take-home essays (American lit I homework #2)

Take-Home Essays

American Literature I 12/03/08
Teaching Assistant: Yuan-yang Wang (王遠洋)

The take-home essays intend to help you organize what you learn in American literature class and come up with your own ideas. Please submit your take-home essays to me by noon in week 14 (12/17). Start each question on a NEW page, and the maximum for each question is 1 page (Times New Roman 12, 1.5 space). The grading of the take-home essays is 5%. Plagiarism of any form will not be allowed. The essay questions are as follows:

1. To Run and Advertise Your Unique Bookstore with the Emersonian Thoughts

Remember Ralph Waldo Emerson wants you to be “Man Thinking,” not “bookworm” (1141) when reading books, including his own pieces of work. It means that only reading Emerson is not enough. You have to really comprehend the Emersonian thoughts. As he says, “[t]here is then creative reading, as well as creative writing” (1142). Let us imagine that you are going to run a small, elegant, and cozy bookstore in downtown, just like what Meg Ryan's Kathleen Kelly does in You've Got Mail (1998). First of all, name your bookstore after Emerson's ideas either in “The American Scholar” or Nature and Explain why you call your bookstore in this sense. Secondly, let's pretend that you want to design a world wide website for your beloved bookstore. In the homepage, you have to quote a sentence/sentences from either “The American Scholar” or Nature to write a creative advertisement to introduce your bookstore. The advertisement might include your faith to run this bookstore, its uniqueness, what kind of particular books you sell, etc. Be creative.

2. Seeking Human Nature in the Darkest Forest and the Most Forbidden Sea

During his sojourn in Lenox, Massachusetts, Hawthorne develops his friendship with Herman Melville. Melville praises that Hawthorne is a great American writer, and some scholars even conjecture that Melville revises Moby-Dick (1851), and it is published after his acquaintance with Hawthorne for a year. Both of the two writers have brilliant skills to depict human nature. Coincidently, there are many symbols that are worthy of discussing in “Young Goodman Brown” (1835) and Moby-Dick. A symbol is, as M. H. Abrams illustrates,

anything which signifies something; in this sense all words are symbols. In discussing literature...the term “symbol” is applied only to a word or phrase that signifies an object or event which in its turn signifies something, or has a range of reference, beyond itself.” (Glossary 311)

In “Young Goodman Brown,” not only the things like the serpent-like staff, the pink ribbons of Faith's cap, etc, but also the whole journey in the forest itself could be regarded as a symbol. Forest signifies wildness, and in this dark and deep forest Goodman Brown is painfully forced to seek “the nature of mankind” (1297) that is concealed in normal life. In the story of Moby-Dick, Ishmael goes through the fatal adventure with captain Ahab to chase Moby Dick on “the dark blue sea” (2346). The chase makes Ahab reveal his nature of “[h]uman madness” and “monomania” (2347). Please make use of Abram's short definition of symbol to compare and contrast the forest in “Young Goodman Brown” and the sea in the selected chapters of Moby-Dick to elaborate the theme of seeking human nature.