|
(2013
midterm assignment) Sample Student Midterm Answers 2013 #3: Web Highlights |
LITR 4232 |
 |
Baisha Kreuzer
Web of Wonders
Jennifer Hamilton, Matt Chavez, and Meagan Hamlin are my
choices for my web highlight selection. I chose certain passages that each
student highlighted from the midterm and focused on what they discovered that I
initially did not discover myself. I found this part of the midterm to be
beneficial because it offered insight to subjects I thought I already found
insight to.
Jennifer Hamilton’s short essay on “Who Am
I?” discusses a passage in Rip Van Winkle
that brought to my attention some details and interpretations that I had not
thought about before. Her passage of choice was:
“I’m not myself – I’m somebody else – that’s
me yonder – no – that’s somebody else got
into my shoes – I was myself last night, but I fell asleep on the
mountain, and they’ve changed
my gun, and everything’s changed, and I’m changed, and I can’t tell what’s my
name, or who I am!”
Hamilton discusses how the relevance of this passage resides
in the fact of American constantly changing. This story remains relevant though
generations because aside from all the years that have passed, the one thing we
all have in common is change. It is impossible for life to remain consistent and
therefore we are all subjugated to the inevitable claim that change delivers.
Matt Chavez wrote a
short essay called “Whitman on Sublimity” where he discusses a passage written
by Walt Whitman.
When I heard the learn'd astronomer;
When the proofs, the
figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and
the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the
astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room,
How
soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I
wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to
time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
What stood out to me in Chavez’s analysis of
this passage was his description of what he felt Whitman was conveying as
sublime: “…sublimity exists in nature, but especially in the heavens, for the
Romantics. The distinction between a love for nature and a study of nature is
what sets the two figures apart”. This description relates to another poem we
discussed this semester, Sonnet – To
Science by Edgar Allan Poe. While reading Chavez’s analysis, it reminded me
of my own analysis I did of Poe’s sonnet to science and the connection between
spiritual and natural elements. I have discovered there is a fine line between
nature and spirituality. Romantic writers often dance between these two concepts
and sometimes intertwine the two as one.
Meagan Hamlin wrote a short essay for a
midterm on Ligeia. Her analysis
focused on a comparison between Ligeia
and Wuthering Heights, a popular
classic novel by Emily Bronte. Hamlin connected the character Ligeia to
Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights and
described both characters as dark nomads whom no one knew much about except for
their “unforgettable and passionate” persona. Her comparison intrigued me as I
initially would not have thought to connect the two characters, but now I can
see the similarities. Hamlin did involve the theme of gothic elements into her
story and analyzed the romantic descriptions of Ligeia, but most of what she
wrote in that aspect I already discovered myself.
