Presenter: Erin Weaver
Faculty Mentor: Elizabeth Bohls, Brent Dawson
Presentation Type: Poster 88
Primary Research Area: Humanities
Major: English
England sends its first party of settlers to New World Virginia in 1585, but it isn’t until 1607 that the empire founds Jamestown – the first lasting colony on the continent, following 22 years of failure to occupy the territory. In absence of physical ownership of the land, how to do the narratives that emerge out of the New World during this period attempt to assert a rhetorical claim to it?
To answer this question, my research analyzes the writing of New World authors Smith, White, Lane, and Harriot. Thus far, it has investigated the existence of the following through close reading analysis in order to pinpoint rhetorical strategies that assert possession: a) the binding of space in the New World into definable (and therefore claimable) place through rhetorical cartography and the theory of space and place; b) Edenic tropes to assert a God-given right to cultivate the landscape and mark it as claimed; c) syntactical structures that infantilize native improvements and project English structures (or signs of ownership) onto the land.
The rhetoric of travel writing has been well studied; the rhetoric of claim within these texts is lacking. In combining the studies of travel writing’s rhetoric and language’s ability to bound space, I will discern ways in which English colonists are able to claim the territory solely through their use of narrative.