ENG 422 - Creating Narratives: Investigating Davidson’s Literary Past

Although scholars debate aspects of creative writing’s origins in the American academy, faculty at institutions such as Harvard were known to accept fiction or poetry for class credit by the late nineteenth century (Myers 283).  If the following excerpt from the 1895 Quips and Cranks is not merely satirical, the same was true at Davidson.

          He looked so strange I asked him if he was sick.  He said no, a thought had struck him. I asked him what kind of thought.
          He said an unthought-like thought that was the soul of thought. I felt dazed at this answer, but said nothing, as the 
          subject was getting beyond me.  [N. B. He was writing a poem for Quips and Cranks–Editor of Q and C.] So I turned the
          subject deftly by asking him what he had in his notebook.  He said mostly bout rimes that he had written in his Soph. 
         year for the English professor, and a few little things of his own that he called Heart-Foam.

It is clear that Davidson students read and wrote creatively, whether “rimes” for class or personal “Heart-Foam,” long before the inclusion of formal creative writing instruction in our curriculum.  

In this seminar, we will explore early literary activities and attitudes at Davidson.  As exemplified by the work of Davidson’s Commission on Race and Slavery, revisiting our institutional past “with fresh, critical eyes” can provide what John Thelin terms “a source of renewal and rediscovery” (History of American Higher Education xi).  The Davidson archives hold rich material in both print and digital forms, including multiple student literary publications, from 1886, when the Eumenean and Philanthropic Literary Societies launched the Davidson Monthly.   For example, the same issue of Quips and Cranks yields not only the passage provided above but also a satiric description of an English class as well as multiple student poems.   

Seminar participants will collaborate in uncovering evidence of student literary activity on campus, analyzing that evidence, and situating these activities amid broader literary trends and collegiate practices.  We will inevitably encounter writing that reveals contemporaneous biases and limitations even as we witness the abiding drive to creative work among our student body.  Class projects will be published in Omeka, a content management system that allows rich displays of archival material.

Satisfies English major requirement.