it's the end

I have really enjoyed the personal reflection aspects of this class and having an opportunity to sort of talk about success at CMU and what it means to succeed here and what it should mean to succeed here in a more open and revealing way. I think that I've learned a good deal about what I want and need to get out of my own personal experience here and I think that being in this class has helped me to try and strive more towards that personal picture of what my life here should be like rather than accepting the typical picture of Carnegie Mellon success, working until you can't work anymore.

That being said I am taking some academic sort of traditional knowledge out of this course as well, although I have learned a lot about myself over this past semester through this class I have also discovered some interesting aspects of 19th century literature. One thing that I hadn't quite understood about American literature during this time period was the sheer variety of genres available. For some reason I mostly thought of pamphlets, fliers, treatises and poetry as representing this century and not novels and short stories. When thinking of the 19th century as an era in American literature I tended to think of documents that surrounded major historical events like the Civil War rather than books that would have been read for pleasure. I was pleasantly surprised then to find myself reading Little Women, and just as surprised, if not quite as pleasantly, to discover Wide Wide World.

One thing that I would have liked from this class, and that maybe wasn't possible because of time or other constraints, would have been more information about the specific moment in time that received these works in the 19th century. Some of the author biographies, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's especially, did a good job with this, but while we covered the general makeup of the society during the 19th century I sort of would have liked more specific information about the historical events surrounding each book, which might have lent more weight to how the books reflect transformative moments in the century.

Overall I think that the class was pretty cohesive and engaging. I enjoyed class discussions and especially the somewhat unconventional assignments, and found the class to be somewhat refreshing rather than stressful.

Last Post

I feel like I learned a lot from the course and I really enjoyed some of the new learning experiences we went through. I especially liked how we went on nature walks to better understand the subjects that we were learning. I definitely understand much more about the 19th century lifestyle compared to before. The subjects that we covered over the semester were things that I might have never encountered in my life had I not taken this course.

In the beginning of the course, I had no idea what Transcendentalism was. Not because I had never heard of it before, or because there weren’t any definitions of it on Wikipedia, but because I just didn’t understand what it was actually supposed to do. “A movement against the current state of culture and society” sounded extremely general and vague to me. However, as we learned more about it, I actually found it to be interesting. Even though only a small group of people were involved in the movement, it made a significant impact, which is very impressive. Also, the fact that each individual contribution to the movement was documented and mattered makes Transcendentalism that much more interesting. I also like the effect in had on a family level. For example, Amos Alcott’s involvement in Transcendentalism affected his daughter Louisa’s life and perhaps even shaped her into the writer and character that she was.

One of my favorite books that we read this semester was Little Women. Prior to the course, I had read it before and watched theater versions of it, but re-reading it after learning about the 19th century made it much more fun. Learning about what experiences shaped the author and how the larger social values affected an individual’s life made reading the book more interesting. I knew that the book was based on Alcott’s life, but I didn’t realize how closely it reflected her life. I read in the introduction of the book that most of the incidents depicted in Little Women were actual experiences that Alcott and her sisters went through. It made the story much more real.

UNTITLED By clare graziano

Spinning through the daze of purple

The haze of anger of anguish and confusion

A color that plagues my hopes with

A feeling of failure

Tears of hurt

Lost in zeros and zzz’s

Knowing the answer is

Refusal

Time for change

But as it continues to rain

I feel the time and place

Stray to permanent pieces of a frame.

Boxing in my moments and my shape

Lost in the words of no’s and can’ts

Rules that have lost their meanings

And purposes that are without

What to do and say when

Big puppy eyes demand answers

And the thoughts of when you could

Seem as old as the man on the corner

Money gone like Mondays

Trust like Tuesday s

But Wednesday never seems to come

Stagnate in the week

In the month in the year.

Its time for change

To cut way the abuse

The angry reality and

The men that defined a period

Saddest at the loneliest moments

Ready for enlightenment

A moment when the clouds open

And the sun shines in reason

When will it come will it be soon

Or like the winter is it here to stay

To remind me of the mistakes I

Have made

Breaths of snow of rain of hail

But the breath of green is the last one

I can take

I will wake

But know that soon I will break

The soul is gone

The heart is cracked

And all that is left are

The books

That holds up the stack of lists

The goals and dreams

The thoughts and ideas

That once made a girl

Just like me feel free.

Reflections

So my experience in the class has been an interesting one. In our discussions we talked a lot about the over-worked Carnegie Mellon student who desperately needs to take a break from his or her computer, put down the problem set, and venture into the woods to reconnect with nature. We talked about how there was a necessity for relaxation and reflection on this campus, and while I initially jumped to disagree (I am a extremely motivated person and take deep pride in my successes within the institution) I would have to argue, upon reflection, that this class succeeded in its goal.

No, while I am not the type of person to drop every thing for two hours to do “nothing” on the floor of my dorm room (with the exception of my weekly meditations—but I actually view those a productive [for my mental well-being perhaps]), and while it is debatable whether I will force myself to lessen my load of responsibilities anytime soon, something I was extremely thankful for regarding this class was the way in which it really was my three hours of relaxation in the week. This is not to suggest that we as students were given a lesser workload, but rather that the readings and assignments we were given were intellectually stimulating but at the same time not stressful or violently demanding. I came to class each day having not specifically planned topics for conversation, but instead, just allowing my ideas and comments to flow naturally into discussion.

This may seem crazy to you, but these are the things that I do on a daily basis.

I am an extremely anal person. Organization and reliability are everything to me and I hate letting down those who trust me with responsibility and their confidence. That being said, I have noticed that this class has been a refuge for me this year. In our classroom space I was able to escape my own obsessive tendencies (checking email every five minutes, writing down each word of a comment I feel the need to make in class before saying it, etc..)

So cheers to that, my friends. I may not have formed a best friendship with the Transcendentalists or Thoreau, but this class has definitely caused me to take a few deep breaths—and honestly, any progress is progress.

Final Blog Post

I'll admit that I was apprehensive about taking a class on 19th century literature. I wasn't sure how interesting literature written in 1800s could be. To my surprise I found that the themes found in many of the works we read our relevant to current culture and even my own life. I have thoroughly enjoyed the class...well with the exception of the poetry unit, largely because the structure was completely different than other classes I've taken at CMU. I tend to be pretty quiet in class, but in this course I fell compelled to participate in the discussion and it was a new experience to voice my interpretations of texts and bounce ideas off others.

Exposure to the Transcendental Movement was probably what I benefited most from this course. I knew very little about transcendentalists before reading Thoreau, but I learned was striking. It was incredible how such a small, interconnected group of people relentlessly advocated for change, particularly with the way man treats nature. The transcendentalists seemed to be so far ahead of their time and so in sync with the environmental argument today.

I'll definitely take a great deal away from this course. On a personal level I feel much more comfortable joining class discussions because of this class. I've also learned to examine texts in relation to the socio-cultural context of the time and how the time period and culture effects the text.

Why Did I Never Realize How Cool the 19th Century Was?

Before I took this class, I wasn’t aware of how much revolutionary social change took place during the 19^th century. That’s a little odd, because I knew that this was when the civil war happened and when the first wave of feminism began. Before reading the books for this class, however, I hadn’t connected the two movements in my head, learned about any other attempts at social change, like Transcendentalism, that took place during the 19^th century, or thought about the significance of the fact that several huge social movements began around the same time.

The readings for this class gave me a sense of how many people in the 19^th century not only wanted things to change, but pushed for that change through literature. Transcendentalists like Thoreau and Emerson wanted us to live in nature with more awareness so that we could learn to respect it and each other; Jacobs, Douglass, and countless other abolitionists wanted to see slavery end and tried to bring this about by showing that slaves are people, too; Charlotte Perkins Gilman demonstrated the dangers of the rest cure and tried to communicate that entrapping and limiting women only leads to suffering; Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson synthesized various parts of these statements and condensed them into poems.

Transcendentalism, Abolitionism, and Feminism are very diverse movements, but at base, I think they are all organized around similar principles. Each movement points to the essential humanity—and by extension the right to equal and decent treatment—of its members. I think this is true of Transcendentalism even thought it didn’t campaign for one specific group (though Thoreau was definitely anti-slavery). One of the things that I took away from Transcendentalist writing was the belief that we’re all equally capable of establishing our own relationships with God in our own individual ways. To me, this implies that we’re all equal, because we all have equal access to God and receive equal amounts of his love. This seems like a very powerful argument for respecting every one’s right to live the way they want to, and to abolish oppressive hierarchies.

I’ve always thought of the last half of the 20^th century, particularly the ‘60s, as the revolutionary moment in American history. And while it’s true that this was a period of huge social change, I think that the 19^th century was equally important. I also don’t think that the ‘60s could possibly have happened without the writers, artists, and political figures who started these 19^th century revolutions.

last blog post

I’m glad that I had the opportunity to take this course. I got to read Little Women – and I enjoyed it in spite of myself. Sure, Thoreau might not have been the popular guy in class, but he definitely had opinions, and he wasn’t afraid of who he was. I’m learning not to be so afraid of that, lately. Although I can’t credit Thoreau with my enlightenment, that is nonetheless my positive parting gift to him. And I think that if there is one thing I definitely want to take away from this class, it’s that I don’t have to rush things. I remember when the prospective students were in class, and Professor Newman was talking to the one girl’s father as I left the room about just enjoying the time that you have in college, that we were all “running toward” something, and that we’d see when we got there that it wasn’t what we thought it would be. Well, I have pretty much three weeks left in college. And I’ve noticed that I always start to miss things just as I realize that I’m not going to have them much longer. But I’m trying not to get too freaked out about what comes next, and just take one day at a time.

On another note, I also enjoyed reading Whitman and Dickinson, because I can’t say that I was overexposed to them in college or in high school. I really felt that the chosen poems were saying something that I needed or wanted to hear at this point. Our discussion about Dickinson on Monday really helped me see her poems in a different way too: I really liked Professor Newman’s description of Mother Goose, and I really hadn’t read her poems as so, so dark when I read them by myself – for whatever reason.