PreAPENGLISH 10: April 16-20, 2012

Greetings Sophomores!

I hope you had a restful weekend, because the coming days will be full!
You have a test on the Age of Reason/Enlightenment period on your first day this week.
We will begin studying the Romantics, for which I need you to read the following stories at home this week:
"The Devil and Tom Walker" (also in your text)
"Rip van Winkle" (not in your text)

A little background on American Romanticism follows:
American Romanticism 
1. Romantic Period – began in England around the turn of the nineteenth century
· In England, origin attributed by some critics to the onset of the French Revolution in 1789, and others to the publication of Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1798
· Both Coleridge and Wordsworth felt that the crucial elements of a poem were found in the mind and emotions of the poet and not the conventions of the outer world.

2. Attitudes and Tendencies of American Romantic Literature:
· A disdain for the city or a "distrust" of civilization
· Nostalgia for the past
· Concern for individual freedom
· Love for the beauties of the natural landscape
· Interest in the supernatural

3. Romantic Sensibilities
· The imagination, spontaneity, individual freedoms, and nature are of greater value than reason, logic, planning, and cultivation.
· Reason is limited; the imagination is able to discover "truths" unreachable through reason.
· Authors should rise above empirical evidence to a realm of higher truth – truth can even be found in exotic settings or in a world far removed from the industrial age. Gothic novels with wild landscapes and mysterious castles exemplify this approach.
· God is found in nature; the nature of God is not as clearly defined when compared to the Puritans who found in nature the God they knew from the Bible.
· Science is a "vulture whose wings are dull realities" (Poe).

4. Features of American Romantic Literature
· The hero may have youthful qualities, innocence, a love of nature and distrust of town life, a distrust of women (thought by male writers to represent civilization and domestication), and a need to engage in a quest for a higher truth in the natural world.
· Journeys found in American Romantic Literature are usually from the city to the world of nature.
· Many Romantic pieces require that readers willingly "suspend their disbelief" (Coleridge).
· European models still heavily influence American poetry.
· Unlike European models, the American novel depicts a wilderness experience, idealizes frontier life, and coincides with westward expansion and the growth of a nationalist spirit.

We also need to get moving on our research papers. I am attaching the specifics. You may choose one of the The Scarlet Letter topics listed, or submit a LITERATURE BASED topic of your own for my approval.

So much to do...so little time!
See you in class!

Mrs. SO