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LITR 4326 Early American Literature Model Assignments |
Final Exam Essays 2016 Sample answers
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Brittney Wilson
History Repeating: Learning from the Past
When
I signed up to take Early American Literature with Dr. White this semester, I
honestly had no idea what exactly to expect. I did not know what we would be
reading, though I assumed that we would focus on two or three early novels from
American authors like Poe, Twain, and Hawthorne, and simply stick to the general
critical analysis of the few novels in regard to the context in which they were
written, thus learning a little about early America. But the amount of history
we actually studied in Dr. White’s class was completely unexpected and likewise,
the amount of historical documents that we covered, regarding them as works of
literature, was something I had never thought possible outside of a history or
politics course. History was never something I enjoyed and I had never thought
much on history affecting the literature that came out of it but this course
forced us to really analyze the two things together for the first time.
A period in history that we covered before the midterm was the First
Great Awakening, a period of Christian revival between the 1730s and 1740s, and
the contrasting Enlightenment, or Age of Reason, which occurred from the late
1600s through the late 1700s. Both of these periods focused heavily on religion
or the pull away from it towards science, but the theme of religion & literature
was first introduced to the class during our study of these time periods. The
contrasting ideas of the time piqued my interest because I grew up in a very
religious family, attending church regularly my early years through high school
when I ended up straying from the church and organized religion as a whole due
to judgements I saw these people of faith passing unjustly onto good people and
ideas. So, having a somewhat sour taste left in my mouth it, religion was the
first thing caught my attention and I wanted to know how the faithful of today
had been ultimately influenced from these time periods and more specifically, by
the historical figures and literature of the day.
Following my interest, I wrote my Midterm essay and both research posts
on the topics of Deism, the Enlightenment & Great Awakening, and prominent
figures of both sides, specifically Ben Franklin, Andrew Jackson, and Jonathan
Edwards. Deism, again, is the belief or concept of one ultimate Creator of
everyone and everything, straying away from the miracles and laws of the Bible
focusing more on nature and the moral laws that govern right and wrong. Ben
Franklin and Andrew Jackson were both deists as well as two of the countries
Founding Fathers, focusing on science and humanity, while Jonathan Edwards was a
preacher of the First Great Awakening, writing his famous sermon,
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
My midterm essay, “Keeping America Afoot,” was focused mostly on this sermon as
well as Ben Franklin. I was put off by Jonathan Edwards’ use of fear-mongering
as a tactic to bring the American people back to the Christian faith and to the
church, while I was touched by Ben Franklin’s general countenance and way that
he treated people and confronted issues with kindness, understanding, and
sometimes humor, as in his rhetoric regarding the American “Savages”. Thusly, in
writing my midterm, as well as my research posts, I tended to stick to a
deep-seeded bias against Jonathan Edwards and in favor of Ben Franklin because
of the things I’d seen in my experience with church and churchgoers.
I wrote mostly on Jonathan Edwards’ focus on the ultimate sovereignty of
a merciless God, a God who would let watch a person lose his footing, so to
speak, and fall into the pits of Hell to be tortured forever unless you
converted immediately to the Christian faith and lived a life devoted to working
to earn your place on God’s good side. Then I compared Ben Franklin’s more
palatable rhetoric in Remarks on the
Savages of America where he was willing to listen to people’s ideals coming
from a place on their religion in contrast to Christianity. He was evolved
enough to realize that they probably thought the Christian ideal was just as
foreign and odd to them as their religious practices seemed to the Christians.
In forming such a bias, I was harsh in my opinions towards Jonathan Edwards’ way
of doing things and made my midterm too out of focus, not thinking that his way
of doing things may have had some suavity to it.
Dr. White pointed out to me in his response to my paper that he was one
of the greatest minds of the time and that he had a way of explaining things to
his followers that caused a sense of fear that produced a sense of urgency that
would rightly bring people back to faith. He was feared in the loss followers
and intelligently used his tact to get the job done. This made me see things
more clearly and in the way that was probable back then so it opened my mind up
to things I had not been accustomed to and evolved my way of thinking in that
way. It made me see things from both sides as both sides were set in their
thinking and trying to do things for what they saw as the greater good for
humanity.
So, in this way, learning from Dr. White, I learned to learn from history
and the time periods and more critically analyze how things were done while
seeing and forming an understanding of why and how things were done differently
back then, ultimately drawing on the fact that both were learning and neither
were wrong. This also brought about a greater understanding of how things like
this ultimately had a huge influence on modern people and how they think and do
things, making it easier to understand why people are the way that they are and
that they are not completely wrong.
In this way and others, this Early American Literature course has been
eye-opening and has developed my way of thinking into developing into a more
open-minded, less biased scholar. And in this way, I know that it has helped me
develop the skills to take with me into grad school and further into my career;
it has even brightened my idea of history and literature in combination and
given me a new interest in the subject that I hope to carry with me through my
studies.
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