Please return by 6:00 pm, Thursday, May 7, to Room Hill 617 or by e-mail to
ehrlich@andromeda.rutgers.edu.
Answer any one (1) question in each of the four (4) parts. Be sure to refer to or cite specific
works or passages in your essays; please don't review the class meetings or the works themselves.
A: Research, Criticism, and Theory
1. Which general, national, or literary encyclopedias, histories, handbooks, or dictionaries did you
find most useful in your reading and research for this course? Which items would you
recommend which are not already on the course handouts?
2. Which research and critical guides, surveys, and indexes that are specific to works, authors,
period, genre, nationality, topic, approach, or methodology did you find most useful in your
reading and research in this course? Which items would you recommend to be added to the
course handouts?
3. Which words and keywords were necessary for your research (i.e., words other than those
which appear in your title, introduction, and conclusion)? Which are also LC subject
headings? (Optional: Which are used by Web directories?)
4. Which secondary works did you find most useful in the Bedford critical/cultural editions of
Hawthorne? (Optional: please comment of if you also used Norton critical editions of these
works?)
B. The Nation and Period
4. What seem to you to be the most common or universal characteristics of the seven authors we
studied this semester? Is their commonality primarily in subject matter, structure and form,
or ideas and attitudes?
5. Discuss the leading literary manifestoes of this era: Emerson's Nature, "American Scholar,"
and "The Poet"; portions of Thoreau's Walden; Melville's"Hawthorne and His Mosses"; and
Whitman's "Preface" to Leaves of Grass and "Democratic Vistas." What do they have in
common? How do they differ?
C: Sexuality, radicalism, and revolution:
6. In The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne remarks in connection with Zenobia that a radical
change in the structure of society is apt to first reflect itself as a change in the relations of the
sexes. Heterosexual relationships, assumed as a norm only Hawthorne, are pushed to some limits
in Melville and Poe. By contrast, chastity is advocated by Thoreau, is implicit in Dickinson, and is
almost present by neglect in Emerson, whereas homoerotic and homosexual impulses without
tangible relationships are central for Whitman. To what extent are political and social
radicalism (and its opposite, traditional or conservative views) implied in this rainbow of
sexual identities, choices, and actions?
7. The period of the course, 1830-1860, was one of geographic expansion, industrial
transformation, and widespread radical and reform agitation. Many of the authors in the 512
course directly addressed social and political issues, and a few also did so indirectly. To what
extent can the course be seen as an ongoing debate between radicals such as Emerson,
Thoreau, and Whitman and conservatives such as Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickinson who
seem ceaselessly to be debating ideologies with themselves and with each other?
D: Transcendentalism
8. Poe is different the other authors of the course in that his critical theories were largely
concerned with rational, logical, or mechanical principles, natural laws of rhetoric, technique,
construction, workmanship, form, and effect. The organic principle, on the other hand,
emphasized meaning, irrationality, the unconscious, change, growth, correspondence,
transformation, mind, intuition, memory, and even mysticism. How does the organic principle
manifest itself as both a goal and a problem in the authors of the course?
9. The period 1830-1860 in American Literature is also called the American Renaissance, the era
of Transcendentalism, and the age of Emerson. While it easy to divide authors into the pro-Emerson and anti-Emerson camps, even his followers sometimes diverged from him and his
enemies could be influenced by him. Discuss either a or b:
a: How did Thoreau, Whitman, and Dickinson depart or differ from Emerson in following
him?
b: How were Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville influenced by Emerson while trying to differ from him?