Irving & Poe

Tuesday, 27 April: Legend of Sleepy Hollow & Poe

Readings: Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1819)

Edgar Allan Poe, William Wilson (1839)

Student Presentations

Discussion Leader(s): Elisabeth Scoggin (Sleepy Hollow) & Jenny Harrell (Poe)

Discussion Questions: Irving (1783-1859) and Poe (1809-1849) are a generation apart--Irving on the hinge between the Age of Reason & Romanticism, Poe completely a Romantic. How can you tell the difference? How is Sleepy Hollow both Classical and Romantic, in contrast to Poe's deeper Romanticism?

Both authors use the gothic and the sublime but in different settings--identify. How is Irving more quintessentially American?

What is the significance of the gothic? Why does it keep returning? How does it keep working? What in us responds to the gothic? How does the gothic respond to the Enlightenment?

Recall Edgar & Clithero as doppelgangers in Edgar Huntly--apply concept to William Wilson.

In contrast to our earlier texts, how do Sleepy Hollow and William Wilson qualify as "literature?"

overview

Most important: exposure to texts, glimpse of past

Already forgetting except what  you knew before . . . Mather, gothic, Salem witch trials, church & state

But a few new ideas will be reinforced here and there

most important: past wasn't just magic but grew and changed like we do now

they weren't better than us--it's just that we don't remember the losers and the noise from then

we'll be as strange to the future as the past is to us

Don't come to college to learn answers but to learn how to ask questions and learn how to discuss and resolve

Never stop learning