Gordon Sayre (Professor)
Statement
I'm a specialist in colonial and Early American Literature from the sixteenth through early nineteenth centuries. I have a particular interest in French colonial history and literature, in the exploration and cartography of North America, in Native American literature and ethnohistory, and in natural history and eco-criticism. Some titles of courses I have developed and taught at the UO include:
ENG 615 "Theorizing Ecocriticism: Pastoralism in America; Nature, Subsistence, Leisure, and Labor"
ENG 364 "Early American Ethnic Autobiography"
Comparative Lit. 413 "Conquest and Cultural Representation in the Americas"
ENG 479 "Poe, Hawthorne, Brown: American Gothic"
ENG 410 "Literature, Natural History, and the Problem of America"
Publications
The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero: Native Resistance and the Literatures of America, from Moctezuma to Tecumseh.
University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
American Captivity Narratives: An Anthology. Houghton-Mifflin/Riverside, 2000
"Les Sauvages Américains:" Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature. University of North Carolina Press, 1997
Selected Articles:
"Plotting the Natchez Massacre: Le Page du Pratz, Dumont de Montigny, Chateaubriand." Early American Literature 37:3
“The Mammoth: Endangered Species or Vanishing Race?” JEMCS 1:1
"Defying Assimilation, Confounding Authenticity: The Case of William Apess." a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 11:1
