than two pages each, designating the passage(s) with page numbers in parentheses in your discussion, and likewise designate a particular passage from the Shamokin Diaries (either the handout or describing its location by date and author in the online text). As before, please avoid summary, and address specifics in your comparison of Susquehanna “overlay landscape” in the two texts. You may want to consider in your analysis how each text connects or not with Scruton’s idea of oikophilia as the experience of beauty combined with the experience of sacredness, and/or John Mohawk’s idea of Native sacredness. But please try to keep focused on the two early texts. Looking forward to reading your reflective comparison!