This webpage is the official midterm, to be updated until 5 December, when paper copies will be distributed.)

Email: Any time after class on Tuesday 5 December and by 11:59pm Tuesday 12 December. Write in Word or Rich Text Format file; attach or paste into email message to whitec@uhcl.edu. Edit before hitting "send."

Format: Open-book, open-notebook, open-webpage. Outside sources permissible but emphasize course texts, terms, and objectives.

Use materials on course website: esp. term definitions, objectives, Model Assignments +- outside sources (<optional).

Contents: 2 (or 3) essays

Essay 1: 1-hour+ essay on overall learning experience (details below) 

Essay 2: 1-hour+ essay on 1 or more of 4 options detailed below

Optional Essay 3: describe and evaluate Charlotte Temple and / or Edgar Huntly (if not discussed in Essays 1 & 2).

Somewhere in your final exam you must discuss both Charlotte Temple and Edgar Huntly, either separately or together with enough detail that your reading and comprehension of these texts is evident. If you don't include them in Essay 1 or 2, add an Essay 3 describing and evaluating these novels in light of course objectives and discussions. (Details further down.)

Overview of Contents (for details, scroll down)

Essay 1: 1-hour+ essay (6-9 paragraphs) on overall learning experience: Review and evaluate your midterm's Essay 1 or 2, plus or minus any classroom presentations. Summarize your overall learning experience in context with the course's Learning Objectives. (Emphasize one or more Objectives at bottom of course homepage.)  

Essay 2: (6-9 paragraphs) Options below; for more details, keep scrolling down. (Topics may be combined.)

2a. 1-hour+ essay on Early American Literature as the "origin story of American literature": How does "Literature" evolve from the Renaissance, 17c / Baroque, and Enlightenment to the early Romantic era? How such definitions may apply to or compete for what we study or teach as literature?

2b. 1-hour+ essay: review & compare 3-4 periods of study (Renaissance, Seventeenth Century, Enlightenment, Romanticism)

2c. 1-hour+ essay: "which America to teach?" What built-in advantages, disadvantages to both dominant-culture and multicultural emphases?

2d. 1-hour+ essay: most challenging or inspiring idea or content in the course + resolution.

2e. 1-hour+ essay: teaching multiple texts through intertextuality and historicism in addition to or instead of intensive single-text study.

You may combine one or more of these options, but indicate such combinations in your answer number(s), titles, or otherwise so I'll know what you're doing.

Some overlap with Essay 1 is acceptable, but if your content for Essay 1 focuses on the content of one of these options, please choose another option.

Optional Essay #3 describing and evaluating Charlotte Temple & Edgar Huntly. (If you don't discuss one or both of these extensively in your other two essays, write an essay evaluating one or both that you haven't discussed. Details & options below.)

Format requirements: Number & title each essay.

No need for documentation except for something surprising. Refer to texts by full title and full name of author the first time; abbreviations welcome thereafter; e. g., “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” > “Sinners”

Required references:

Throughout the exam, refer to at least 7 or 8 major texts from across the semester, not just since the midterm, but most should be post-midterm. Don't focus exclusively on one or two classes and their texts—thematically unify a range of texts. Of course you may refer to some texts more extensively than to others, but you can't just do a hit-and-run on Charlotte Temple and Edgar Huntly.

Charlotte Temple and Edgar Huntly must be extensively featured and discussed at some point(s) in your exam. That is, you need somehow and somewhere to demonstrate that you did the required reading and can relate them to our course. If you can't work them into your essays, write a separate essay (Optional Essay 3) reviewing and evaluating either or both.

Refer at least once somewhere in your exam to a previous final exam from Early American Literature 2016 final exam submissions, Early American Literature 2014 final exam submissions, Early American Literature 2012 final exam submissions, or Early American 2010 final exam submissions.

Audience: A member of our class or a student in a future semester, or maybe a member of your family or other teachers so they may see what you learned. Your ultimate audience is the instructor, but my response may address whether you demonstrated learning that another reader can follow, comprehend, and care about.

Content Details: Essay 1 (6-9 paragraphs)

Essay 1: 1-hour+ essay (6-9 paragraphs) on overall learning experience: Review and evaluate your midterm's Essay 1 or 2 plus or minus any helpful classroom presentations. Also consider including instructor feedback. Summarize your overall learning experience in context with the course's Learning Objectives. (Emphasize one or more Objectives at bottom of course homepage.)  

Required references: your midterm's Essay 1 or 2 (or both) plus or minus any classroom presentations. You are not required to copy or reproduce your earlier writings beyond summaries or quotations.

3-4 course texts, mostly since midterm; you may cover 1-2 texts in more detail than others. Connect texts to each other by comparing subjects, themes, characters.

1-2 Course Objectives (at bottom of course homepage): you may cover only part of an objective, but use its terms and develop its idea(s). If you can connect to other objectives, all the better. Don’t just mention the objective(s), but work with them by applying to texts and re-thinking meaning of objective or terms.

Possible uses of midterm: You could start the essay by reviewing your midterm's leading themes, then extend those ideas to new texts or materials from later in the course. When discussing your midterm (or your later learning), you could also review how and why you chose your research topics and what you learned from one or both. (You may reserve such references for this exam's Essay 2 if they apply to your subjects there.)

Topic choice and development: You may range among texts, periods, course organization or style, but above all have an overall personal and / or professional point about your learning experience to develop as you work through materials. What from your work in this course matters or has meaning? How and why? What will you remember, and what can you do with what you've learned?

Possible topics or personal emphases: entertainment and instruction; competing origin stories; dialectic or dialogue as means of discussing sensitive subjects; religion and science; American identity as dominant-culture and multicultural.

Possible organization: point A to point B

Point A: What you came in knowing about Early American Literature and how or why you knew what you did (e.g., what you'd read or seen, what you've been taught in school, church, family, etc.)

Point B: What you read and learned in Early American Literature, and how our course's readings and discussions extended, challenged, or changed your knowledge

Or: How does knowledge gained in Early American Literature connect or apply (or not) to other Literature, History, Humanities, or Education courses you've taken?

(possible) Point C: What would you want to read or learn next? or How do you apply what you learned to further reading, study, or career?

Essay 1 may preview topics or materials specified in the Essay 2 options. Some overlap is possible.

Content Details: Essay 2: Options (Topics may be combined.)
(6-9 paragraphs)

2a. Competing definitions of "Literature" from the Renaissance, 17th Century / Baroque, and Enlightenment to the early Romantic era, and how such definitions may apply to the study or teaching of literature.

Possible background: Our course's texts fall between two poles of literary history emphasized in high school and college curricula: The Renaissance of the 1500s-1600s (mostly Shakespeare) and the Romantic era of the 1800s (Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Poe, Emily Dickinson, the Brontes).

Questions: What models of "literature" do those familiar periods offer, and how do they compare to the literature studied in Early American Literature?

How has literature evolved or changed from the Renaissance and 17th Century to the Enlightenment / Age of Reason and the Romantic era? Consider different genres, appeals, styles, audiences, cultural contexts.

What do most of us have in mind when we  think of "literature" or attempt to define it? How do our texts compare to or extend this definition? Consider comparing early sermons, journals, nonfiction narratives, and Founding documents with later fiction and novels or with lyric poetry from any period.

How may a course like Early American Literature frustrate, vary, or expand the assumptions most of us make about the nature and purposes of literature, or the kinds of texts we enjoy and study in a Literature course?

Should teachers of literature expand the potential appeal and application of literary studies by including nonfiction and legal or historical documents? Or should literary studies appeal primarily to the imagination and readers devoted to escape and the life of the mind? Examine advantages and disadvantages to both positions.

"Critical thinking" and "cultural literacy" are standard reasons for teaching Literature. How may more typical literature courses and Early American Literature meet these needs differently?

Possible terms and consideration: Instruction and entertainment; mimesis; novel; fiction, lyric poetry; escapism and literary fiction; identification; vicarious experience; nonfiction; "extra-literary"; legal or historical documents; reader-friendly; religious or political texts; spoken vs. written literature.

Course Objective 2: To read Early American Literature as an origin story about the beginnings of North American culture and literature.

2b. Review & compare 3-4 periods of study (Renaissance, Seventeenth Century, Enlightenment, Romanticism)

Write a unified essay containing the following elements:

Review "periods" webpage & discuss purposes and limits of studying literature & history by periods.

Select three of the periods covered by our course for review and discussion. (You may do all 4 if inclined.)

Choose from four to six texts total from our course to illustrate and complicate these periods. Some texts may embody more than one period—no problem, just explain.

Refer to at least one piece of music from our music web reviews or to one or more works of art from our visual art web reviews.

visual art web reviews: Enlightenment / Romantic visual art; Neo-Classical Style of Architecture (not required)

Course Objective 4. To gain literary and cultural knowledge of historical periods & attempt trans-historical unity.

2c. "Which America to teach?" What built-in advantages, disadvantages to both dominant-culture and multicultural emphases?

How does teaching or study of American literature and culture reconcile the patriotic assumptions of our political and educational systems with the historic and continuing injustices that become evident when we read multicultural literature?

How well do American devices for progress—esp. self-government via literacy or education, increasing inclusiveness of citizens' or human and civil rights, the changing meaning of "all men are created equal"—compensate for past exclusions and oppressions of ethnic, gender, and religious minorities?

Can we remain patriotic Americans while acknowledging uncomfortable truths without turning past leaders, writers, and thinkers into pure villains, mere victims, or insiders-outsiders?

Or are the categories dominant-culture and multicultural becoming obsolete as "black-and-white America" gives way to a brown America of intermarriage, trans-national migration, geographical mobility, integrated schools, changing curricula, economic inequality, and global consciousness? What identities are possibly replacing "great white fathers" or "women and people of color?" Do these two parties remain irreconcilable, or are there ways to include all these voices in a story of American origins and potential progress?

More simply, use terms and ideas from Course Objective 4 and possibly Objective 6, copied below.

Course Objective 3. To reconcile the "Culture Wars" over which America is the real America? Which America to teach?—Dominant culture and / or multicultural? . . . To ask hard questions without simple or final answers by using dialectic discussion methods. (Answers evolve with changing world.)

See also Course Objective 5. Can American history tell a single story?

2d. Most challenging or inspiring idea or content in the course + resolution.

Some overlap with Essay 1 or other Essay 2 options is possible and not a problem—just refer to anything relevant you wrote elsewhere, reinforce and extend while minimizing repetition.

Write an essay about something you've learned that has stayed with you, that you've found yourself thinking about in other situations or classes, that challenged, reinforced, or extended ideas or attitudes important to you and all of us.

You may initially focus your idea and essay on a single "A-Ha!" moment in a text, discussion, or presentation, but extend the idea through several periods or classes of our course. For instance, if you emphasize "creation stories," don't remain stuck in our second class meeting but apply the term to later texts, even our concluding novels.

Warning of greatest danger: Don't stay stuck on one single moment, text, or insight, giving the impression that you only had one isolated success. Connect your insight or realization to other texts or authors at other stages of the course.

As usual, write about something that matters to you and should matter to others.

2e. Teaching multiple texts through intertextuality and historicism (in addition to or instead of intensive single-text study).

Most literature courses go from one great, free-standing classic text to another, each a world unto itself (mimesis) with its own attractions or shortcomings. This arrangement corresponds to most readers' experience of reading one text at a time as a self-contained unit of entertainment and instruction.

In Early American Literature, however, only a few texts are of such transcendent quality that they stand and speak to us by and for themselves. Instead, each text gains meaning through its relations with other writings, creating a network of meaning in which one text supports or informs another, so that even sub-literary texts produce significance.

Another advantage of studying literary masterpieces is that many require little historical background knowledge in order to appreciate their meanings or identify with their characters or actions. YOu don't need to know Renaissance England or Denmark to understand and enjoy Hamlet, or medieval Verona to process Romeo and Juliet.

In contrast, texts in Early American Literature often require historical instruction and discussion, especially in terms of historicism, in which literary and historical texts share and add meaning to each other, and the challenges of the past relate to those we face now.

To write on this subject, compare and contrast your experience with this course's intertextual and historicist techniques to other Literature courses and their methods. Review at least four texts in relation to each other and to the historical backgrounds that were either provided or were created by intertextuality.

(Each text you select doesn't have to relate to all the others you select. If you discuss four texts, for instance, they might work together in two distinct pairs.)

Refer extensively to the intertextuality and historicism instructional pages and to any relevant historical pages made available on the course website.

Course Objective 6. Critical Theory / Critical Thinking: . . . Intertextuality . . . Historicism . . .  

Optional Essay #3 describing and evaluating Charlotte Temple & Edgar Huntly. If you don't discuss one or both of these extensively in your other two essays, write an essay evaluating one or both that you haven't discussed.

Length: At least 4 paragraphs, but more can be better.

If you used either Essay 1 or Essay 2 to discuss our two novels sufficiently to demonstrate your reading and comprehension, you may ignore this part of the exam.

But if your two long essays featured only texts besides these novels, write an essay discussing one or both of these novels and their significance at the end of our course.

Demonstrate your reading and comprehension of these novels by comparing and contrasting them and/or by discussing how they fit into our course, especially as a conclusion.

If you discussed one of these novels in a previous essay, no need to start over; refer to that essay in making comparisons and contrasts between the two texts while emphasizing the novel that hasn't shown up till now.

Possible considerations:

How do these texts exemplify the novel or fiction? How do they anticipate later developments in fiction—even today's popular fiction or film?

What do familiar forms of fiction offer that these earlier novels (or our course's other texts) do not?

How do these novels exemplify Romanticism? The gothic?

Sample Essay #3: Elizabeth Sorensen, Charlotte Temple and Edgar Huntly

Evaluation standards:  Readability & surface competence, content quality, and unity / organization.

  Readability & surface competence: Your reader must be able to process what you're reporting. Given the pressures of a timed writing exercise, some rough edges are acceptable, but chronic errors or elementary style can hurt.

  Content quality: Comprehension of subject, demonstration of learning, + interest & significance. Use of course website materials, esp. terms, objectives, Model Assignments.

Reproduce course materials, especially through reference to terms and objectives, but also refresh with your own insights and experiences. Avoid: "You could have written this without taking the course."

  Thematic Unity and Organization: Unify materials along a line of thought that a reader can follow from start to finish.