Lecture 1 Washington Irving
1. Background Questions:
1) What is the duration of American Romanticism?
From the end of the 18th century to the Civil War (1861-1865)
2) What are the main features of American Romanticism?
Irrationalism: opposing rationalism/neo-classicism; focusing on feelings,
intuitions and emotions; worshipping ideals, imagination
Individualism: placing the individual and the common man against the group, against authority
Being close to nature: the world as a living, breathing being; the close relationship
between man and nature
Simplicity in style
(Other distinctive features of American Romanticism besides the above common features of Romanticism)
Objection to puritan morality
The “newness” of the Americans as a nation independent from the European yoke: newness of America as a nation, their ideals of individualism and political equality, and their dream of America as a new Garden of Eden for man, their national experience of “pioneering into the west”
2. Selected Reading:
Pre-Reading questions:
1) What are the artistic features of Irving’s writing?
a. The use of humor
b. Graceful, refined, fluent, dignified and standard language. His essays are models of English.
c. Romantic imagination and fantasies
d. Vivid and picturesque description of the setting
2) What are the different types of humor? Try to find some humorous expressions in the excerpt?
a. Different types of humor:
Jocular humor—Irving (for fun, for amusement)
Satirical humor—Mark Twain (to satire, to criticize)
Tearful humor—O’ Henry (arouse sympathy on the poor)
Black humor—Joseph Heller (humor in facing death)
b. There are a lot of examples:
When depicting how Rip’s close friend, his dog Wolf reacts to Rip’s wife, Dame Van Winkle’s any movement when it is at home.
When introducing the so called celebrities at the small inn where Rip frequents in order to console himself when he is driven from home by his wife, and how Rip’s wife behaves when she gets to the small inn.
Topics for after-reading discussion:
1) What kind of people do you think Rip Van Winkle and his wife Dame Van Winkle are? If your future husband/wife is Rip/Dame, what will you do to him/her?
Rip Van Winkle: lazy, good-tempered, warm-hearted, hen-pecked, well-oiled,
care-free, obedient, irresponsible, etc.
His wife: nagging, termagant, sharp-tongued, hard-working country woman
2) What are the possible themes of the short story?
a. A story of man who has difficulty in facing his advancing age or the author’s conservativ e attitude towards the American Revolution and the young Republic, and his dissatisfaction with American development
b. Puritan teachings (Unceasing labor, no play, all kinds of pleasures are condemned, greedy for wealth) as opposed to the American desire for leisure, for the freedom of the individuals as part of American Romantic ideals.
c. Escape from one’s responsibility and even one’s history
d. The loss of identity
4) For what reasons is Irving considered “father of American literature”?
Possible reasons:
He is the first American author who explores native themes.
He is the first American writer to win international recognition, extremely popular in Europe.
His popularity comes from his humor (using dignified words to for unimportant things/ exaggerate the seriousness of the situation)
“Rip Van Winkle” is often considered as the first American short story.
Lecture 2 Edgar Allan Poe
1. Background questions:
1) What is Gothic writing in the 18th century?
An 18th-century style of literature which describes romantic adventures in mysterious or frightening settings, like ancient castle, ruins or wilderness. The subject matter is always about murder, violence, rape, incest together with ghostly or supernatural horror sometimes.
2) What is romantic in Gothic writing?
Gothic style is usually called “dark romanticism”. Not like romanticism which tends to convey positively human’s social, political and moral ideals, Gothic writing is full of violence and horror with the involvement of mysterious and supernatural forces to reveal the dark side of human nature, especially of human morality. Like general romanticism, it is irrational paying much attention to the release of human emotion, imagination, intuition and ideals which are suppressed or neglected by the rationalists.
2. Selected Reading :
1) What are the elements of poetry?
Elements of poetry
1. Voice: speaker and tone
2. Diction: the best words in the best order (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
3. Imagery: a concrete representation of a sense impression, a feeling, or an idea.
Images: visual, aural, tactile, olfactory (something smelled), gustatory (sth tasted)
4. Figures of speech: simile and metaphor
5. Symbolism: a symbol is any object or action that means more than itself, any object or
action that represents sth beyond itself.
6. Syntax: the grammatical structure of words in sentences and the development of
sentences in longer units throughout the poem.
7. Sound:
a. rhyme: matching of final vowel and consonant sounds in two or more words
