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LITR 4231 Early American Literature |
Final Exam Essays 2014 Sample answers
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Jonathon Anderson
5/3/2014
Essay #1
The Absurdity of Grand Unified Theories
I worked at Starbucks with a guy to whom I referred only as “The Philosopher”
about ten years ago. The reason for this designation was uncomplicated: he was a
philosophy major, and was inclined to hold forth on his field of study during
the serene pre-dawn hours before the quiet arrival of the first familiar faces
of the day. The soothing murmur of Iron & Wine on the store’s sound system
accompanied scarcely louder discussions of Foucault or Sartre; several mornings
were devoted to Nietzsche. What always interested me about The Philosopher was
the fact that in all of his admirably scholarly conversation, he never made
reference to a work by any of the luminaries he brought up. He had apparently
never read a page of Nietzsche, although he quoted copiously from later
commentators on particulars of the development of Nietzsche’s thought. Having
only read Nietzsche, but not books about Nietzsche, I was left to hold up my end
of the discourse solely on the basis of my individual reading experience. The
Philosopher, on the other hand, opining from the opposite position, seemed to
lack an appreciation for the idiosyncrasies of the source material. Because of
this, he knew why Nietzsche was important to read, but not why he might be
enjoyable to read. For me, it also illustrated the difference between primary
and secondary texts.
I’ve always been more of a primary source person than a secondary source person,
so my level of interest was immediately piqued by the large number of original
texts on the syllabus for this semester’s Early American Literature class. Each
week there seemed to be something fascinating to see first-hand, from Columbus’s
letters, de Vaca’s La Relacion, and
Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation to
Edwards’s Personal Narrative and the
writings of the Founders. Most of the texts we read before the novels at the end
of the semester are works to whose content we’ve been exposed in some form
either during our educational careers or through the nation’s ongoing
political/cultural debates. Like my friend The Philosopher, I found myself
realizing that I was completely in the dark about so many idiosyncrasies in the
primary sources that complicate the two-dimensional characterizations that form
the foundation of how we think of America and Americans. For instance, the
brokenhearted disenchantment regarding the loss of spiritual possibility in
exchange for getting rich in Columbus’s last letter, which strikes a tone
remarkably similar to that of some former idealists of the 1960s, who saw the
world as poised on the cusp of a transformation before society abandoned the
script altogether. La Relacion and
Of Plymouth Plantation both present
challenges to the standard oppositional narratives of conquest and cohabitation,
as we see de Vaca’s struggle for survival lead him to assimilate into the
existing native social structures and Bradford ruefully remarks on the
unraveling of his community through the avaricious drive for personal gain that
drives a wedge between those who want to stick to their original purpose in the
New World and those rudimentary capitalists enchanted by opportunity.
In later texts like The Federalist
Papers, Paine’s The Age of Reason,
The Crisis and Common Sense, and
Jefferson’s excised portion of The
Declaration of Independence and Notes
on the State of Virginia, we see the impassioned (and at times, perhaps,
idealistic) arguments of today being hammered into shape by their progenitors:
the balance between state and federal jurisdiction, the problem of party
politics, the place of religion in American society, the basic framework of the
civil rights movement. In addition, it is instructive to see that the doctrinal
discrepancies between the Founders did not preclude their subordination of
individuality for the sake of the shared dream of a new country that in some
ways realized the original utopian visions of the first settlers. By juxtaposing
familiar and unfamiliar texts we are able to see the cultural DNA of provocative
individuality first documented in Bradford and John Smith institutionalized in
the Declaration and the
Constitution. Looking at these
cornerstone documents through the lens of origin stories and captivity
narratives gives us not only a fresh perspective, but a deeper sense of how
these documents (which are in one sense so familiar that they have been emptied
of meaning) encode the most basic tenets of what it means to be an American.
The strength of this course, the sometimes overwhelming diversity of materials,
is also its biggest challenge. The embarrassment of riches that Dr. White
provides is such that, as texts complicate each other, they create roadblocks to
our understanding. I found myself very early in the semester trying to find a
way to wrap my mind around the conflicting perspectives of our material in order
to “tell a single story,” as course objective 6 challenges us to do. Trying to
establish some sense of a mental framework for this task, the unification of
American narratives connected for me to Stephen Hawking’s discussion of grand
unified theories for the unification of physics towards the end of
A Brief History of Time: “seemingly
absurd infinities occur in the other partial theories, but in all these cases
the infinities can be canceled out by a process called renormalization,” which
involves “canceling the infinities by introducing other infinities” (173). This
led me to wonder how we could “renormalize” the American story to cancel the
“absurd infinities,” or unresolvable conflicts.
Looking back over my work this semester, it is clear to me that this question of
whether we can tell a unified American story has been my preoccupation. On the
midterm, each of my essays looked at some aspect of this problem. In the first
essay I set out to argue for a concept of America as a cosmic space. By “cosmic
space” I meant that, between the psychological effects of the geographical scale
of the continent and the exotic strangeness of the environment and peoples,
Europeans entering the American continent were entering an otherworldly and
transformative realm of myth that stripped away their individuality and reduced
all action to the level of the symbolic or abstract. The research I did for my
second research post actually clarified this idea, with Tuan’s description of
the effects of moving away from a culture’s “sacred center” into the wilderness,
as well as the cultural associations of the journey Europeans were undertaking
by sailing west. Both research posts seem to have been attempts to link the body
of literature we studied to earlier texts (Why is Paradise to the West?) and
later texts (Echoes of American Frontier Experience in the European Gothic).
In his 2012 Final Exam essay “A
Trot through the Ages,”
Adam Glasgow said
“I have been in many previous classes where the instructor has used the term
‘join in the great conversation,’ but this is perhaps the first class that truly
makes me feel like I am part of a bigger conversation.” I could not agree more;
the fact that Dr. White posts “model assignments” is simultaneously very helpful
and very terrifying. On the one hand I found it very helpful in trying to orient
myself to Dr. White’s expectations for each of the essays and the research
posts. On the other hand, the idea that not only my classmates but future
students could possibly be reading anything I submitted assured that I was
always striving to be on my “A” game. Less distressing was the idea of engaging
in the “bigger conversation,” which I feel obligates me to try to make a
contribution by bringing something new (or at least interesting) to the table
with each assignment.
My overall learning experience this semester has been a quest for connections.
Like Jennifer Matus,
“[n]ot only was I introduced to literature that I had never read, but I learned
more about the history of our country than I have ever learned in any history
course” ("Pieces
to the Puzzle of History through Literature").
As I prepared to write this essay, another possible approach to unifying the
American story led me to think of the period in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s
when writers from backgrounds as varied as William Faulkner, Joseph Campbell,
and J.R.R. Tolkien were considering ambitious projects of connected narrative.
In the Preface to The Silmarillion,
Tolkien describes his abandoned pet project: "[O]nce upon a time I had a mind to
make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and
cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story - the larger founded on the
lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast
backcloths...I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many
only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a
majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint
and music and drama. Absurd" (xii).
The task can be overwhelming, but little by little the stories of America can be
knitted together to form a grand tapestry of hopes and fears, ideals and
hypocrisy, triumphs and damnation.
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