LITR 4328: American Renaissance

Model Assignments Final Exam Essays 2018 (final exam assignment) Sample answers for A1. learning about American Renaissance

Tim Doherty

Reality Complicates Romance

Two months ago, I wrote an essay that does not fill me with shame to re-read. I stand by most of it. The stylistic flourishes did not always work. The final paragraph of the essay betrays the naively superficial lesson I had learned to that point. Before the midterm, historical turmoil had not yet complicated the American Renaissance.

My midterm essay on this same subject is a victim of its moment in time. The writer I was in love those early days, from the unspoiled vistas of Washington Irving’s Hudson Valley to the urban gothic charm of Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter. I was unaware, in that moment, as I picked a research topic and grew confident, of what lay ahead. The historical context of the period cannot be ignored any more. While Irving’s characters cavorted in innocence, a few miles to the south the peak of human savagery rolled toward its violent final moments. A newborn nation was on the verge of ripping itself apart.

What I find most fascinating about studying the American Renaissance is the evolution of styles as Romanticism begins to yield to Realism in the last third of the 19^th century. Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches skips playfully between Romanticism and Realism, even incorporating Gothic elements. In paragraph 4.55, Alcott writes of “the grey veil falling that no human hand can lift.” She follows that Romantic metaphor with the Realism of sitting by John, wiping his sweat, and fanning him.

Evolution can be seen in Frederick Douglass’s style when his “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln” weaves Romantic, elevated language into a Realistic appraisal of Lincoln’s character. “Truth is proper and beautiful at all times and in all places…” is beautifully transcendental, then Douglass deflates the ideal Lincoln, who was not “our man or our model.”(1)

Romantic rhetoric and archetypes play important roles in non-fiction stories, especially slave narratives. Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass knew when and how to elevate elements of a scene to amplify its effect on the reader. Douglass uses lurid, “warm, red blood… dripping to the floor” to elevate the impact of a brutal whipping in the narrative of his life. (1.13) Here he lets emotion color the imagery that punctuates a stoic recitation of human depravity. Douglass’s writing stands up next to any writer of the era for its richness and creativity.

Each week of this course dissected another layer of a fascinating era in American Literature. Processes begun in August continue to improve my literacy. Re-reading texts from just a few weeks ago as I compile this final, I noticed new dimensions and subtler uses of Romantic rhetoric. This was my first Literature class. I look forward to seeing how the lessons of the coming semesters begin to affect my writing.