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(2015
midterm assignment) Sample Student Midterm Answers 2015 #3: Web Highlights |
LITR 4328 |
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Mariah Glidden
Helpful Points of View
I liked Velma Labode’s idea of “romance in
motion” in her essay “The American Renaissance: Time in Motion”. I hadn’t really
ever thought of romance as being in motion, but it truly is. In her description
of the relationship between a child and his objects being romanticized by time
she really helps one grasp how romance is all about time. In the romantic
setting of nature time seems to pass slowly, in the literary romantic quest
there is often a time limit, and in the romantic genre there is often nostalgia
for a time passed. Time can be fast or slow just like a romance within it. On
the other hand, time can go on forever just as romance can, whether it is the
love between two people or the beauty of nature.
I liked the short essay Whitman on Sublimity by
Matt Chavez quite well until the last paragraph. The author has a line in there
that I find rather difficult to understand. The line reads “Romanticism is about
the individual’s experience, and Whitman is turned out unaccountably by his
disdain for a nature which is no reflection of him, but a thing set apart.” I
think the author is trying to say that Whitman is unexplainably pushed away from
a nature that isn’t his own, but Whitman turning away from it is not
unaccountable. The author gives the explanation for Whitman’s disdain in the
beginning of the sentence by saying that “Romanticism is about the individuals
experience,” so it would make sense that Whitman is put off by something which
isn’t his individually.
My favorite short
essay by far was Andy Feith’s “Taking the Web Review on its Own Terms”. I had
more than a few favorite sentences, the first of the being “Nature, given enough
time, destroys everything we humans build up.” This is a very powerful
statement. As human we like to think of ourselves and the things we make as
indestructible. We feel the need to leave our mark on the world around us, a
very romantic idea. In reality though, nature will eventually take back what is
hers and all thoughts of us humans will have been forgotten. It shows how the
relationship between Romanticism and Realism can come full circle. He also
states the he wonders if “the gothic and the sublime have somewhat lost their
power today, when “nature” in the United States has largely been subdued and
relegated to a few small safe spaces”. After thinking about this I have to
wonder the same. In one way the disappearance of vast open spaces that our
ancestors often stared at in amazement and admiration could have lead to a
decrease in respect for nature. In another way there is the scarcity of the
sights that cause such feelings of sublimity that one might be hit with the
feelings doubly whenever they do have the chance to witness such beauty.
Each one of these essays has shown me a
different point of view than I would have normally taken. Being able to comb
through what other people think about one general subject has helped me to
develop my own opinions and reinforced ones that I felt already, more so than I
would have if I had just read the assigned texts and listen to lectures.
