(2015 midterm assignment) Sample Student Midterm Answers 2015 #3: Web Highlights

LITR 4328 American Renaissance

Taylor Fraze

Web Highlights: Could Not Have Said It Better Myself

When looking through past assignments, I realized a few had the same understanding of romanticism as I did before taking this course. Agreeing with Ashley Rhodes, thank goodness for classes such as this one. The following excerpts exemplify this common misunderstanding:

“The Renaissance style contains many different aspects, one of those being Romanticism. I am very familiar with “Romance” novels. I am a “twi-hard”, Twilight fan for those who are not, and I guiltily read all 3 Fifty Shades of Grey novels in a week. When I heard the term “Romanticism” brought up in class, my mind immediately went to those books; and to all the sappy love stories I have seen my mother read since I was young. But, to my surprise, Romanticism is something much larger than just a good love story. This side of Renaissance Literature contains many terms I am familiar with, having taken many Literature courses in my college career, but none that I would have before tagged to Romanticism. Terms like the sublime; the feeling of something far bigger than us alone, the subject of nature or of children, longing and loss. Terms like desire, love, and heroes are terms I would have alone associated with Romanticism”.   – Jenna Crosson

“Romance is an all-encompassing term that has been simplified to project only images of love and woman-only novels, when at its origins, this is simply not the case”.  – Britini Pond

“When someone says Romantic I often envision the color red, candlelit dinners, and of course a handsome prince formally named Charming sitting on a white horse. It’s astounding how much the pop culture’s way of using the term has embedded itself in my brain, but thankfully there are courses like this to uncover the true academic meaning beneath the Mickey Mouse definition I’ve been exposed to”.   – Ashley Rhodes

I especially connected with Jenna Crosson’s guilty confession of having read Fifty Shades of Grey; throughout my literary experiences, my mind seems to have been trained to think of love and, sadly, even sex when the term romance or romanticism is used. I think Ashley Rhodes hit the nail on the head when she stated that “it’s astounding how much the pop culture’s way of using the term has embedded itself in [her] brain”. Unfortunately, pop culture has minimalized the definition of romance and taken all true literary elements out of it. Furthermore, Britini Pond summarized this idea in saying that truthfully, romanticism is more than what pop culture has turned it into.

I believe I was drawn to these passages because they related to the same mindset I had about romanticism. By reading through their essays, I discovered that their knowledge evolved in a similar pattern as mine did. For example, Jenna Crosson realized that a child’s innocence had a romantic element to it and was presented as such in Poe’s Romance or that nature was indeed a romantic symbol and included in various texts.

I found Ashley Rhodes essay to be very insightful and I was curious to read the rest of it (since it was only an excerpt). I would have loved to see what else she had to say about beauty and terror co-existing. Did she think is contributed to some element of romanticism? I found her essay interesting and I liked her use of the text and her explanation, but again, would have loved to read what else she had to say.

This was probably my favorite part of the assignment. Looking at other students’ opinions helps me to better understand my thoughts and it helps me to see things in a different perspective. My seeing that other people entered this class with my same thoughts made me feel less guilty (per say) about having such a narrow understanding of the term “Romanticism”.