Sample Student Research Project 2018: Journal
LITR
4328 American Renaissance / Model Assignments
Sample Student Research Project 2018:
Journal
Annie Tran
Finding My Way Through the Sublime
Proposal
So far, the most intriguing concept to me has to be "the Sublime" I wanted to
take an analytical approach to write about the sublime, but this whole midterm
writing process felt more like a mini-research journal chronicling my lacking to
less lacking. Even though I have spent a good amount of time writing about the
sublime in this midterm essay, I feel as though I have much more to explore and
understand.
I will lean more towards option 2 for my research project; however, I gladly
take any advice you could give me on which approach to take. I was interested in
option 3, but I have not yet conferred with you on the possibility of expanding
my Immigrant Literature Research Report as a proposal for the conference.
Email follow-up
I was wondering if I could explore some of the works that you included on the
SUBLIME page of your course site (and other outside sources), and incorporate
what I learned from those into my journal.
Instructor response
In response to your follow-up question, yes, course websites are fair
sources--thanks for asking, as I'll make this point in class today. Yes also to
Option 2 Journal. You can switch to the conference option as conditions
encourage, but even if you stay with the journal, we could still re-develop it
as a conference presentation. Plenty of time remains, and the process isn't very
complicated.
As far as staying with your midterm subject, that's normal enough, and the
Sublime just keeps happening. I'm sometimes surprised by what students make of
it, but such surprises are true enough to a force that exceeds our
comprehension. A journal can give you a good grounding in the historical theory
and expression of the Sublime, though, so you're not just making it up but
navigating by precedent. Of course, you can then proceed to later, even recent
expressions or theory. As usual, welcome to check in as you make progress.
Entry #1: Why do
I keep being drawn back to the Sublime
As I have expressed in one of my Midterm essays, my first encounter with “the
Sublime” is in this course. I chose to write about it, then, because I wanted a
better understanding of the term. Though I wrote two essays exploring the
Sublime through my analysis as well as looking at previous students' essays, I
am not yet comfortable about my familiarity with the Sublime. What better way to
gain a better understanding than to do an in-depth research project on the
subject?
Initially, I was unsure about where to start my research. There was no mention
of any known writers of the Sublime, like those from the other genres that we
have discussed in class. For instance, gothic literature and Poe go
hand-in-hand; I knew that much coming into this course. Also, there is a long
list of authors from the Transcendentalism movement, including Emerson, Thoreau,
and Whitman. Then, there are the writers of the Antebellum Women’s Movement,
such as Margaret Fuller, Sojourner Truth, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who were
known to challenge and revolutionize the transcendental style developed by
Emerson.
However, class discussions about the Sublime tend to focus on its relation to
the gothic, and the gothic sometimes demanded more of the attention. More
emphasis was placed on identifying the authors’ use of the Sublime in their
works; we have the gothic writers, transcendental writers, and the realist
writers, but there are no “sublime writers.” This is not to say that I found
anything wrong with our treatment of the Sublime in class. It is for this reason
that sparked my curiosity and subsequent desire to do my research on the
Sublime.
Journal Entry
#2: Sublime writers, do you exist?
First, I wanted to find out if there were any sublime writers. I began with the
general by using Google to search for “sublime writers.” The results did not
include anything sublime writers; the only literary-related results were about
early texts on the sublime, which I will talk about later. Other than that, the
results were mostly about sublime writing in technical or computer coding. I
proceeded to perform a search for “gothic writers” and a search for
“transcendental writers” to confirm a hunch. As expected, those results included
an extensive list of writers and their pictures from each genre.
Journal Entry
#3: A closer look at the course site: "The Sublime."
Next, I looked at the information provided by the course site under
Terms/Themes: “The Sublime.” Previously, I used this page as a reference in my
Midterm essays, and I became familiar with the connection between the Sublime in
discussions of aesthetics or beauty. While exploring the page for this research,
I discovered that “the Sublime has a long philosophical lineage that reaches its
peak during the early Romantic era in Western Europe and the New World,
including the early USA” (“The Sublime”). I noted the following main
contributors to the conception and development of the Sublime: Longinus’ On
the Sublime (date unknown) and Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry
into the Origin of Our Ideas of The Sublime and Beautiful (1757; rev. 1759).
More importantly to American Renaissance, Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the
State of Virginia (1784-85) brought the Sublime to America, which would then
culminate in the Romantic period in American Literature.
Works Cited
http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/terms/S/sublime.htm
Journal Entry
#4: Getting lost in a sea of literary criticism
I knew I would end up using the UHCL OneSearch Database to do most of my
research because I was looking for scholarly and peer-reviewed secondary
sources.
As I delved further
into my research, the results confirmed that I would not find anything about
sublime writers. Of course, at this point, I had given up on that route. I went
where the research took me, which was to thousands of articles and books that
examine and challenge the historical and philosophical context of the Sublime. I
was excited but also overwhelmed at the sea of information that I had to rummage
through to find useful material; almost all were relevant. Not surprisingly,
most of the sources about the Sublime are literary criticisms of Longinus and
Burke’s works, cited in the course site. I also discovered other philosophers
who studied the Sublime, including Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
and others.
In addition, I was shocked at the many interpretations of the Sublime: the
Apocalyptic Sublime (represented in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”),
Aesthetic Sublime, Egotistical Sublime (coined by Keats and used by Dickinson),
International and Political Sublime, Geographical Sublime, Climatological
Sublime, Physiological Sublime (Burke’s early concept), Romantic or Literary
Sublime (typical of transcendental and romantic writers in American Renaissance;
most of what we discussed in class), Sarcastic Sublime (Poe’s parody of Romantic
sensibility), Pastoral Sublime, and Ecological Sublime and more. The Romantic,
Pastoral, and Ecological Sublime of European standards have been specially
adapted to American values and landscape in American literature. I will have to
reread Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Go, Down Moses through the
lens of this research, so I could look for the Pastoral and Ecological sublime
that I missed out on the first time I read them.
Works Cited
Brickey, Russell. “The Trouble
With Fairyland: Two Versions of Poe's Sarcastic Sublime.” The Edgar Allan Poe
Review, vol. 13, no. 1, 2012, pp. 18–40. JSTOR, JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/41507902.
Caron, James E.
“Emerson’s Sublime Pastoralism, Parody, and Second Sight in Faulkner’s as I Lay
Dying.” Faulkner Journal, vol. 29, no. 1, Spring 2015, pp. 71–99. EBSCOhost,
libproxy.uhcl.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=121942930&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Cook, Jonathan A.
“Poe and the Apocalyptic Sublime: ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’” Papers
on Language & Literature, vol. 48, no. 1, Winter 2012, pp. 3–44. EBSCOhost,
libproxy.uhcl.edu/login?url=https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=lfh&AN=72392199&site=ehost-live&scope=site.
Cull, Ryan.
"Interrogating the ‘egotistical sublime’: Keats and Dickinson Near the Dawn of
Lyricization?" The Emily Dickinson Journal, vol. 22 no. 1, 2013, pp.
55-73. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/edj.2013.0007.
Hitt, Christopher.
“Toward an Ecological Sublime.” New Literary History, vol. 30, no. 3,
1999, pp. 603–623.,
www.jstor.org/stable/20057557.
Simpson, David.
“Commentary: Updating the Sublime.” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 26, no.
2, 1987, pp. 245–258. JSTOR, JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/25600650.
Journal Entry
#5: What I have gathered so far from the research
My understanding of the Sublime up to this point is that it is closely related
to art, beauty, and expression. I have developed my definition: the Sublime
embodies the experience that cannot be described with any words. It expresses
the inexpressible in art, music, and nature. Also, the research provided me with
the history of the Sublime. Early accounts of the Sublime, such as Longinus’
conception of sublimity, are characterized by rhetoric language. Essentially,
the excellence of expression can inspire awe or reverence.
On the other hand, the Sublime can be used as a persuasive device. Now, I have
learned to be careful about lumping beauty in with the Sublime. Though the
sublime has been used interchangeably with the beautiful in early accounts,
research shows that there is now a separation between the two terms. This shift
began with the 18th-century writings of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, third earl of
Shaftesbury, and John Dennis that presented the idea that the Sublime is
distinct from beauty. Later works of Joseph Addison, Mark Akenside, and Edward
Young that influenced Burke's survey of the Sublime as separate from the
beautiful.
Works Cited
Nicolson, Marjorie
Hope. Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. Ithaca, 1959.
Journal Entry
#6: What’s with Longinus and Burke?
Review:
Unfortunately, I could not afford the pleasure of reading Longinus or Burke’s
books on the Sublime during the semester. I figured that the best way to get
better acquainted with Longinus and Burke’s theories of the Sublime is to review
literary criticism of their works. An essay by Jennifer Jones addresses issues
within the canonical narratives of the sublime that have dismissed Longinus’
Peri Hypsous or On the Sublime as the history and criticism of the
sublime theory, and they treat Burke’s Enquiry as the model for the
sublime theory. Jones states, “The traditional narrative of the sublime
dismisses Longinus in an effort to authorize a progressivist discourse that
privileges a certain version of Romantic originality associated with Burke’s
affect and Kant’s ethics of personhood” (176). However, she does not ignore
Burke's originality as a significant influence on the development of the sublime
theory despite its opposition to Longinus' supposed archaic roots. She notes the
controversy over the Longinus’ identity and authorship, which was successful in
the de-authorization of On the Sublime in 1808. Though, Jones also
reveals that the controversy was primarily due to the negative reception of the
text during the Romantic era that pushed to reject this text.
Furthermore, the controversy grows deeper as many Romantic-era writers
challenged the legitimacy behind the translation of the Greek term, hypsous,
into the French/English word, sublime. Jones states, “If hypsous
could be decoupled from the (Burkean) sublime by decoupling it from the term
sublime itself, then the drive to evict Longinus from the canon on sublimity
would have its perfect alibi” (Jones 178). Wordsworth calls it bad translation
and poor scholarship. This is an ironic treatment of Longinus’ On the Sublime
because the text is all about distinction and excellence in expression.
Finally, Jones concludes that less emphasis should be
placed on the progressive model that ignores Longinus’ contribution and elevates
Burke. Instead, in considering the historical context of the Romantic sublime,
we should go beyond Burke and back again.
Jones essay helped me to identify the modern canon of the sublime that pervades
the Romantic studies, shaped by Burke to Kant to Wordsworth. In class, we
discussed the Sublime by recognizing the “beauty mixed or edged with terror,
danger, threat—usually on a grand or elevated scale,” which I learned came from
Burke’s theories. We also looked for “a powerful mixture of pleasure and pain—
attraction and repulsion,” which I learned came from Kant. After reviewing all
the research, especially the information in Jones essay, I can identify Burke
and Kant’s influence on the Sublime theory that is infused with art, literature,
and music during the Romantic era. Jones also presented the controversy
surrounding Longinus’ On the Sublime and its rejection by Romantic era's
writers as a way to understand the intellectual and aesthetic history that
characterizes the period, as well as the development of the sublime theories.
Using the Burkean sublime to challenge Longinian sublime revives the latter to
its rightful place as the basic premise of Romantic aesthetics alongside the
former.
Work Cited
Jones, Jennifer.J. “Beyond Burke’s Precedent and Back
Again: Longinus and the Romantic Sublime.” Neophilologus: An International
Journal of Modern and Medieval Language and Literature, vol. 99, 2015, pp.
175-189. Springer Link, doi.org/10.1007/s11061-014-9406-4.
Journal Entry
#7: Jefferson had a part in this, too
Review:
I continue on to
find some sources relating more to American Renaissance, which makes sense
because I am taking this course. The course site included specific excerpts from
Thomas Jefferson's book, Notes on Virginia, so that was a good place to
start. After digging through several sources, I found Andrew M. Holowchak’s
essay, “Philosophical Vignettes in Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia” to be
useful. Holowchak’s primary purpose is to examine the structure of the book,
Jefferson’s philosophical vignettes about the aesthetic, nature, people and
farming; however, he also touches on Jefferson’s “use of the prominent
aesthetic concepts of ‘the beautiful’ and ‘the sublime,’ characteristic of
eighteenth-century ethical thought of his day” (141). Initially, Jefferson did
not set out to write a book; it was merely a response to the secretary of the
French legation, François Barbé-Marbois, who inquired about the American states.
Holowchak refers to the same passages of Notes on Virginia that are on
the “The Sublime” page of the course site, in which Jefferson’s description of
nature “is a sort of aesthetic appreciation, laced with dread or horror” (141).
In Jefferson’s book, he calls the Natural Bridge the “most sublime of Nature’s
works.” Holowchak notes that Jefferson’s aesthetic descriptions of nature are
similar to Immanuel’s Kant’s, who characterizes the sublime as a mix of
enjoyment with horror. Most importantly, Holowchak captures the essence of how
Jefferson elevated the American landscape and subsequently, American literature
next to that of Europe in the following passage:
In a manner of
speaking, seeing the beautiful behind the sublime in the phenomena of nature
shows that America’s nature is capable of accommodating civilization and
progressive living at least as well as that of Europe. America ’s roughness is
capable of taming…Thus, one could put a Cartesian grid on it to gain some
measure of understanding of its incomprehensible enormity. Likewise,
Jefferson thought that the American wilderness qua sublime was vast and
uncultivated, but one too could put a fixed grid on it, qua beautiful, to
plot out its vastness and tame its wildness. (142)
I like to think
that Jefferson’s book could have been the driving engine for American authors
from the Enlightenment period through the Romantic period and into the “great”
Romantic period in American Literature, where “American authors first appear on
world stage as equals or near-equals to European writers, [and] many authors
experiment in style and develop themes important to American identity and
expression, adapting European styles and standards to American subjects”
(“American Renaissance”).
Works Cited
http://coursesite.uhcl.edu/HSH/Whitec/terms/A/AmRenConcept.htm
Holowchak, M.
Andrew. "Philosophical Vignettes in Jefferson's Notes on Virginia.”
Philosophy and Literature, vol. 37 no. 1, 2013, pp. 136-163. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/phl.2013.0010.
Journal Entry #8: What have I
learned? Where might I explore next?
This has been the most unconventional approach to writing a research-style paper
that I have ever experienced. I was very glad that we had model assignments to
refer to for what kind of structure and content that you consider to be “model”
material. It has been challenging, but I have also had a lot of fun. The primary
challenge was that because it is not structured as a formal, traditional essay,
I struggled (wondered) if I was writing too informal. I guess all the years of
adhering to conventional rules, rules, rules have gotten me into a routine. The
research project grew on me, of course, and I appreciated the freedom to explore
on my terms. The information we learned in class was sufficient enough in that I
can still recognize the Sublime in our class readings; however, the research
informed me about the historical and cultural context. In a sense, the research
provided me a bigger picture behind why and how writers chose to use, or
interpret, the Sublime in their works over the centuries.
For instance, an initial internet or library search on the topic of sublime
would spit out a lot of information about Edmund Burke. If I had stopped there,
I would have missed out on Longinus’s contribution to the historical framework
on the Sublime. It was also interesting to learn about the relationship between
Burke and Longinus even though they lived centuries apart. Burke and other
Romantic-era writers were aggressive about discrediting Longinus’ work, On
the Sublime. They were successful in doing so, but in that, they created a
conversation about Longinus that piqued the interest of later scholars. The
critics say Longinus’ book was merely a set of rules on how to produce
excellence in writing, but they do not believe that excellence is translated
into sublimity. But is it not the embodiment of—I paraphrase Longinus’ five
sources of elevated language—the power of forming great ideas, the power to
inspire passion, the ability to apply sentiment and language, the use of
significant and elegant words and elaborate language, and finally to wrap all
that up into a skillful composition that can provoke the grand emotion? That
sounds a lot like the Sublime to me. It is safe to say that the controversy only
proved how crucial On the Sublime is to the conception of the Sublime
that exists today.
Several of the literary criticism touched on the troubling racial, cultural, and
contemporary aspects within the study of the Sublime. For instance, Simpson
states in his essay that “the sublime has not always been with us; but it has
certainly been more with us, white, male, western, members of so-called
‘developed’ countries…Our mythology of individuality is, for example, quite
foreign to the Native American cultures that try to survive within and between
us” (255). Similarly, Hitt addresses literary criticisms that evaluated “the
aesthetic of the sublime primarily as an expression of asymmetrical power
relationships: between human and nature, self and other, reader and text, male
and female, conqueror and oppressed” (603). He suggests that we move towards the
conception of an Ecological Sublime that moves away from the sublime of
“‘canonical’ writers (all of course white, male, Euro-American, and of a
particular economic class)—who have had, for better or worse, the strongest
impact on hegemonic culture” (610). If I were to continue my research, I would
like to explore the context behind the racial implications of the Sublime
theories.
Works Cited
Hitt, Christopher.
“Toward an Ecological Sublime.” New Literary History, vol. 30, no. 3,
1999, pp. 603–623.,
www.jstor.org/stable/20057557.
Simpson, David.
“Commentary: Updating the Sublime.” Studies in Romanticism, vol. 26, no.
2, 1987, pp. 245–258. JSTOR, JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/25600650.
"Great Star" flag of pre-Civil War USA