Mid Term Essay: Here is what my professor is asking of me. I have no clue what to do with this.Im only a junior in highschool taking an advanced Brit Lit college course.The prompt is the following:
M.H Abrams contends that romanticism represend one stage in the "progressive secularization" of western thought. Secular thinkers, however, can no more free themselves of the Judeo-Christian culture than Christain thinkers can free temselves from classical and pagan thought. "much of what diistinguishes writers I call 'Romantic," Abrams thorizes, derives from the fact that they undertook , whatever their religous creed or lack of creed, to save traditional concepts, schemes, and values which had been which had been based on the of the Creator to his creatures and creation, but to refomulate them within the prevailing two-term system of subject and object, ego and non-ego, the human mind or conciosness and its transaction with nature." The romantics attemepted to do this, Abrahms claims , by the "displcement from a suprnatureal to a natural frame of reference" [Natural Supernaturalism, p. 13]. As Carlyle exhorted his contemporaries, "help us to embody the divine Spirit of the [Judeo-Christain] Religion in a new Mythus, in a new vehicle and vesture, that our Souls, otherwise too like perishing, may live" [Sartor Resartus, "The Everlasting Yea"]
By way of illustrating his thesis that represents the " secularization' of Westerm thought--the embodying or evocation of the supernatural in a new mythus (the natural)-- Abrams places side by side passsages from St. Augustine's Confessions and Wordsworth's The Prelude.
EXAM: Write a 5-page essay (typed explaining (1) yhe rationale for the romantics' reformulation of the old mythus within a "two-term system' (I--Not-I, self -- other, man - nature) Abrams' thesis or to modify his assumptions or his interpretatioin of romanticism (a parilous undertaking!).
Purpose of Exam: (1) to determine your knowledge of the "facts" regarding refomulation as outlined in the prose writes read, and (2) to guage your sense of these facts (i.e., what these facts signify to you regarding the way in which nintheenth-century writers struggled with reformulation and the extent to which theey succeeded in defining a new Mythus).
Methodology: After you've brood about the two passages below and noted obvious and subtle differences regarding the relationship between man and nature in a theocentric as opposed to a humanistic system; after you've reviewed the prose we've read to outline the romantic rationale from reformulation and the poetry we've read to map out the various ways individual poets dealt with naturalizing the supernatural; and when , as the result of the Mighty Being's epiphanically awakening, you're sufficiently recovered from the week-long migraine consequent upon such review, spend two hours writing out your inspired essay. spend another hour profing your draft and incorporatioin primary textual evidents(no need for secondary resaerch. I'm intrested in reading YOUR sense of facts) to support our positioin.
(sorry for any typos my keppad is broken)
M.H Abrams contends that romanticism represend one stage in the "progressive secularization" of western thought. Secular thinkers, however, can no more free themselves of the Judeo-Christian culture than Christain thinkers can free temselves from classical and pagan thought. "much of what diistinguishes writers I call 'Romantic," Abrams thorizes, derives from the fact that they undertook , whatever their religous creed or lack of creed, to save traditional concepts, schemes, and values which had been which had been based on the of the Creator to his creatures and creation, but to refomulate them within the prevailing two-term system of subject and object, ego and non-ego, the human mind or conciosness and its transaction with nature." The romantics attemepted to do this, Abrahms claims , by the "displcement from a suprnatureal to a natural frame of reference" [Natural Supernaturalism, p. 13]. As Carlyle exhorted his contemporaries, "help us to embody the divine Spirit of the [Judeo-Christain] Religion in a new Mythus, in a new vehicle and vesture, that our Souls, otherwise too like perishing, may live" [Sartor Resartus, "The Everlasting Yea"]
By way of illustrating his thesis that represents the " secularization' of Westerm thought--the embodying or evocation of the supernatural in a new mythus (the natural)-- Abrams places side by side passsages from St. Augustine's Confessions and Wordsworth's The Prelude.
EXAM: Write a 5-page essay (typed explaining (1) yhe rationale for the romantics' reformulation of the old mythus within a "two-term system' (I--Not-I, self -- other, man - nature) Abrams' thesis or to modify his assumptions or his interpretatioin of romanticism (a parilous undertaking!).
Purpose of Exam: (1) to determine your knowledge of the "facts" regarding refomulation as outlined in the prose writes read, and (2) to guage your sense of these facts (i.e., what these facts signify to you regarding the way in which nintheenth-century writers struggled with reformulation and the extent to which theey succeeded in defining a new Mythus).
Methodology: After you've brood about the two passages below and noted obvious and subtle differences regarding the relationship between man and nature in a theocentric as opposed to a humanistic system; after you've reviewed the prose we've read to outline the romantic rationale from reformulation and the poetry we've read to map out the various ways individual poets dealt with naturalizing the supernatural; and when , as the result of the Mighty Being's epiphanically awakening, you're sufficiently recovered from the week-long migraine consequent upon such review, spend two hours writing out your inspired essay. spend another hour profing your draft and incorporatioin primary textual evidents(no need for secondary resaerch. I'm intrested in reading YOUR sense of facts) to support our positioin.
(sorry for any typos my keppad is broken)
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