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LITR 4328 American
Renaissance lecture notes |
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Email re evaluations
Dear students, Below is the link for filling out
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Thanks in advance—
Any of you try it yet, for this or other courses? I can't
Any problems?
How long did it take?
Please help.
I benefit from reactions, what worked or didn't work.
Final exam
questions may overlap somewhat without penalty--almost never a problem
keep looking at assignment question, use terms
use term-pages--best students nearly always do, so if you're not, you're starting from behind
working ahead is "working smart"
writing process: prewriting > drafting > rewrite, extend, edit
prewriting: Next 2-3 days: review exam, gather materials, review notes, start thinking, make some notes
drafting: 3-5 days start drafting--try to finish drafting a day before deadline
rewrite, extend, edit: Read your own writing like someone else would; have someone else read your drafts and mark what's working or not
rationale for writing process: gives your subconscious mind time to digest, sort, rethink, resolve
healthier pace, better product
Research Proects
Haven't finished reading, and still some papers coming in. (note on final exam about final grade report)
Preparing & editing emails takes time, better to do it once to speed up process
Thanks for originality, creativity, and learning.
Anxiety or boredom producing to review papers before you get them back, so brief and general
Wish easier to make broad positive statements about a set of papers, but pleasure of seeing young readers and writers like you getting a sense of what you can do and learn, plus sense of how much further your generation's set of experiences will take the study of literature in meeting some of the challenges my generation isn't equipped for.
So par, equal balance of outstanding essays and journals
Essays shwo some real sophistication in applying ideas like sublime, gothic, romanticism and realism to our texts.
Journals useful for a historical literature course where a teacher can't count on young students knowing or caring much about the past--but if you let them find their way, they start a foundation of knowledge.
A few issues or possibilities several of you will see in my responses--purpose is learning; principle of preview, review, reinforce
Poetry presentation:
compare Poe, Whitman, ED
relate to original objective on form and content
1. Identify the gothic adapting to an industrial site! What other American Renaissance or Romantic styles appear? Consider: Transcendentalism, Evangelical Christianity?
2. After the Civil War, Romantic literary styles and subjects were succeeded by Realism. How does Life in the Iron Mills seem Realistic, and how does it cling to Romanticism?
3. What are the different appeals to each? How do the two styles respond to different historical contexts?
1. Identify the gothic adapting to an industrial site! What other American Renaissance or Romantic styles appear? Consider: Transcendentalism, Evangelical Christianity?
216 gothic pile, for other class [gothic as fashion, age, prestige]
65 like Dane's Inferno [gothic] relate to hell
40 gothic lighting?
41 vast machinery
44 devil's place [variations on the gothic
45 hunchback as
65 like Dane's Inferno [gothic] relate to hell
186, 190 witch people, witch dwarfs
216 gothic pile, for other class [gothic as fashion, age, prestige]
2. After the Civil War, Romantic literary styles and subjects were succeeded by Realism. How does Life in the Iron Mills seem Realistic, and how does it cling to Romanticism?
2 Its dream of green fields and sunshine is a very old dream,—almost worn out, I think.
9 pure, unmixed blood [cf. Uncas, Hawkeye]
55 no Romanticism?
55 his nature to be kind [interior self]
56 the finer nature of the man [inner self]
56 the dark blue eyes and lithe figure of the little Irish girl--see also 174
58 Wolfe separate from masses [objective 1a]
60 Think that God put into this man's soul a fierce thirst for beauty,—to know it, to create it; to be—something, he knows not what,—other than he is. [anything but here and now] Transcendentalist / Romantic paradigm; correspondence
165 . . . a Man all-knowing, all-seeing, crowned by Nature, reigning
174 A hope, trifling, perhaps, but very dear, had died just then out of the poor puddler's life, as he looked at the sleeping, innocent girl,—some plan for the future, in which she had borne a part. He gave it up that moment, then and forever.
186 one of the witch people
190 witch dwarfs
219 If the son of the carpenter had stood in the church that night, as he stood with the fishermen and harlots
278 Quaker woman, vase of wood-leaves and berries
286 "Thee sees the hills, friend, over the river? Thee sees how the light lies warm there, and the winds of God blow all the day? I live there,—where the blue smoke is, by the trees.
288 thee shall begin thy life again,—there on the hills.
289 sunshine, and fresh air, and slow, patient Christ-love, needed to make healthy and hopeful this impure body and soul. There is a homely pine house, on one of these hills, whose windows overlook broad, wooded slopes and clover-crimsoned meadows,—niched into the very place where the light is warmest, the air freest. It is the Friends' meeting-house.
cf. conclusion of Hospital Sketches
3 Masses of men [contrast heroic individualism]
10 is that all of their lives? [limits, here and now]
57 A reality of soul-starvation, of living death, that meets you every day under the besotted faces on the street,—I can paint nothing of this, only give you the outside outlines of a night, a crisis in the life of one man
63 rails for railroad
69
Young Kirby looked
curiously around, as if seeing the faces of his hands for the first time.
129 I wash my hands of all social problems,—slavery, caste, white or black. My duty to my operatives has a narrow limit,—the pay-hour on Saturday night.
point: styles aren't pure, always more or less, mixed impulses--for the better
sensitive about going political in a Literature course
self-criticize: if you don't like it, can criticize for being too romantic, not realistic enough
3. What are the different appeals to each? How do the two styles respond to different historical contexts?
Use sentence from Edgar Huntly for Romanticism
8.76 I can still weep over the
untimely fall of youth and worth.
134 Evangelism + Realism
exhaustion of Civil War, moral struggle, loss, sickness--cf. Vietnam War
2 Its dream of green fields and sunshine is a very old dream,—almost worn out, I think.
3 Masses of men [contrast heroic individualism]
4 addresses reader (cf Stowe; moral?)
4 amateur psychologist [professionalization of social sciences in late 1800s]
5 a story of this house
7 prophecy / story
8 secret, underlying sympathy
9 pure, unmixed blood [cf. Uncas, Hawkeye]
10 is that all of their lives? [limits, here and now]
21 some love or hope
40 gothic lighting?
41 vast machinery
44 devil's place
45 hunchback as grotesque?
54 not an unfitting figure, type
55 no Romanticism?
55 his nature to be kind
56 the finer nature of the man [inner self]
56 the dark blue eyes and lithe figure of the little Irish girl
57 A reality of soul-starvation, of living death, that meets you every day under the besotted faces on the street,—I can paint nothing of this, only give you the outside outlines of a night, a crisis in the life of one man
58 Wolfe separate from masses [objective 1a]
59 Out of the blocks of this korl, Wolfe, in his off-hours from the furnace, had a habit of chipping and moulding figures,—hideous, fantastic enough, but sometimes strangely beautiful
60 lowest of his kind
60 Think that God put into this man's soul a fierce thirst for beauty,—to know it, to create it; to be—something, he knows not what,—other than he is. [anything but here and now] Transcendentalist / Romantic paradigm; correspondence
63 rails for railroad
63 nearly Sunday morning
64 something unusual
64 this mysterious class that shone down on him perpetually with the glamour of another order of being. What made the difference between them? That was the mystery of his life.
65 like Dane's Inferno [gothic]
69
Young Kirby looked
curiously around, as if seeing the faces of his hands for the first time.
88
white figure of
a woman faced him in the darkness,—a woman, white, of giant proportions,
crouching on the ground, her arms flung out in some wild gesture of warning.
101 the wild, eager face, like that of a starving wolf's
104
A working-woman,—the very type of her class."
129 I wash my hands of all social problems,—slavery, caste, white or black. My duty to my operatives has a narrow limit,—the pay-hour on Saturday night.
132
"What has the man who pays them money to
do with their souls' concerns, more than the grocer or butcher who takes it?"
134 the awful question, "What shall we do to be saved?" [cf. Acts 16:30] Only Wolfe's face, with its heavy weight of brain, its weak, uncertain mouth, its desperate eyes, out of which looked the soul of his class
139 You quote scripture freely!
143 "Do you know, boy, you have it in you to be a great sculptor, a great man? do you understand?" (talking down to the capacity of his hearer: it is a way people have with children, and men like Wolfe,)—"to live a better, stronger life than I, or Mr. Kirby here? A man may make himself anything he chooses.
[145]
"Make yourself what
you will. It is your right.”
[146]
"I know," quietly.
"Will you help me?"
152 "That is it? Money?"
158 "it would be of no use. I am not one of them."
164 His squalid daily life, the brutal coarseness eating into his brain, as the ashes into his skin: before, these things had been a dull aching into his consciousness; to-night, they were reality.
165 In his cloudy fancy he had pictured a Something like this. He had found it in this Mitchell, even when he idly scoffed at his pain: a Man all-knowing, all-seeing, crowned by Nature, reigning
174 A hope, trifling, perhaps, but very dear, had died just then out of the poor puddler's life, as he looked at the sleeping, innocent girl,—some plan for the future, in which she had borne a part. He gave it up that moment, then and forever.
186 one of the witch people
190 witch dwarfs
206 his right!
209 nothing of which he was certain, except the mill and things there. Of God and heaven he had heard so little, that they were to him what fairy-land is to a child
211 to him a true life was one of full development rather than self-restraint?
212 The Something . . . loved his children alike
215 free to work, to live, to love! Free! His right! He folded the scrap of paper in his hand.
216 gothic pile, for other class
217 Christian reformer, sublime, another class of culture
219 If the son of the carpenter had stood in the church that night, as he stood with the fishermen and harlots
220 The trial-day of this man's life was over, and he had lost the victory.
226 for example's sake (cf. Douglass 4.7)
230 "I think I'll get out."
238 something, a new horror
241 market-day
241 Somehow, the sound, more than anything else had done, wakened him up,—made the whole real to him. He was done with the world and the business of it.
242 Why, the very vilest cur, yelping there in the gutter, had not lived his life, had been free to act out whatever thought God had put into his brain; while he—No, he would not think of that!
266 something
278 Quaker woman, vase of wood-leaves and berries
286 "Thee sees the hills, friend, over the river? Thee sees how the light lies warm there, and the winds of God blow all the day? I live there,—where the blue smoke is, by the trees.
288 thee shall begin thy life again,—there on the hills.
289 sunshine, and fresh air, and slow, patient Christ-love, needed to make healthy and hopeful this impure body and soul. There is a homely pine house, on one of these hills, whose windows overlook broad, wooded slopes and clover-crimsoned meadows,—niched into the very place where the light is warmest, the air freest. It is the Friends' meeting-house.
289 her eyes turned to hills higher and purer than these on which she lives, dim and far off now, but to be reached some day
290 "Is this the End?" they say,—"nothing beyond? no more?"
291 While the room is yet steeped in heavy shadow, a cool, gray light suddenly touches its head like a blessing hand, and its groping arm points through the broken cloud to the far East, where, in the flickering, nebulous crimson, God has set the promise of the Dawn.
