MPEN211 - Major American Authors
Dr. Ken Kirby
Spring 2012

Syllabus
Subjective paper - Learning Objectives in Literature
 

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Report on critical reading

On Wednesday, Mar. 21, a paper of about 1000-1200 words (3 1/2-4 pages) will be due via e-mail.  Your assignment is to respond to some of the critical commentary on either Hawthorne or Emerson that I have selected for you.  The paper should include your ideas about the probable meaning and/or effect of the story, ideas that resulted from your reading and our class discussions, but a substantial portion of the paper must respond to the critics you read.  Explain why you agree or disagree with the critic, perhaps bringing into the paper other works from our reading that the critic does not discuss. You should also make use of the introduction to your author in our anthology, where appropriate.

Apart from these sources, do not do any additional research.  Cite the article(s) and our textbook according to a standard format; in other words, in MLA format you will have a brief Works Cited list (two or three entries) on the last page of the paper, and appropriate in-text citations.  The paper must be unified around a central idea that attempts to solve some sort of problem of interpretation, must have effective organization (intro. with background, context, and thesis; orderly paragraphs with a balance of analysis and supporting detail, and conclusion that sums up and provides closure); appropriate sentence structure and diction; and appropriate use of the conventions of Standard Written English.
 
 



 
Nathaniel Hawthorne

After reading "Young Goodman Brown" and "The Birthmark," you may want to scan the remarks on both stories in Lea Newman's A Reader's Guide to the Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne before deciding which essay to read in Albert von Frank's collection (Critical Essays on Howthorne's Short Stories), which will be your primary source for the report.  Both Judith Fetterley's essay on "The Birthmark" (164) and Jerome Loving's essay on "Young Goodman Brown" (219) emphasize sexuality more than I do, but what do you think?  I also advise you to take a look at Henry James's comments on Hawthorne's stories in general (von Frank 64).  He seems to prefer "Young Goodman Brown"; if we can determine why he thinks this is the better story, this may help us understand both Hawthorne and James.

 
 
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"'The Woman's Flesh of Me':  Rebecca Harding Davis' Response to Self-Reliance" by Kristin Boudreau is a rather wide ranging article about Davis's and other people's rejection of Emerson's theories of transcendental thinking and acting.  When Whitman praised the aging Emerson for maintaining his spiritual force and efforts to transcend the body and the material world, Boudreau says Whitman was either being deceitful or looking with rose-colored glasses, for most of the evidence points out that Emerson was not sucessfully transcending the physical world.  Davis also rejected Emerson's idea that the body could be transcended and that the spiritual world was more real and more valuable than the physical.  Examining these refutations of Emerson's ideas could possibly help you understand the ideas better.

Amy S. Lang's article "'The Age of the First Person Singular':  Emerson and Antinomianism" examines Emerson's thought as it relates to an earlier "heresy" in American religious tradition:  Ann Hutchinson's antinomianism.  Don't get bogged down in Lang's discussion of Hutchinson and the impact her ideas had on Puritan thinking; she may or may not be very accurate.  But her comments about Emerson's rejection of tradition, custom, and law could be useful in helping you understand Emerson's transcendentalism.