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American
Literature: Romanticism Student Midterm Samples 2013 3. Web Highlights |
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Kristine Vermillion
Nuggets of Insight to Keep in Mind as the Conversation Continues
Kate Herbert "The Individual,
The reason that I chose to
read Kate's essay is because she is exploring the relationships of both man and
woman to nature, which is primarily signified by the wilderness.
This is a theme in American Romanticism that I am
extremely interested in, and that I want to write about, so this review is
helpful for me in refining some of my ideas.
Kate's comments on women and the wilderness are
good.
Her conversation on the differing responses of the sexes
to nature and the wilderness are insightful.
The basic gist of the observation is that women and
the wilderness do not jive.
When women are in the wilderness, they are either
captives or as in Hawthorn's "Young Goodman Brown" or in Poe's "Ligeia,"
phantoms, dreams of depravity.
Either way, in the wilderness, it is a place where
women are held captive or destroyed, if only metaphorically.
This discussion of women in both the home and in
the wilderness I find to be quite intriguing, and I suspect that it is an
integral component to the analysis, exploration and criticism in the genre of
Women's Fiction during this class of writing. I look forward to it.
Laurence Finn, "Crossroads: American Romanticism's Mixture of
the Spiritual and Material" (2008)
Finn's discussion on the
"transcendent sickness" is very intriguing.
The following sentence is quite illuminating: "In
Charlotte
Temple, the transcendent sickness is love; in
The Fall of
the House of Usher, it is fear; and with
Jonathan Edwards' work, it is sin."
I hadn't thought about these in terms of a
"transcendent sickness" before, and the thought it stimulating.
You could add to the list.
Ligeia? What is Magua's sickness, where does it
fit?
Rip Van Winkle?
Ichabod Crane? Young Goodman Brown?
The Minister?
There is a prevalence of sickness, especially
mental sickness, and it would lend to a great discussion or a good essay, but
alas!
This semester will not suffice to produce such a
discussion out of me!
I am curious, though, if the
sickness of Ellen's mother in
The Wide, Wide World,
would somehow fit into this discussion.
I find Mrs. Montgomery to be a very curious
character. Since I am but halfway through the book, I don't feel that I can
comment yet, but I am filing this idea away to explore later.
Kyle Rahe, "Chiaroscuro: Reconciling Light and Dark in
Teaching Romanticism"
This is an interesting
discussion on how in the world one would approach teaching American Romanticism.
Even after sitting through half a semester of
class, I am still intimidated by the huge field and all the genres in it.
Then there is the predominate, though covert
Romance that lingers in all the subsequent genres, forms and literary epochs.
It is everywhere.
So, how do you approach teaching it?
Kyle explores approaching it
through the theme of light vs. dark in the texts.
This would be one productive avenue.
(I remember doing just this in the tenth grade for
my end of year project in my American Literature class. It was a successful and
insightful analysis for me at that time, and would also be a good route for me
even today as well.)
At one point Kyle says, "The course features so
many authors that seem like opposing forces, but in reality they complement each
other.
The stories and novels have so much going on under one
umbrella: Gothic, the Sublime, satire, optimism, pessimism."
So,
I gather, through this class and through Kyle's conversation that how we are
going about doing it, American Romanticism that is, is a productive way to
discuss all the many authors and the many elements they utilize.
