Assignment Links for Weeks Six and Seven Are Now Active.

I have activated the links for weeks six and seven, and I've combined and shortened the assignments for these weeks.  Sorry for getting them activated late, but I've been diagnosed with a kidney infection which had me unable to access a computer before today.  Flat on my back and in great pain was the last way I expected to spend my week when I headed out for the Triad last Friday and a family wedding.

I hope you've spent the few extra days getting caught up or just taking a breather.  Over the next week and a half, you'll be reading a slave narrative by Harriot Jacobs, which will give you a first hand account of life as a slave in North Carolina.  With Jacobs, we'll begin a shift in our study of Romanticism from what Romanticism was and how to characterize its literature to how Romanticism worked in society and changed what it meant to be an American.  As you will find out later in the course, our society began with an odd combination of Protestant and Rationalist roots.  As a society, we believed that all shared equal rights, but as rationalist, we tended to believe that those who didn't rise to the top of society full of opportunities and equality were lazy or worse.  As a society, we had to learn to care for and about others.  Romanticism played a large role in giving us a philosophical and social basis for caring for others less fortunate than ourselves.

As you read Jacobs, remind yourself of what you have learned about Romanticism.  It emphasizes the viewpoint of the individual.  It tends to value feeling over cold rationality.  It seeks high emotion.  Think how these traits play out in Jacobs, and think how a Romantic audience or an audience trained to read as a Romantic would react to Jacobs and the pathos, that is, the emotional argument, she constructs.

Now think how essential it is to get someone to feel if you want them to act.  Understand this interplay between feeling, feeling for others, and feeling enough to act, and you'll begin to understand how important Romanticism and its literature was to our own American character.

Steve