|
(2016
midterm assignment) Sample Student Midterm Answers 2016 #2b: Short Essay (Favorite Term) |
LITR 4328 |
 |
Jackie Rodriguez
When Soul Meets Body (Correspondence)
My favorite thing that I have been exposed to
this semester is correspondence. I believe the definition of this term to be a
way to describe the way a person feels on the inside by using what people can
see in the outside around them. I formed this definition with help from the
definition on our web page which I really liked “relation between inner and
outer world, soul and nature, self and cosmos” the idea that the soul and nature
are able to reflect one another is something that I absolutely adore. I feel
like this definition/idea encompasses everything that makes me love Romanticism
and Transcendentalism. This term is so important to me because as an avid reader
I love when I can see things that I have learned in the books that I read for
pleasure. I feel like this term is the ultimate mood setting device. I feel as
though we have all seen this in our novels and poems many times but if you are
like me, you were unaware that it had an official name.
The term was really quite confusing to me until
I saw it used in The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow Irving uses it in the most basic form, “The hour was as dismal as
himself” and from that moment it was apparent in subtler forms. For instance, I
feel that the fact that he used to entertain the women with stories of the
supernatural is in a way an invitation for the supernatural things to happen to
him. In other words, while this is a very far off application I still think it
shows that I am able to grasp the term now, the fact that he has supernatural on
his mind that puts supernatural into story perhaps he is seeing shadows or
hearing noises but that just the light or the wind? I feel like this application
enriches my definition of correspondence because it really just offers it to you
at the most basic form
The term itself however, is not so basic;
something I like about correspondence is that it can also be the person doing
the describing that is projecting their inner feeling. This is to say that if
you are feeling negatively no matter how the outside really looks you will see
it as bleak like you feel inside. Which is what Ichabod is doing in the previous
paragraph. I feel like you can see correspondence in this manner in
Last of the Mohicans. In the 5th
chapter Heyward begins to become paranoid, his fear is causing him to see things
and misinterpret noises “His awakened imagination, deluded by the deceptive
light, converted each waving bush, or the fragment of some fallen tree, into
human forms, and twenty times he fancied he could distinguish the horrid visages
of his lurking foes, peering from their hiding places”. This is a really good
example of how we sometimes project the way that we feel inside into the world
outside of us. This really only enriches my definition as it gives it another
dimension but it does not warp it in any way. The definition was that the soul
and nature match and I think this is just a different starting point to lead to
the same outcome.
I think I am still struggling to understand if
this term is married to the Romantic Era or if It was used before then. I feel a
bit offended that in my studies I had not discovered this term before this point
in my academic career. It causes me to wonder what the importance of this term
truly is. I find that it gives a name to something we are all familiar with and
it has the potential to accomplish very abstract things, which I like. I feel
like my understanding evolved from the simple idea that mood and setting were
simply put forth and described to the reader in the most direct way. This opens
a new door to the ways in which mood can be analyzed as well as a more poetic
way to talk about human emotion in pros. I feel like I encountered this in
Romantic poetry in past studies but did not know what it was so, I am interested
in the idea that I have something new to look for when I am analyzing poetry. I
also feel like this term helped me understand the idea of the sublime. Since the
sublime Is a mixture of pleasure bleeding over to pain its only logical to think
that these feelings of pleasure and pain might help inform correspondence in the
text as well. This is a theory I look forward to testing during the rest of this
course.
