LITR 4326 Early American Literature         Model Assignments

Final Exam Essays 2016 assignment Sample answers for Essay 1 on overall learning experience

Austin Green

Looking Back (And Further Back)

          In all honesty, this class ended up being completely different than what I imagined or thought it was going to be when I originally signed up. Even after the first class and reading the syllabus what I thought the class would be about, for me at least, ended up being what felt like a minor part. I thought we would go over some early novels, talk about them, write papers about them, and be on our way. Another three to five books in my arsenal of literature I can talk about confidently without notice. Able to make connections using these new books to the ones I had previously learned. Not that there is anything wrong with that. I do not mean to belittle that, I just say it because I have just found that in the majority of my literature classes that was the final outcome. What the class became for me, the major point that continued sticking out was the battle of dominant culture versus multicultural. Which is taught? Which should be taught? Mixing these questions with the documents we went over in class created a really interesting conversation in my head. By the end of the class, when we started getting into the actual novels, it almost felt like a cheat to me. Oh, these are two easy, these are actual books. Let’s find more letters or written stories. Let’s dive into what we can take from these in regards to not only literature, but history.

          I was fully ingrained with this mindset when I turned in my midterm. In my first essay, I wrote about the layers to history I was taught growing up (and even being taught now). How being told one thing, even though it might not be exactly true, seems to be done in order to build a foundation of knowledge. Once the foundation is built, then you can make little tweaks to it without the entire thing collapsing. The documents I wrote about in this essay (and in the second part of the essay), surprisingly became my favorite parts of the semester. Columbus’s contradictions in his letters. John Smith’s own portrayal of himself versus how he was seen in pop culture, and reading about my own hometown’s history in Cabeza de Vaca’s La Relacion. Looking at these documents not only in a historical context, but as literature, truly gave them all new meaning to me. These are all firsthand accounts, written by the “hero.” It is true that the winners or survivors get to write history; we see it here again and again.

 I wish the second half of the semester had more of these type of documents. I know it is a literature class, and not history, but with the buildup from the first half of the semester I only felt we lost steam in the second with the novels. While I enjoyed the novel on its own merits, Charlotte Temple was made even more interesting with knowledge of Susanna Rowson’s personal history. Knowing she too lived in both America and England gave the story some of that same personal sense of questioning the history that was presented that the earlier documents had. Being presented as a novel though, as fiction, it loses some of the intrigue that I found in the documents mentioned previously. I added Charlotte’s Daughter to my reading list and fully intend to read it, likely over the coming month before summer classes begin.

The second half of the semester also brought our second research post. I struggled with the assignment on our first post, and was glad we were not graded until the second. With my first one, I thought we were reviewing the sources we found, not exactly writing about what we found. Writing about researching, but not about the research. It made for an awkward paper, and I think if one goes and reads my first post, you can tell even I felt awkward leaving out most of the relevant information, and just writing about the journey. I did not even give the post an interesting title, just “Charles Brockden Brown” (a placeholder title while I wrote the post that I overlooked updating when finished). After getting feedback I understood I was viewing the posts in the wrong light. For my second post, I read a book by an author we were reading further in the class. I like gothic writing, and thought this would keep my interest. Wieland was a tough book to start. I almost wrote about changing my topic to something different, but ultimately decided it was a book I wanted to have in my “have read” column in life, so I stuck with it. I was glad I did. As tough as it was to get going, once I was invested in the story and used to the writing, it flew by.

My favorite part of this research was the Paste Magazine article that referred to him as the father American Gothic fiction, where he was (quoted from my research post) “given credit for taking the elements of European gothic and changing them enough to relate to the new America.”  I think that the same could be said was done in Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly. Right away I could see some similarities in the format of the novel with some of the previous readings in class. The novel is presented as letters, much like Columbus’s letters from the first half of class. This just made me think of the Columbus letters as even more works of literature than before. Like Charlotte Temple, the most interesting aspect of this novel was that it was written by someone from America, living there since birth. It had the same pitfalls as Temple for me as well though. It’s presented as fiction, not as fact. After reading two of his novels, I think this is definitely the better read for class. Maybe it was because I had already read Wieland, but this was easier for me to start and get through.

Ultimately, the class became something far more interesting than just reading a few novels and talking about them. I found it tougher to try and take the novels and add them to the discussion of dominant culture vs multicultural, which America do we teach. This was not because of the novels themselves, but based on how much stronger I felt the “historical” documents drove home the ideas and questioning of what we are taught. While it surprised me, and I am sure some of my classmates were thrilled to finally get to the novels, I do not think I was alone in the class in thinking they seemed a misfire to me after what we went through beforehand. Looking back over the semester, if I could change anything, I would probably have done a different second research post. As glad as I am to have read Wieland, I think I would have gotten the same reaction from only reading Edgar Huntly. I think a better course of action for my interests would have been to try and find more firsthand accounts of early American life. Also, I would’ve made sure to do my presentation strictly on “Classical” classical music. Much like my first research post, I just took it in a direction it didn’t need to go. At least for my presentation, I did it to try and make the information connect better with that class, not just because I misunderstood the assignment.