Note:  You should review the notes on Blackboard as well as some of the information on the links here.

I. Works Covered (included but not listed: class notes, transparencies, and reports from class members):

• Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher"; "Israfel";"To Helen"; "The Philosophy of Composition" 
• Emerson, Nature; "Hamatreya"; "Each and All" ;"Self-Reliance" ;"Thoreau"; "The Divinity School Address"
• Thoreau, Walden 
• Alcott, "Transcendental Wild Oats" 
• Douglass, Narrative 
• Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 

• Transcendentalism (including microcosm and macrocosm and other ideas)
• Gothic
• Basic principles of romanticism (attitudes toward childhood and humanity, for example)
• Structure and  imagery of Walden
• Rhetorical techniques of and information about  the slave narrative
• Relationships among authors 

•  Discuss the nineteenth-century conception of the artist in relation to “The Fall of the House of Usher” or “Israfel.”
• Relate Poe’s theories of composition to his works: does he practice what he preaches?
•  Explore literary motifs or idea (such as the doubling of images, the representation of consciousness, the idea of the quest) in one or more works we have read.
•  Discuss the role and depiction of women in Poe, Alcott, and Jacobs.
•  Compare the rhetorical techniques and the literary strategies of Douglass and Jacobs.
•  Compare and contrast the views on transcendentalism of any two of the following authors: Thoreau, Emerson, Alcott.
•  Relate a specific passage or chapter of Walden to the themes and ideas of the whole.
•  Relate one of Emerson’s poems to the ideas in Nature.
•  Examine Douglass’s Narrative as a document of discovery like Walden.
•  Discuss the view of nature in Alcott, Thoreau, Emerson, Poe.
•  Characterize and discuss views of slavery in  Jacobs and Douglass.