American Literature: Romanticism Final Exam Assignment

Email students:

• Total time writing: 3-4+ hours—Divide? e.g., 2 hours one day, 2 hours the next?

• write & submit answers in any order, but indicate choices

• all 1 file please—exceptions OK

• If your exam will be late, communicate! (professional courtesy)

Special Allowances:

• sections’ contents may overlap / repeat; acknowledge, cross-reference, economize

• Welcome to refer to texts or courses before or contemporary with this course, and to possible developments of your interests beyond our seminar.

Special Requirements:

• Title each essay—the better the title, the better the writing. (No # for "Mid-Length Essay," but provide a title.)

• Refer at least once (in the entire exam) to a previous final exam answer or other submissions to our class’s midterm samples (Model Assignments)

• Your mid-length essay must refer to your midterm essay and your research project.

Mid-length essay (4-6 paragraphs)

Review & prioritize your learning in American Romanticism.

If someone comparably educated asked you what you learned or gained from our course (and you weren’t inclined to just gripe), how would you answer?

Possible emphases:

• 2-3 uses for course and / or texts; questions you had about literature that have been answered or came into focus.

• Refer to your midterm and research project as developments in your semester of learning.

• Personal / professional applications; applications to career or general learning

• Usefulness of literary-historical studies in period or style? What clicked and why? What challenges to overcome, to what point or advantage? But also what limits to subject matter or course emphases and objectives?

• Terms, concepts, or texts that were new and helpful, or reinforced or extended previous learning?

• What do your interests in the course reveal about your profile as a Literature or Humanities major, and how do these interests connect to academic or professional interests beyond this course?

• Highlights of semester. Connections to other courses. How are you maturing as a reader and writer?

Not looking for cheerleading but an intelligent measurement-evaluation of what you learned and can imagine doing with it. If you have criticisms or suggestions, make them work for you and me. You'll be judged not for flattery or disapproval but for your thinking and writing about our subject, texts, and classroom related to your sense of needs for literary criticism and teaching in our society.

Long Essay Questions

Write Two Essays in response to Two of the Questions below

(6-9 paragraph answers)

1.  Why do “desire and loss” re-appear so frequently in American Romantic texts, both as driving forces in the “romance” narrative and as indexes for Romantic values?

Describe the significance of this pattern for the romance narrative and its general significance in Romanticism, citing works by three or four writers.

*Consider Columbus, Smith, Bradstreet, Rowlandson, Edwards, Poe, Hawthorne, Douglass, Jacobs, Stowe, Whitman, Hurston, Fitzgerald, or others.

Essential website: Desire and Loss.

2. How has American Romanticism continued or changed in post-Romantic American literature?—that is, literature after the Civil War and American Renaissance of the pre-Civil War generation of the1820s-1860s? Discuss Romanticism with Realism (+- Local Color) and Modernism.

Refer to at least three writers from our last four class meetings and to a contemporary poem from the presentations.

Relevant writers from our last four classes: James, Jewett, Chesnutt, Faulkner, Porter, Wolfe, McKay, Hurston, Hughes, Cullen, and Fitzgerald.

3. Historically, Romanticism began in Europe and is mostly associated with European literary traditions and cultural values. American writers typically associated with this literary movement (Cooper, Poe, Emerson, Fitzgerald) are of European descent. In America and esp. the USA, though, Romanticism must adapt to a multi-racial and multicultural nation involving a dominant culture and distinct minority cultures. In current pedagogy, all writer in a seminar like ours write in English, a European language. In addition to mastering various versions of this language, writers from non-European races must consider dominant-culture themes and genres as options for their compositions. For instance, Romanticism.

            Write an essay involving three writers representing at least two of the three major early American races (or ethnicities):  European American (required), African American (required), and either Native American Indian or Mexican American (optional). (Our study of American Indian literature being limited, you may refer to European American texts about American Indians.

            Consider how race or ethnicity complicates, absorbs, or exemplifies the formulas of Romanticism. Reflect how such investigations transform our conception of Romanticism. Is it a style based on universal truths, or a set of historical and cultural conventions, or a shifting set of features that reflect the desire and perspective of the writer or audience? How does the usefulness of the term “Romanticism” change?

• For a European-American writer, choose a writer who represents race more or less directly, like Stowe or Faulkner, but if it suits your purposes, you might choose a writer who treats the issue less directly or even apparently ignores it (e.g., Irving, Porter, or Fitzgerald).

• For African American writers, choose among Douglass, Jacobs, McKay, Hurston, Chesnutt, Cullen, Hughes, Smith.

• If these lists leave out someone from our reading, use your judgment to add appropriate names as necessary.

• You may discuss more than three writers, but many more might dilute productive cross-racial tension you might achieve by comparing fewer writers from different racial contexts.

• What advantages or risks to studying multicultural authors in a mainstream or classic literature course?

4. Citing at least three authors, review and evaluate some varieties of the Gothic encountered this semester. Why does the Gothic recur so frequently in American literature or beyond? Why is it so adaptable to different environments, and what different purposes may it serve? What are some possible theological, intellectual, and cultural sources, limitations, and biases?

Default organization:

• Identify or define the Gothic as a literary genre or mode.
• Review in detail the backgrounds and sub-categories of the Gothic encountered across the semester with examples from selected authors and texts.
• Evaluate the appeal and limits of the Gothic.

Possible authors: Rowlandson, Edwards, Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Douglass, Jacobs, Chesnutt, McKay, Hughes, Cullen, Plath, Dickinson, others.

Not required but noted: The African American authors Douglass, Jacobs, McKay, Hughes, and Cullen are not gothic writers but are included among options because of their experiments inverting the gothic color code whereby white or light equals purity or virtue, and black or darkness equals decay or sin.

5. Review and defend Romantic Poetry as an essential medium for American Romanticism, explicating 2-3 poems (one of which may be outside our course readings).

• Review overall appearance of poetry in course and suggest improvements.* Refer to presentations, what worked or didn’t regardless of poem content.

• Compare and contrast the poems you select, building either a consistent pattern of Romanticism or an appreciation of the variety the term tolerates.

• Question the usefulness of Romanticism in helping you read the poem. Does identifying elements, styles, or themes as “Romantic” help or hinder appreciation of the poem? For instance, Romanticism may be so integral to American culture that it may feel more powerful and universal, more a part of nature, if it doesn’t have a name. Knowing Romantic conventions may be distancing or abstracting—it may make history out of what we thought was natural—but such awareness may be powerful in its own right.

• Take account also of Romanticism’s limits when dealing with a poem of a complex or high quality or from another stylistic period.

[*Among improvements planned: instructor will offer more instruction on poetry, possibly with half-classes devoted to Dickinson, Whitman, Poe, and/or Harlem Renaissance poets.]

6. The "romance narrative" is among the most persistent yet elusive and challenging features of any course in Romanticism. Define the concept, citing the term's complications and rewards for various audiences. Describe its appearances in at least three of our texts, citing its potential variations for different writers and identities. For a theoretical angle, identify the potential value of studying narrative along with its conceptual challenges.

Essential website: romance, narrative.

(This is a new question for 2015, so no model answers.)

7. Write an essay concerning some persistent or occasional issue, problem, or theme significant to the course but overlooked by the previous questions. Refer to course objectives or introduce and defend new objectives. Your choice for this question may overlap with other questions above. If your topic appears to range beyond the course's evident subject matter, rationalize and defend your topic's significance to our seminar. Relate your topic to the larger subject of American Romanticism--what relevant insights does your discussion reveal or suggest? Refer to at least three writers and their texts.

Possible items for #5: Byronic hero; transcendence and/or Transcendentalism, the tragic mulatto, period studies.

Previous example from Model Assignments 2003: "The Mysterious Female: Elusiveness as a Means of Increasing and Prolonging Male Desire in American Romanticism"

One more question-option: If you wish to combine two questions above into one for a single essay, you may--just explain in your essay's introduction. But you still must write two essays based on questions 1-7.