LITR 4232 American
Renaissance
LITR 4232 2006 final exam
Answers to Question 5 (Student’s choice)
Essay 5 – Metatopics: The “Big” Question of Literature
At the beginning of almost every literature course, the professor asks the question, “Why do we study literature?” The fact that this question is generally addressed to students majoring in literature is not a fact I dismiss as I listen to the responses. The answers tend to be somewhat specialized, such as “to explore other ideas, worlds, and cultures,” “to improve reading skills,” or “to examine different methods of language and description.” None of these examples are incorrect. However, the content of this course, the Romantic Movement, American Minority Literature, Shakespeare, Mythology, Chaucer, Contemporary Literature, etc… has caused me to continually reconsider this question. It was not until this semester that an answer came to me that I felt truly satisfied the continued study of literature past high school, for those people that choose to major in other subjects.
The first “big” answer I usually offered to myself for this question was “exposure to our past allows us to understand the roots of our culture, to trace the foundations of our philosophies, our successes and failures and to consider carefully where we might be headed.” And certainly, a person can learn a lot just by studying Shakespeare alone. However, a person can also learn a lot by studying history. Literature offers something different, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t put my finger on it.
While studying the emergent literature of America in this course, I greatly enjoyed seeing threads of similar stylistic devices used between authors who probably never talked to one another. The push for the sublime and the acceptance of the gothic as a tapestry for settings, seemed to echo a particular anxiety that the newly formed country must have experienced, but that we can’t empathize with, 250 years later. While form and style are fascinating measures of literary development, it still didn’t fill in the gap of the question.
When I discussed Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” for my presentation, the answer began to dawn on me. He wrote, “a man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within” (1622). And when we discussed Frederick Douglass’s narrative, I recalled the following heartbreaking passage: “I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed” (1917). Reading Poe’s “Ligeia,” I found myself absolutely fascinated with his impossibly long description of his beloved’s eyes. “The ‘strangeness,’ however, which I found in the eyes, was of a nature distinct from the formation, or the color, or the brilliancy of the features, and must, after all, be referred to the expression. Ah, word of no meaning! behind whose vast latitude of mere sound we entrench our ignorance of so much of the spiritual” (2463).
By the time I read Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” I became more confident of my newly found answer to that very important question. In all honesty, I did not think I would enjoy Whitman, but his descriptions of love quickly drew me in. “Loafe with me on the grass….loose the stop from your throat, / Not words, not music or rhyme I want….not custom or lecture, not even the best, / Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice” (2940). More importantly, perhaps because his poetry is so conversational, it solidified my view of the study of literature.
Conveniently, Whitman also has a passage that backs up my new answer. We continue to study literature beyond the Western Canon, because the study of literature is the process of thinking. I could qualify this by stating that the different philosophies of authors, represented by their different styles, the varying themes and the evolution of language all show the consideration of the state of humankind. But I think that instead, I’ll let Mr. Whitman sum it up for me. “You shall no longer take things at second or third hand….nor look through the eyes of the dead….nor feed on the spectres in books, / You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, / You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself” (2938).
Would this revelation have occurred in any of the other literature courses? Possibly not. The connection between the philosophy of freedom, the individual, and rational thought is key to the creation of the United States, particularly to its beginnings. Although I might have been actively seeking an answer to “the question,” I did not suspect I would find it during this class. [KB]
Essay Question #5
I did not expect to have the “man behind the curtain” revealed to me by this course. In other words, I had many nebulous thoughts—in relation to literature, why it is studied, and why “I” study it—crystallized for me during the course of the semester. The starting point for this was the quote from Horace that stated the overall purpose of literature “to entertain and inform” (Notes) Yes! I had thoughts about the purpose of books and what they meant to me, but I could never put them into words and this statement encapsulated everything I had ever thought about the pleasure and literacy I have received from literature over the years and in my baccalaureate studies.
Further, I had never seen the categories, characteristics, and issues addressed in literature put so succinctly until taking this class. To elaborate, I am referring to our three objectives that we have explored over the course of the semester: using “‘close reading’ and ‘New Historicism’ as ways of studying classic, popular, and representative literature”; “studying ‘Romanticism,’ the narrative genre of ‘romance,’ and the related styles of the ‘gothic’ and ‘the sublime’, and using literature as a basis for discussing representative problems and subjects of American culture” (Notes).
Even working from one text such as James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, all three objectives are embodied. His work is classic and popular in that he gives picturesque descriptions of the forest, yet he mixes in open interpretation of Duncan’s “bigotry” in relation to Cora (Mohicans). The “high arches of the forest” provide the gothic setting and the disembodied sounds entering the cave provide the sublime (Mohicans). Meanwhile, all throughout the book the theme of race relations is representative of the culture then and now.
Compare a work like Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” that seems to be only representative literature, yet contains the gothic. Thoreau writes of the government making a man with its “black arts . . . buried under arms with funeral accompaniments” (Civil). It is classic in its allusions to the bible and “purer sources of truth” (Civil).
And, what does this mean? These works and all of our works share a common language. They allow us to have a broad discussion across genres and across texts.
Further, I plan to teach English on the High school level one day and I feel this knowledge is invaluable for that environment. I feel that I can better communicate to students “what” literature is supposed to do for them and; therefore, “why” we need to study literature. I can communicate that literature “broadens us” and allows us to speak to one another with a common language whether we know we have one or not. By exploring stories that seem to have no similarities we find that they have more in common than is apparent on the surface. In turn, that can be passed on to students and affect them not only in terms of literacy but in terms of who they become as people. [JM]
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