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LITR 4326 Early American Literature Model Assignments |
Final Exam Essays 2016 Sample answers for 2b. Review & compare 3-4 periods of study & 2d. Most challenging or inspiring idea + resolution. |
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Melissa Holesovsky
Entertainment and Instruction: The
Rationale of Literature
As a future educator, I have examined my school work through the lens of
both student and prospective teacher. As I worked through each assignment for
each class, I have posed the question to myself: “If I needed to teach this, how
could I make students care?” In answer to this question, I keep returning to the
works that can be used for both entertainment and instruction, but, yet, are
still considered literature. Even more interesting, all these works come from a
variety of time periods and serve to reinforce the principles of these periods.
Over the semester, these are the works that have stuck with me and I find myself
thinking of them in other classes and cross-referencing them with other assigned
works.
One of the first works I found remarkably entertaining and instructive
was “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” the sermon by Jonathan Edwards.
Giving his sermon during the Great Awakening, Edwards’s words and message were
typical of the time. In the first Great Awakening, people shifted away from the
formality once associated with religion and toward an emotion, heart-felt
spirituality. This is apparent in Edwards’s sermon. Edwards doesn’t just use his
sermon to try to draw lambs of God to the fold, but to incite fear in them
through depictions of what God, when angry, can be capable of doing. Of a Bible
quote, Edwards explains “he will crush you under his feet without mercy; he will
crush out your blood, and make it fly, and it shall be sprinkled on his
garments,” which is both terrifying and fascinating. His over-the-top
explanation of a wrathful God evokes the emotion of fear and repentance in those
hearing the sermon, bringing them back to their relationship with God, but it
also draws a reader in with a gruesome sense of entertainment.
With considerably less fanfare and vividness, Benjamin Franklin’s
enlightenment era writing “Remarks
Concerning the Savages of North America” is still both instructional and
entertaining. Because Franklin was a rational thinker, typical of the
Enlightenment period, he takes a much more rational, reasonable approach to his
writing. Franklin takes a close look at the habits, traditions, and wants of the
native people and reports his findings in a way that helps break biases against
this population of people. In my midterm essay two, “Something Savage,” I looked
at one of Franklin’s recounts of the natives in regards to traditional views and
the reciprocity of politeness in regards to other’s views. The point made in
this passage is summed up in the opening line of the excerpt chosen for this
class, “Savages we call them, because their Manners differ from ours, which we
think the Perfection of Civility. They think the same of theirs.” This idea is
reinforced again and again as Franklin balances his information with some humor
and irony regarding the views of natives and how they are not as savage as
assumed, but more like the people labeling them so.
With a return to emotion and instruction,
Charlotte Temple by Susanna Rowson
delivers a great message while serving as a cathartic read for those who want to
experience desire and corruption. Coming from the Romantic period, this early
novel features a young woman who goes against all that she has been taught to
embrace her desires for adventure and love. Despite her parents’ teachings,
Charlotte listens to Ms. LaRue and accompanies Montraville to America and into
social ruin. This novel has a storyline that entertains and was well received by
audiences on both continents as it followed the journey of passive Charlotte
into the social ruin of pregnancy and death. In fact, in her 2014 Final Exam,
Dawn Iven said of the novel “Charlotte Temple, characterized as a romantic tale, was easy to read
and kept my attention,” a sentiment I share as well. The entertainment of the
novel is also what makes the novel one of instruction, teaching young women what
not to do and what would happen should they give in to their desires.
Also of the Romantic period, Edgar
Huntly by Charles Brockden Brown has many elements of entertainment, but
also can be used for instruction. Inspiring later writers like Edgar Allan Poe
and R.L. Stevenson, Brown’s early American novel has multiple story lines all
connected to one another which are all being recounted by the character Edgar to
his fiancé, Mary. True to the Romantic form, Brown adapts the gothic genre to
American settings by way of darker than dark, mountainous settings overshadowed
by a mysterious death and sleepwalking. In this adaptation of a popular genre,
students can read and learn about the differences in the gothic depending on
country of origin, specifically, how an American created a gothic setting
without the use of castles and dungeons. What makes the novel instructional is
also what makes it entertaining. Brown’s character Edgar opens the novel with
the recount of and intent to investigate the death of his friend, but finds
himself drawn into the practice of sleepwalking. As Edgar tries to rationally
explain the practice of sleepwalking, Brown’s style almost seems to revert to
the Enlightenment as the character considers a psychological basis for the
behavior and the possibility that the sleepwalking is allowing for behaviors
repressed during waking hours. With Edgar
Huntly, Brown successfully entertains and instructions, presents an American
gothic, and bridges Romantic and Enlightenment principles.
The readings offered in Early American Literature have been a
cross-section of American time periods and have both taught and entertained me.
Some of the elements I found most entertaining are ones that help me distinguish
certain elements of time periods associated with the author and/or purpose of
the piece. While the question of the purpose of literature is not one likely to
be uniformly answered, arguments can be and have been made that literature can
both entertain and instruct. It is with this thinking that I move forward into
the world of education and prepare to offer my students readings that can help
me teach while entertaining. If I can hold their attention, I know they will
learn as some of these readings have already done for me.
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