American Literature: Romanticism Sample Final Exam Essays 2015 final exam assignment Overall Learning Experience

Jonathon Anderson

5/10/2015

A Long Time Coming

          I came into this semester with a casual acquaintance with the American Renaissance consisting of what I believe was a 6^th grade assignment to memorize “The Raven,” a 10^th grade reading of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” that belabored its color symbolism, and 11^th grade readings of The Scarlet Letter (which seemed morally tiresome but otherwise enjoyable) and Melville’s Billy Budd (morally tiresome and unenjoyable – although I really shouldn’t say that since I didn’t get around to actually reading it until a decade later). At some point during my undergraduate coursework I encountered “Young Goodman Brown” and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” and snagged a smattering of Emerson and felt like I had a fairly decent handle on the period.

Being a Music major with a curiosity for interesting music, I eventually crossed paths with the work of the first important American composer, the insurance salesman Charles Ives, whose Fourth Symphony has a movement subtitled “The Celestial Railroad” after the Hawthorne tale. So, I read “The Celestial Railroad,” and a few more tales besides, in the name of thorough musicianship, and discovered that Hawthorne is actually not just for schoolkids. Fast forward about fifteen years, a partially read complete tales and poems of Poe, a Hawthorne anthology, a complete poems of Emily Dickinson skimmed for quotes, a collection of Melville’s stories (including poor unread Billy Budd), and Moby-Dick, and you have my ramshackle, half-forgotten idea of America’s first watershed moment in literature.

          What I showed up looking for was that little chunk of time between Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly, where Early American Lit. left off, and The Scarlet Letter, where things picked back up for me. What I found was Irving and Cooper, both of whom I only knew through popular culture. With Irving I discovered a delightful wit and amiability that seemed to look back to Franklin, while Cooper looked ahead to the seriousness of purpose of the authors I knew. Both of these guys seemed characteristically American, but resolving the distance between them as Romantics took a little more time.

From what I see looking back over my work, that was my main task. The strange part is, I didn’t completely know it at the time. I think I’m still at work on the challenge from Early American Lit. to arrive at a unified sense of the American story. My midterm was concerned with bridging the perceived gap between the Founders and the American Renaissance. The distance seems tremendous at first. I also went the other direction, trying to hunt out the Romantic lineage in Pynchon, which now seems to me to be all over the place in Gravity’s Rainbow, Vineland, and Against the Day. The end of the semester finds me engaged in basically the same endeavor, looking at Poe as maybe the main inheritor of Irving’s wit and satire (though without the warmth) and thinking about the ways Romantic ideas and attitudes are transformed and recontextualized from literary generation to literary generation.

          Conceptually, my biggest takeaway from the course might be a clearer understanding of what we mean when we talk about “the sublime,” and the ubiquity of the Byronic hero. I ended up following the concept of the sublime back to Longinus through Pope and Joseph Addison, and that became the basis for my term paper dealing with Pope’s The Rape of the Lock in Dr. Day’s Eighteenth Century British Lit. course. The Byronic hero, meanwhile, seemed to pop up everywhere, as Byronic heroes will do (even at one point appearing in the guise of a fish).