LITR 4232 American Renaissance

Lecture Notes

 Meeting 2: Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”

Tompkins H. Matteson (1813 - 1884)
Rip Van Winkle’s Return
Oil on canvas, 1860
("Hudson River School" of American Romantic painting in mid-19th century)

Today's schedule

Presentation schedule

Mohicans assignments 

Obj. 1: popular, classic, representative?

Romanticism & Gothic (obj. 2)

Thursday, 28 August: Washington Irving 951-985 (“Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”)

Text-Objective Discussion: Faron Samford

Tuesday, 2 September: conclude Irving, begin James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans, chapters 1-3 (pages 1-35 in Penguin Classics edition.)

Guide to Last of the Mohicans

Web highlight (Midterms on Irving / Cooper): instructor

Thursday, 4 September: Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans, through chapter 13 (thru p. 133 in Penguin edition.)

Text-Objective Discussion: Bryan McDonald

Course Objectives:

1. To use "close reading" and "Historicism" as ways of studying classic, popular, and representative literature and cultural history of the "American Renaissance" (the generation before the Civil War).

2. To study the movement of "Romanticism," the narrative genre of "romance," and the related styles of the "gothic" and "the sublime." (The American Renaissance is the major period of American Romantic Literature.)

3. To use literature as a basis for discussing representative problems and subjects of American culture (Historicism), such as equality (race, gender, class); modernization and tradition; the individual, family; and community; nature; the role of writers in an anti-intellectual society.

Assignments for Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" & "Legend of Sleepy Hollow"

Objective 1. To use critical techniques of "close reading" and "New Historicism" as ways of studying classic, popular, and representative literature and cultural history of the "American Renaissance" (the generation before the Civil War).

Objective 1 applied to Irving: classical and popular literature:

In what ways are these "classic" texts?

In what ways are they "popular?"

About their "popularity," why do people know these texts, even if they haven't read them? How do they keep a special place in the minds of Americans?

(Compare Robinson Crusoe, Romeo & Juliet)

 

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Objective 2. To study the movement of "Romanticism," the narrative genre of "romance," and the related styles of the "gothic" and "the sublime."

Objective 2 applied to Irving: Romanticism and the Gothic

How does the Gothic appear in "Rip Van Winkle" & "Legend of Sleepy Hollow?"

What is the gothic's significance to Romanticism?

Introduction to the Gothic

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Objective 3. To use literature as a basis for discussing representative problems and subjects of American culture (New Historicism), such as equality; race, gender, class; modernization and tradition; the family; the individual and the community; nature; the writer's conflicted presence in an anti-intellectual society.

Objective 3: typical issues, problems, or themes in American literature and culture: "modernity" or "modernization" vs. tradition

"change" vs. "traditional values"

"Modernization" is the ongoing revolution in values and material life that began in Ancient Greece and was reborn in modern Europe with the Renaissance approximately 500 years ago. Modernization is a sociological concept involving many aspects of human and natural life:

human equality (in opportunity or possibility if not in fact)

secularization

urbanization (farms > city)

rise of middle class

nationalism (i. e., identification of a person as "an American" rather than a member of a tribe, family, or state)

authority of tradition is replaced by authority of empirical science and observable human behavior

pace of change constantly accelerates, with occasional pauses (e. g., the 1950s)

lifespans lengthen; population increases

in most material terms, modern life offers a better standard of living than the past did

reactions against modernization include fundamentalism, "family values," nostalgia for earlier times

Standard contrast with "modern" is "traditional"--modernity threatens tradition; it disrupts and unsettles older ways of life

Modernity and change are confusing, disorienting--desire for simplicity of past (which wasn't really simple, just familiar)

> popularity of occult or supernatural + conspiracy during rapid change: people want to understand in familiar, personal terms

"Modernization" is relevant to study of the American Renaissance because 

The American Renaissance is the period when Americans first began moving to cities in large numbers and experiencing the other changes listed above on a large scale.

Some literature of the period shows changes of intellect, lifestyle, and nature that resulted and how people adjusted. (Literature as engagement)

Much "Romantic" literature (such as "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and The Last of the Mohicans or The Scarlet Letter) is set in an earlier or more rural time and place.

Assignments for Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" & "Legend of Sleepy Hollow"

Objective 1. To use critical techniques of "close reading" and "New Historicism" as ways of studying classic, popular, and representative literature and cultural history of the "American Renaissance" (the generation before the Civil War).

Objective 1 applied to Irving: classical and popular literature:

In what ways are these "classic" texts?

In what ways are they "popular?"

About their "popularity," why do people know these texts, even if they haven't read them? How do they keep a special place in the minds of Americans?

1. To use critical techniques of "close reading" and "New Historicism" as ways of studying classic, popular, and representative literature and cultural history of the "American Renaissance" (the generation before the Civil War).

In what ways are Irving's stories popular, classic, and / or representative?

Link to sample student essay on popular, classic, and representative literature

Popular

&

classic literature

terms can overlap without negating each other (e. g., Douglass both representative and classic)

Popular Classic Authors:

Twain

Shakespeare

Dickens

Irving

Cooper

Poe

(harder to find later)

Frost?

Langston Hughes

Toni Morrison

How is Irving "popular"?

descriptions + picturesque, abundance

How like a sitcom?

Sentiment

Stock / stereotype characters

Humor / comedy

nostalgia

How classical?

Insight, criticisms

Historical comprehensions

Compositional integrity (not just a lot going on, but parts fit)

Not representative

2105 musician an old gray-headed negro

pyramid of shining black faces

2106 grinning rows of ivory from ear to ear

2107 what passed at this interview I will not pretend to say

2108 O these women! These women!

How is Irving popular?

appeals to everyone more or less; or even if it doesn’t appeal, it’s not threatening to anyone except overly intellectual or prissy sorts

Sentiment: childhood, dog, scenes of abundance, nostalgia

descriptions + picturesque, abundance

picturesque--sleepy abundance of autumn

(picturesque: 1. Resembling a picture; suggesting a painted scene. 1b. charming, quaint)

perpetual club of the sages, small inn, George III, endless sleepy stories about nothing

whole group reminded Rip of the figures in an old Flemish painting

abundance

bursting forth with the treasures of the farm

vast store of apples, great fields of Indian corn

How like a sitcom?

Restoration of family, social order; rejection of outsider (Ichabod)

Rip’s daughter took him home

Sentiment

Pushes easy emotional buttons; Spielberg movies, family movies

children, dogs

Stock / stereotype characters

stock characters

termagant wife

lazy husband, lovable ne'er do well (Kramer?)

“naturally a thirsty soul”

prissy schoolmaster

irritated jock: burly, roaring, roistering blade

rich babe

simple, familiar plot

path crossed by . . . a woman

Humor / comedy

Ichabod’s head, body

loud voice

superstitious, odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple credulity

dog sings along

Gunpowder

Ichabod’s body

just time to save himself by clasping old Gunpowder round the neck

nostalgia

a village of great antiquity

many years since [but not really]

they are given to all kinds of marvelous beliefs (premodern)

How classic?

Style:

Compositional integrity (not just a lot going on, but parts fit) 

Subtlety rather than obviousness

But remains popular b/c

technique doesn’t declare itself (sleep / ghost)

shift to dream?

Not obvious, not reductive, not “the same old same old”

Most popular culture simply reinforces ideas, attitudes we already have

Classic literature rich with meaning, keeps giving off meaning, not obvious

Contains important ideas, comprehension of historical change

inn > hotel

tree > flagpole

very character of the people seemed changed

riot in the village?

RVW experience of every generation

Relate to objective 3: American Renaissance as modernity and resistance

[Summary: Enlightenment vision of world of laws, in which nature and culture are unchanging, or always progressing, gives way to a world of change and decay.  Romanticism as nostalgia.]

village was altered: larger and more populous

house gone to decay

called loudly . . . lonely chambers rang

(Legend) fixed x great torrent of migration and improvement . . . changes

(Legend) > Kentucky

(Van Winkle) shifting throng > ghosts . . . in long established Dutch communities

2. To study the movement of "Romanticism," the narrative genre of "romance," and the related styles of the "gothic" and "the sublime."

Romanticism (obj. 2)

Historical, trans-cultural, international movement, value system in literature and arts, response to massive social changes in Europe and USA

Still very influential in popular attitudes: love of nature, past, children, innocence, etc.

Movement itself: late 18^th > 19^th century (late 1700s > 1800s)

Spreads out into popular culture

Romantic music (Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert, Tchaikovsky)

Romantic painting (Millais, Turner > Impressionism)

Romantic Literature

Germany: Goethe, Schilling, Heine

England: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Byron, Shelley, Keats

concept more or less alive in popular culture

“how romantic”—affectionate eroticism + exotic / faraway / quaint

e. g., cuddling in front of a fire in a ski lodge in the Swiss Alps

honeymoon on a tropical island

broader usage

—values and aesthetic system—started in early 19c, continues today—nature, childhood, past good—cities, adulthood, present bad

the world has spirit

The Indians considered them the abode of spirits . . . ruled by an old squaw spirit . . . . kind of Manitou or Spirit, who kept about the wildest recesses of the Catskill Mountains

Hudson . . . crown of glory

sublime  

down into a deep mountain glen, wild, lonely, and shagged; the bottom filled with fragments from the impending cliffs

something strange and incomprehensible about the unknown, that inspired awe and checked familiarity

gothic—

decaying mansion

light / dark plus red

mansion > nature

haunted by strange beings

[haunted castle] > haunted valley

so seldom hear of ghosts, except in our established Dutch communities

great tree, woman in white that haunted the dark glen

whitewashed walls shine modestly

large brook among broken rocks and trunks of fallen trees

enormous tulip tree, gnarled, fantastic

groan – rubbing of one huge bough upon another

huge misshapen, black, and towering

haunted fields, brooks, bridges

romance

pop cultural uses: Harlequin romance, American Romance classics

true love, happily ever after, ends on a kiss

academic uses:

—a kind of story or narrative—“quest,” rescue, transcendence (happily ever after)—fairy tales, Arthurian tales of nights in shining armor, long ago and far away

ex. Star Wars, Officer and Gentleman, Dances with Wolves

romantic comedy: Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally

knight-errant of yore, fiery dragons and such like, castle-keep, lady of his heart

knight-errant in quest of adventures . . . in the true spirit of romantic story

correspondence 

every sound of nature, at that witching hour, fluttered his excited imagination

sank deep in the mind of Ichabod

all the stories of ghosts and goblins . . . came crowding upon his recollection. The night grew darker and darker

Visual Arts concerning Rip Van Winkle

George Frederick Bensell (1837-1879)
Rip Van Winkle
Oil on canvas