Monday, December 17, 12:30, Carney 102

Format

Sample Questions:

At the end of Roger Malvin’s Burial, what is Reuben able to do that he hasn’t been able to do for years?

1. sleep
2. laugh
3. pray
4. sing

In the Hawthorne' s story, "The Birthmark, " what shape does Georgiana's birthmark take and where on her body does it appear? _____________________________________________

True or False? : At the end of her slave narrative, Harriet Jacobs describes the experience of buying her own freedom after working for several years as a domestic servant.

Historical Contexts

1. Economic changes

Shift to market economy from home based economy; influence of industrialization; urbanization, technological change

2. Domestic ideology (The Woman Questions, Cult of True Womanhood, Cult of Domesticity)

Four traits: purity, piety, domesticity, obedience

3. Slavery and Race

Varieties of racism; fugitive slave law; abolitionism

Literary Modes

Be able to talk about their characteristics, the works that employ them, their roles in 19th century culture.

1. Sentimentalism

2. Anti-slavery literature

3. Romance/allegory/symbolism

4. Transcendentalist prose

Topics and Themes for Review:

The following are a set of themes and questions from which the questions on the final will be drawn. You will won't see these exact questions on the test, but being able to deal with the issues they raise will prepare you for writing both the passage analysis and the essay.

1). After the American Revolution made the United States its own country, many 19^th century writers took up the task of constructing a literary identity for the new nation.

In ways do authors before the Civil War tried, either explicity or implicity, to answer the question, What is American literature? How do the literary manifestos of Emerson and Whitman attempt to define American literature? Do their visions of American literature leave room for women and African Americans to write about their experiences and concerns? Do other authors offer competing definitions of American literature? How does the slave narrative forces us to redefine our sense of what counts as both "literary"and "American"

2). From the time first slaves arrived in Jamestown until the Civil War attempted to complete the American Revolution, slavery was a continuous challenge to the American ideals of freedom and equality. In the nineteenth century, slavery confronted the nation with moral crisis that many writers felt compelled to address.

How would you compare such works as Melville’s "Benito Cereno," Douglass’s Narrative, and Jacobs, Incidents, Child's fiction, Whitman’s Song of Myself in their treatment of slavery? What benefits or limitations do you see in their literary strategies? How do these works attempt to deal with the arguments surrounding slavery and what proposals do they make for how to solve the problem? What assumptions about race do they represent?

3) Until the early nineteenth century, writers like Jefferson and Crevecoeur could still imagine America as the literal embodiment of the pastoral ideal, a nation of independent farmers cultivating a middle landscape between the wilderness and urban civilization. However, as the economy began to shift, the idea of nature gained importance for many writers as they sought to examine the implications of science, technology and industrialization for American life.

How do 19th-century writers addressed the relationship between nature and civilization? What values do writers like Emerson and Thoreau attach to nature? What is the relationship between the artist and nature? What does Melville suggest by the industrial landscapes in their stories? According to Hawthorne’s stories, can science perfect nature, or is it part of the problem?

4) In the first half of the 19^th century, women found themselves in a culture that idealized certain feminine qualities while limiting the roles women could play in society. As some women began to challenge these social arrangements, "The Woman" question increasingly became a topic for public debate and literary expression.

How do "classic" American writers like Melville, Hawthorne, Poe represent women in their fiction, and what do they seem to suggest by their portrayal of women as beautiful or flawed, dead or alive, speaking or silent? Do the women writers that we read offer alternative representations of women? How do writers both argue with and affirm the tenets of domestic ideology (piety, purity, domesticity, and obedience)?

5) Several authors we have read in the course emphasize the experience of learning to read and write. What role does education (and literacy in particular) play in the representation of various American identities we have read in this course. How do authors like Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau characterize what kind of reading is best, what writing can accomplish, and what the ideal relationship is between teacher and student? What do other authors (Fuller, Douglass, Jacobs, Fern) suggest about the limitations of education and self-improvement in a society built on social and economic inequalities?