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(2016
midterm assignment) Sample Student Midterm Answers 2016 #3: Web Highlights |
LITR 4328 |
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Eric Howell
Through Shared Eyes: Romanticism Revealed
Through reviewing and analyzing the works of several previous students, I
was able to learn about the American Renaissance through the eyes of my peers.
By selecting Joshua Van Horn’s American
Renaissance: The Age of Emotion, Kat Henderson’s
Dark and Light:
Two Faces of the Sublime, and Amanda
Duarte’s Connecting With Nature, I
have gained a firmer grasp and understanding on the ever-elusive style of the
American Romantic era.
In American Renaissance: The Age
of Emotion, Van Horn beautifully depicted the progression and transition of
American literature from the Enlightenment era to the Romantic era. Van Horn
explains, “The
enlightenment, an age that promoted reason over emotion, unintentionally
produced a worldview that involved little to no romance. The American
renaissance writers sought to maintain the understanding gained by the
enlightenment while also promoting romantic sensibilities.” In my own
experience, I have noticed that while participating in a particular class, such
as American Renaissance, it is easy for me to forget the “bigger picture” while
focusing on the current material. Just last semester I had taken Early American
Literature, a period preceding the Romantic era, and in all honesty, I have
rarely thought about what brought on the writings of romantic authors. Van Horn
elaborates on the link between the two historical and literary periods by
expressing “All of these sentiments express an earnestness to unite what was
learned during the enlightenment with an emotional and spiritual perspective of
past generations.” He notes the differences between the spirituality of
Transcendentalism, citing Emerson’s take on Higher Law and comparing them to the
previous outlooks of the Enlightenment era. By doing this, Van Horn boils down
the complexities of Emerson and Transcendentalism and contrasting these
naturalistic and individualistic type views the prior perspective concerning God
and spirituality, shedding light on the progression of thinking that had taken
place amongst Americans of the time.
Kat Henderson’s Dark and Light:
Two Faces of the Sublime helped further my comprehension of the Romantic
concept of the sublime. Henderson eloquently, yet simplistically, states “When
something is sublime it is more than just exceptionally beautiful. It is
beautiful to the point that it becomes scary or terrifying. It reaches the
profound and begins to strike fear into the heart. Romantic authors use sublime
experiences in many forms.” The sublime is a key characteristic within Romantic
writing, and authors used this literary device to
evoke “amazement and dread.” More importantly, Henderson explains how the
sublime is used as a mechanism to marry together contrasting ideas and concepts.
By using the example of Transcendentalism and Gothicism, she offers the reader a
chance to see just how significant the sublime can be. Henderson explains “Transcendentalism
deals with transcending from a state of lower existence to one of more meaning
and depth while the Gothic deals with the dark, eerie, and more horrifying
aspects of life. Sublimity builds a bridge between these two by showing how
beauty and the magnificent can become a source of dread.” I never interpreted
sublimity as a link used to intertwine such varying themes of American
Renaissance literature; however, from Henderson’s perspective, I was able to
pick up on such an important aspect of American Romanticism.
Another important aspect of the American Renaissance is the influence of
nature, and Duarte offers an interpretation, which reveals the implication of
nature in Romantic writing, and how the wilderness provides an immense power to
relating the relationship between man and Higher Law. Duarte capitalizes on
Emerson’s Nature to emphasize the
role nature plays during the American Renaissance period, stating, “I chose
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature” because in such a short essay, Emerson is able to
speak to a wide audience. When he wrote the essay, the industrial revolution was
taking place so the settlers were experiencing the loss of closeness to nature
and more fiercely gained a never-ending desire to be close to it once more. By
providing the historical happenings of the time, she is able to capture the
reader’s attention and focus it on the “why” of nature in Romantic writing. The
desire of man to return to nature is an expression, which shows the desire for a
simpler, more pure time. This desire can be expounded upon by correlating the
characteristics of nature to that of a Higher Being, which prevalent through the
writings of Emerson and other Romantic era writers. Duarte aids in the
comprehension of the Romantic author and their affinity for nature in a manner
that portrays man’s ever-growing distance from purity and divinity, a subtlety
not easily acknowledge, in my own personal experience, without prior background
knowledge of the time period of the American Renaissance.
Although the Romantic era owns a vast amount of various characteristics
and elements, these three web selections make it easier to digest and connect
some of the more vibrant themes in American Renaissance literature. By providing
historical analysis and how certain aspects of Romantic writing link to one
another to build upon affect, I can better understand the broad and complex
scope of Romanticism. The Romantic era
of American literature is broad, deep, and encompassing, and by interpreting the
works of others, I feel that I have gained a more broad, richer access to
perspectives that I may had not found through my own intuition.
