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Focus Questions for Responses. Write your answer on one of the
questions.
Response 1 -- Renaissance
1. What is Emerson’s understanding of beauty? How does it relate to his understanding of nature? What seems to be “new” or “American” about this understanding (if anything)?
2. Henry David Thoreau wants to change people's lives with Walden. How does he hope to do this? What is his "morning work" (619)? Define and describe how he would have us be "awake." To help you, you may want to search Walden online. Use "control+F" and search for "morning," "wake," "asleep" or other terms that might be appropriate to find specific passages to analyze.
3. Thoreau was well received in his day, earning many favorable reviews. View some of them to learn what was said about Walden at the time it was published. What do you learn? Though critics praised him, Walden did not sell very well? Why?
4. You may be surprised to find in the first chapter of Walden, “Economy,” that there's not that much mention of nature. Is the physical setting only secondary? Does Walden seem to be about something other than nature? If so, what?
5. What elements of Walden are present in "Resistance to Civil Government"? (This annotated version may help you.)
Response
2 --
1. Based on
your reading of Emerson, how would he respond to a particular story of
2. Why do you think Hawthorne made Robin ("My Kinsman, Major Molineux") such a bumpkin? What similarities does this story seem to have with "Young Goodman Brown"? Are they both allegories?
3. How do you react to the description of Major Molineux
"in-tar-and-feathery dignity" on the uncovered cart? Would you
have reacted the way Robin did at the sight of his uncle? To help you answer,
re-cast the story in your own terms: you go to Ljubljana seeking a
political favor from a distant relative? What would you do if confronted
with a similar situation?
Response
3 -- Workplace
1. To some extent, both
"Life in the Iron
Mills" and "Bartleby"
deal with the effects of
industrialization, and both ask at least one rather profound
question: what is the extent of our responsibility
to another? Why is Bartleby able to hypnotize the narrator so? How do you
we feel about the narrator/lawyer? Does
he do enough? What would you do in the lawyer's situation? Mitchell's?
Have you ever been in a similar situation where you could help
someone?
2. Consider the "view" Bartleby has? How does this description relate to the "view" (or Melville's view) of society at the time. Bartleby stares for long periods of time at the "dead brick wall" at his workplace and also again while in prison. Consider how his work environment has influenced his inability to do anything else, or how it has influenced the "contract" between the employer and employee. What do you make of the fact that he goes blind? ("'Do you not see the reason for yourself,' he indifferently replied . . . . his eyes looked dull and glazed" emphasis added). Is his view different than Thoreau's when he's in prison? Is Bartleby a self-reliant (Emersonian) man, marching to the beat of his own drum?
3. Compare the very last lines of Walden ("Only that day dawns
to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning
star.") to the close of "Life in the Iron Mills" (its groping
arm points through the broken cloud to the far East, where, in the flickering,
nebulous crimson, God has sent the promise of the Dawn"). What awakenings are these? What are the sources of this hope and what assumptions
are they based on?
Response 4 -- Whitman and Dickinson
Emerson's description of the
poet he searches "in vain for" is an almost uncanny description
of Walt Whitman.
This picture accompanied the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, which Whitman
published himself. It had no mention of the author's name save for deep
in "Song of Myself":
Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos.
Whitman and Dickinson are two pivotal poets in American literature. They make a nice contrast, from the public to the private, the one who looked outward to the one who looked inward. Her poems are tight and oblique, whereas his expand, circle, and ramble. His poems often transcend death whereas in hers, there's a distinct tension between death as finality and death as eternal, a tension between believing and disbelieving. For this week, choose one of the following questions. Be sure to cite specific examples in your response. Choose selected poems (or lines) or sections of poems as representative (of course, you need not review a large body of their work).
1. Imagine you are the one who finds Emily Dickinson's "fascicles" in a closet years later. How do you respond? What strikes you about the poems? Write a letter to a publisher expressing your views ands surprise. Discuss the poems in the assigned reading in your answer.
2. Whitman was known
to review his own poems under an alias. Write a review of his poems as if
you were Whitman himself. If you wish, you may draw on Emerson's "Poet" , on Whitman's
"Preface," or this letter
from Emerson (begins “Dear Sir—I am not blind to the worth . . .” )
Response 5 -- Realism
The first two of the
responses for this week ask you to be creative and to draw on your own
experiences as a way to connect with the stories. You do not have to provide specific evidence from the text to
receive full credit for your answer (as you normally do--to remind yourself of
the grading criteria for the response, review
the syllabus). Nevertheless, you could still comment on how you read the
selections by describing your own experiences (for example, your experience
might be different than that in the text.
How are the circumstances different? The same?)
1. After reading the
chapters from Huck Finn, think about what you would do in a similar
situation. Have you ever been in a position to betray (or be loyal to) a
friend? What happened? Or, have you ever been in a similar
situation where doing "wrong" (according to conventional wisdom) was
really doing "right"?
2. After reading
Charlotte Perkins Gilmans's "The Yellow Wallpaper," think and write
about the following: How have people misjudged you? When did you have to go to
your room? What did it feel like? Have you ever committed bold acts that were
misinterpreted? Ever felt limited by the opposite sex?
Read more about Kate Chopin from a PBS website on a
documentary of her life (a
brief sample). To answer the questions for this week, you must finish the
novella.
1. What other awakenings or "dream fictions"
can you compare The Awakening to?
"Rip Van Winkle?"
"Young Goodman Brown?" "Resistance to Civil
Government?" Walden? Jim's dream in Chapter XV of The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn?
2. Discuss how Edna's awakening is more like a slow
progression of changes than a linear series of events. What is she awakening
to?
3. Does Edna command sympathy or disapproval? Should she be praised or blamed? Is the
ending a victory or a defeat? (Consider how it might be the other way around
than the way you want to answer?)
4. Compare and contrast the ending of The Awakening with that of Thelma and Louise, shown in class on . . . . ?