Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Romanticism Values Synthesis Blog-Due March 25th

In order to hone your skills of identifying themes and creating a central argument via writing, do the following prompt:

1. Choose one of the values of romanticism we discussed: emotion over reason, nature over human-made, impermanence of humanity, the individual over the collective, valuing rural life. writing sparked by individual emotion instead of borrowing from other genres or overthinking writing.

2. Choose three literary works from the Romantic Unit. How does the Romantic value you chose come out in these three literary works.

3. Incorporate at least two direct quotations from these works to support your assertion. Use "/" to indicate breaks in lines

4. Remember to explain the why's and how's surrounding your assertions/claims i.e. how does this or that literary work represent the value you choose or why do you think the Romantics focused on these values in their writing over others? Why were the Romantics drawn to such themes?

5. As always, solid topic sentences and varied sentence structure are always helpful.

2 comments:

Drew said...

For my discussion I chose "nature over human-made". For example, In "The Lamb" there is the natural place of the lamb and the farmer who needs the lamb for wool "/Gave thee clothing of delight, softest clothing wooly bright/". This tells that the lamb is needed for man to survive, when he needs clothes. In "The Tiger" the poem magnifies the mystery of the tiger in the wild "/Tyger! Tyger! burning bright in the forest of the night/". This shows that even the tiger has power over his domain during the night. In "The World Is Too Much with Us" love is portrayed, unlike anything man can make "/Little we see in nature that is ours/". It means that we covet nature and we have to take care of nature to save its beauty. The romantics were drawn to these ideas because they show that people are more calm and less aggressive than what people think.

Joshua said...

1. The topic I will be covering is nature or human-made. In "The Introduction to Frankenstein" by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, a creature created from human body parts. This turned out to be disastrous as the monster did not do what it was commanded to do. In "Ozymandias" by Percy Bysshe Shelley, the quote by the late King Ozymandias really contrasts with what is shone. He says, "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Yet, the next sentence shows a different picture. "Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away." Basically, man-made things are doomed to fall or to be destroyed. There is no man-made thing that can last eternity. In "The World Is Too Much With Us" by William Wordsworth, Wordsworth explains that us humans spend too much time on the things that don't last or won't give us fulfillment. "The world is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our power: Little we see in Nature that is ours;".