LITR 4232 American Renaissance 2010 final exam—Answers to Question A1

          When I signed up for the course back in August I panicked a little inwardly because my knowledge of American literature, up until that point, was vastly limited. My natural bent is toward classic English literature and American literature is a serious departure; or is it?  After struggling through the first few classes I began to gain some footing through the analysis of terms and their applications.  I realized that good writing and good writers have the same classic motifs, though historically and culturally stylized. This realization did several things for me as a reader and as a writer. The terms learned in class created a baseline for all future analysis of literature. From that baseline I sprang toward the binary comparison between classic literature and popular literature and that opened my thinking to what works and what does not work for a piece of literature.  And most importantly I believe that the use of sentiment in all its various methods can work wonders on a work of literature. As a reader who never read anything overly sentimental or overly sad I have embraced what is beautiful about sentiment and champion those writers who use it in ways that stir the reader. Those works, those sentimental works of art, cling to a reader in a way that most fiction does not.

          The terms outlined in class were a gift, truly. I believe that Dr. White described their importance as a language that one must learn to streamline the communication process, and that could not be truer.  Essentially, without an understanding of these terms a reader might feel like being lost in foreign country with only a few simple phrases to navigate a complex journey. The same sort of thing happened to me. Having read a good deal I picked up many things, but they never came together in quite the same way as they did when woven together in a seamless and cohesive way. Knowing a term and understanding a term well enough to identify it in other places is a valuable skill because it promotes patterns, familiarity and inspiration which promotes creativity and significant analysis; skills that are invaluable to for any person working in any field. It reminds me of something I learned in Dr. Day’s Victorian Literature class. When we read Sherlock Holmes, the main character the genius Holmes says comments to Dr. Watson about his seeing but not observing, I believe the same thing has happened to me; I’ve read and enjoyed books but did not analyze them. Tackling terms like gothic in Poe and Hawthorne; sublime in Dickinson; transcendentalism in Emerson and romanticism throughout the class has not only become clearer, those terms have also functioned as cornerstones for other works. 

          Comparing popular fiction and classical fiction was intriguing and when sentiment was added the effect is astounding. At first I did not think there was any possible overlap between these groups, and I did not consider the use of sentiment as a handy creative tool. But when I considered it critically sentiment made sense. While most current fiction by authors such as Meyer, Patterson or Larsson may not be taught in classrooms ten or twenty years from now, there have been some relatively recent authors like J.K Rowling who were capable of writing books with both entertainment value and genuine literary merit that are capable of sustaining the passage of time. I began to see a formula of sorts when we discussed certain works in class. For example, when a reader examines a book like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and why it was popular during its day and why it remains a teachable literary classic, a reader could ascertain which of today’s books might have the same elements to become a modern classic. Uncle Tom’s Cabin took a powerfully divisive issue like slavery and clothed it in sentiment by linking slaves and whites through the shared experience of family, and in so doing made it popular fiction. This is not all that different from the way a recent Dominican author Junot Diaz built his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Diaz also used divisive issues like immigration, poverty and race to weave an extremely detailed story of a family riddled with struggle and tragedy. Here Diaz also used sentiment to personalize his characters and their choices making them both relatable and pitiful. The same thing is done in the popular American romance The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks and when compared with stories like “The Lamplighter” and The Wide Wide World it is easy to see why they are so successful. Those stories which are heavily sentimental appeal to readers on a universal level. The display of characters in their illnesses and dismal situations and their journey toward something transcendent is the classic underdog tale which is virtually irresistible to most people.  Whether the reader believes in hope, light and love or not, victorious good after terrible adversity is always popular.

          Essentially American Romanticism changed the way I read books, which is something I honestly did not expect it to do.  What I thought would be a course about American authors and history became a course not only about American romanticism but also a resource manual about literature in general; why it works; when it works and why it is still enjoyed today. I am extremely glad I took this course for no other reason than its profound effect on the way I think about books.