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LITR 4328: American Renaissance .png) |
Model
Assignments Final Exam Essays 2017 (final exam assignment) Sample answers for A1. learning about American Renaissance |
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Elisa
Cortez
December 9, 2017
What
I thought I knew about American Renaissance
I can easily say that my knowledge of American Renaissance or American
Romanticism, were somewhat limited. When reading my midterm, I found that my
only known source of literature I could relate to of that time period, were
Edgar Allan Poe. Though I had heard of
Rip Van
Winkle and
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, I did
not have a clear understanding what the American Renaissance period consisted
of. To my surprise, representative literature was also a huge part of the
American Renaissance. Narratives like Harriet Jacobs’
Incidents
in
the
Life
of
a
Slave
Girl, and Frederick Douglass’
A
Narrative
of
the
Life, offered something that I did
not associate with American Romanticism. The depths of the texts were true
accounts of people who lived and experienced slavery first hand. I found it
difficult at first to see these works as part of the American Renaissance,
because I had believed popular authors like Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson
were only part of that era.
When reading and
A
Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass An American Slave, I was able to get a different understanding of
what slavery was, and the human aspect of it. Growing up, we are often taught
the facts and not much is mentioned how slavery effected so many people. One
major point to me was that most slaves like Frederick Douglass did not know who
their father was and not even exactly how old they were. A quote from his
narrative “By far the larger part of the
slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs,” really stood out
to me, because it gave a sense of what slaves felt not knowing something that we
take for granted today. The importance of this literature and how it shapes that
era is what I found most interesting. Without narratives as such, my whole
understanding of the American Renaissance would be centered on popular
literature, which only gives me a small window into what literature can bring to
learning.
The reading of the narratives documents a personal human struggle that is
important not only to the person, but also to understanding history. Literature,
in my view, can give us a better view of what happened and how people coped and
how their struggles were documented.
We are taught in history class facts, more that we are taught real life
stories. Though, there are many stories based on slavery, we can grow and learn
more from representative authors. Personally, I feel this type of literature
gives way to opening up about our history as a whole, though some may argue that
literature and history do not go hand in hand because literature is focused on
the human aspect and not directly on the facts.
My knowledge extended quite a bit as the semester progressed; a challenge
for me was learning poetry and the different styles, formal and free form; also
how the content differed between poets, which set them apart from each other.
Comparing their works during the American Renaissance era how to identify each
as a romantic poet or a transcendentalist, or both. All in all, I felt my
learning from different authors, poets and narratives, shaped my knowledge of
the American Renaissance or American Romanticism period.
