American Romanticism Sample Student Final Exam Answers 2010

Danielle Maldonado

Blurring the Lines of Romanticism

One of the most interesting aspects of this course was that I learned in order to understand Romanticism, you must examine other time periods surrounding the Romantic period: Puritanical Pre-romantic writing, Realism and Modernism. It seems as if during my undergraduate study, I didn’t learn about literature in terms of genres or periods and was new to this sort of classification as a graduate student. Through my graduate career, however, I’ve noticed that despite, for example, this course being called “Romanticism,” you still must study these surrounding periods to gain a more complete understanding for, in this case, what is romantic about a piece of literature and how it emulates other pieces of the same time period. As a result of this study, I enjoyed how the course really ran the gamut of American literature from the mid-1600s to the 1930s.

Another aspect of the course that I appreciated was learning some classics that I felt I should have read by this point in my life, but hadn’t. Exploring texts like Washington Irving’s Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle put to rest the bits and pieces of these childhood fables I vaguely recall. I was also able to investigate Edgar Allan Poe beyond The Raven with Fall of the House of Usher and Ligeia, absorbing how he’s really the Father of American Gothicism and Macabre. This was probably the most useful application of the course because of my career path and interest in American Literature. As a high school teacher of American Literature, our current curriculum is lacking and incomplete. We read two creation stories, jump right to Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and then to John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. The first semester’s scope and sequence is problematic in several ways. First, in reading The Crucible, we’re considering the time period in which the play is set instead of the time in which it was written, glossing over the natural allegorical aspect of the play. In then moving on to Of Mice and Men we go out of chronological order, jumping back to a realist piece set in the 1930s. Within this semester, we study very few American Literature classics that we studied in this course, prompting that we revisit our curriculum if we are all call the junior year “American Literature.”

Another aspect of this course that I would like to bring into my own classroom is the further integration of multicultural authors. High School students read a portion of the narrative of Frederick Douglass but we don’t compare that text to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin which is both very American in nature as well as written by the forgotten minority: a woman. I especially enjoyed The Harlem Renaissance, examining how this separate tradition of Romanticism really is just as mainstream as Caucasian writers during this time period.

Throughout my graduate career, what I enjoyed most was how my American Literature courses overlapped in many ways. Objectives and ideas could be carried from one classroom to another. I hope to carry some of these into the high school classroom in order to better organize our curriculum so that it’s representative of the true American experience.