Unit 2

Georgia Performance Standard

ELAALRL2 The student identifies, analyzes, and applies knowledge of theme in a work of American literature and provides evidence from the work to support understanding.

A theme is the hidden lesson or moral that the story tries to teach you. It will not say the theme straight forward, it will hint at it. The standard is saying that using examples from the text you can prove what the theme is.

Rip Van Winkle

The romantic part to Rip Van Winkle is when he makes it to the mountain where he gets tired and decides to take a rest. he helps this old Dutchman to carry his keg of liquor he hears what he believes is the rolling thunders that can be heard from the village when actually it is people playing a game of nine pins. He ends up drinking a flagon of this drink and ends up sleeping for about 20 years. no one can actually sleep this long with out something happening to him he would starve or die of dehydration eventually and before that he should wake up. But on terms of romantic these days there was a little anti-romantic story here, when Rip finally gets back to the village he eventually finds out what happened to his wife and "found relief in this new information."

Thanatopsis Movie

This poem has the three ideas of Romanticism throughout the whole thing. Imagination has to be used during most of the poem. It explains, in one whole section, what mother nature is saying to you. You would definantly need alot of imagination to even grasp a non-living thing talking to you. That particular part also could represent the nature part of Romanticism but he also mentions it later when he describes that you grew up from the earth and when your life is over you will return to it. As for the promotion of the common people, he mentions that it doesn't matter who you are, you will lie with the kings, wise men, and good people that have lived on this earth.

Transcendentalism

Nature

This piece of writing mainly focuses on how beautiful nature is and how it looks different from person to person due to their mood. "Yet it is certain that the power of to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both. It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For, nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then, there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population." This big part of the story really stuck out to me. You couldn't just put part of it in as it wouldn't make much sense otherwise. But this piece is saying that nature could look different from day to day as it has the same mood swings a person does but also that each individual would percieve the look of nature differently from one another anyway due to their own feelings on that particular day.

Self-Reliance

This piece of writing mainly focuses on the person themselves as a higher being if you were to put forth effort to be exactly what you are. "There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion;" When a man is still growing up and learning responsibilities he would learn that someone needs to be himself. If you are copying someone then you are committing suicide because you kill your true self to be like someone else. Same goes with wanting to be someone else. It doesn't matter whether or not you make stupid decisions you, yourself, need to deal with the consequences same if you do something good.


Wilderness

The man in this video enjoyed the wilderness. Transcendentalists enjoyed nature too, and believed that god could communicate through nature, among other things. If a man was close to nature he would be close to god. This man lived in the nature and off the nature for about 30 years. The man took only a little bit of tools so that he could build his own cabin. He built everything that he needed except a few items like his gun, canoe, and bullets. This man loved nature a lot so he decided to find out if he was able to endure what it could throw at him for one year and deal with his own company for that long. He made it to his goal 30 times over.