 |
LITR 5431 Seminar in American Literature:
Romanticism lecture notes |
 |
 |
Discussion Questions for reading assignments:
Writing only 6-7 years after
Sleepy
Hollow &
Rip Van Winkle, how is
Mohicans
more
Romantic?
Literature
as escape or engagement?
How does Mohicans use the gothic (esp. its color code) to
explore American race relations and taboos?
How does Romance explore the unknown as Realism may not?
-
Besides cartoons and movies, how and why does everyone know the stories of Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow, even if never read before?
-
Sleepy Hollow 6, 24,
-
Rip Van Winkle 30, 31
Irving
humor
RVW 7-8, 12 (Mrs. VW), 21-2 (drunkenness)
sublime
RVW 17
captivity narrative RVW 48
Henry Hudson 55
Romance
RVW [13] Poor Rip was at last reduced almost to despair; and his only alternative, to escape from the labor of the farm and clamor of his wife, was to take gun in hand and stroll away into the woods.
Sleepy Hollow 8 Rip comical
14 female circle, country damsels
20 Katrina
21a soft and fo heart
26 romance quest, knight-errant + lady of his heart
31 how women's hearts are wooed and won
32 knights-errant of yore
35 in the true spirit of romantic story
47 border chivalry
54 something must have gone wrong
RVW 15 classic ghost story moment
RVW 30, 31 satire
Irving
humor
RVW 7-8, 12 (Mrs. VW), 21-2 (drunkenness)
sublime
RVW 17
captivity narrative RVW 48
Henry Hudson 55
Rip Van Winkle
1 change
1 sublime
3 hen-pecked husband
4 stories of ghosts, witches, and Indians
5 aversion to all kinds of profitable labor
6 comic farm
10-11 stories, great tree
13 his only alternative, to escape from the labor of the farm and clamor of his wife, was to take gun in hand and stroll away into the woods
15 ghost story
16 strange figure slowly toiling up the rocks
17 sublime
19 spirits in nature
21 other ghost story option
25 The rocks presented a high impenetrable wall over which the torrent came tumbling in a sheet of feathery foam, and fell into a broad deep basin, black from the shadows of the surrounding forest. [<brief touches of sublime & gothic<]
26 dress, too, was of a different fashion
27 The very village was altered; it was larger and more populous. There were rows of houses which he had never seen before, and those which had been his familiar haunts had disappeared. Strange names were over the doors—strange faces at the windows—everything was strange.
28 the house gone to decay [gothic]
30 the village inn—but it too was gone
31 rights of citizens*—elections—members of congress—liberty*—Bunker’s Hill*—heroes of seventy-six*
32 a loyal subject of the king, God bless him!”
36
There
was a wooden tombstone in the church-yard that used to tell all about him, but
that’s rotten and gone too.”
41 sad changes in his home and friends, and finding himself thus alone in the world. Every answer puzzled him too, by treating of such enormous lapses of time [irony: not that much time has passed for all these changes],
43 He doubted his own identity, and whether he was himself or another man.
[44] “God knows,” exclaimed he, at his wit’s end; “I’m not myself—I’m somebody else
Legend
1 One of the quietest places in the world
4 vicinity of a church
6 fixed x torrent of immigration and improvement
8 humorous description of Ichabod
16 satire, limits of human mind
27 Brom as proto-Romantic hero but here stock for satire
33 sentimental stereotype (appropriate to satire) + 46
36 Gunpowder
39 abundance
49 shifting throng of population
55, 56 correspondence
56 gothic of past crime
57 wilderness gothic
59 huge, misshapen, and towering + gloom
62 whitewashed church
Mohicans
1.21 Historical fiction
1.19, 21 Alice & Cora
2.5 gothic secret, "some strange accident"
2.8 narrow and blind path
2.12 distrust b/c skin is dark?
2.13 dark-eyed Cora
2.21 secret path
2.30 gothic forest
Mohicans
1.4 pictorial
1.6 historical fiction
1.7 George Washington
1.8 captivity narrative cf. RVW 48
1.8-1.9 shift from history to fiction > 1.13 two females [+ cinematic]
1.17 Indian runner + Byronic marker
1.19 two females
1.21 light-dark + sublime > 2.12
2.2 romantic rhetoric in dialogue
2.3 plot outrage
2.5 preview of Magua's past
2.12 skin is dark
2.13 dark and tangled pathway [wilderness gothic]
2.21 secret path
2.29 cf. Ichabod and forest
2.30 suspense + gothic forest
What about these stories is essentially American and appeals to American
readers?
Identify
the gothic,
the sublime,
and
correspondence in
Rip Van Winkle, Sleepy Hollow, and Mohicans
gothic: Mohicans
gothic: RVW
26, 28 (cabin), 36 tomb marker
gothic: Sleepy Hollow 5 (that region of shadows), 17 ghosts and goblins, 49 tales of
ghosts and apparitions, 51 dark and light of gothic, 56 tree, 57 groan,
58 cavernous gloom, 69 schoolhouse haunted
sublime: Mohicans
sublime: RVW
1, 17, 26,
sublime: Sleepy
Hollow 59 something huge, misshapen & towering [+ gothic], 61,
correspondence: Mohicans
correspondence:
RVW
correspondence:
Sleepy Hollow 55, 56
Historicism: How do we
learn history from fiction, and how does fiction reshape history?
Sleepy Hollow is early Romanticism, but also late Classical-Enlightenment,
esp. in its use of Satire.
How is the characterization satirical? Why isn't Romanticism usually
funny?
presentation on Satire
sentimental stereotypes
Sleepy Hollow 33, 46
