American Literature / Unit 6 AML 0523 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Reading a Romantic Landscape
The idea
Romantic writers make landscape carry argument, and three questions get at it. First, what scale is the scene: a vast, overwhelming prospect is working the sublime and will be attached to awe, fear or the presence of something larger, while a composed, irregular, pleasing one is picturesque and will be attached to contentment or nostalgia. Second, what is the human figure doing in it: a solitary observer means the passage is about a mind, while a settlement in view means it is about what people do to places. Third, what is the verb tense and direction of change: Romantic American landscapes are usually described as vanishing, and the passage will register the loss as either tragic or inevitable. That last question is the one the exam asks most, because it separates celebration from elegy.
In practice
Scale, the figure in it, and the direction of change.
Where people slip
Do not read a description of wilderness as neutral scene-setting. In this period a forest is almost always an argument about what settlement costs, and the passage's attitude to that cost is the answer.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
Unlocks
- Nothing yet depends on this.
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