Essay Assignment
For this assignment, you are required to write a paper on a topic relevant to the content of our course.
You may choose one of the topics below or design your own, though if you choose the latter option, please run your topic by me.
If you are enrolled in, your paper should be about 1,000 words;Students should write a paper of about 1,500 words.
Keep in mind that this paper is not meant to be a research essay but rather a close interpretation of the works you're focusing on; all of the evidence to support your points should come from the works themselves.
1) Write a close comparison of two of the works we have looked at. You may choose, for example, two landscape paintings; two poems; or comparable passages from Emerson and Thoreau; or Darwin and Thoreau.
2) Choose a landscape painting that is not discussed in Landscape and Western Art and apply one of the concepts in the book to that painting.
Your choice of painting must be approved by me before you begin work, and when you hand your paper in, you should also either provide a copy of the painting for me or a URL at which I can view it online.
3) Discuss one of the Romantic poems with reference to Burke's analysis of the sublime.
4) Discuss one of the landscape paintings we have looked at with reference to Burke's analysis of the sublime.
5) Choose either Emerson or Thoreau, and discuss the affinities that writer has to the science of the time, with specific reference to Darwin.
6) In what way or ways do the poems by Whitman convey the ideas of American Transcendentalism apparent in the readings by Emerson and Thoreau?
7) Making reference to chapter 8 of Landscape and Western Art and our Darwin reading, discuss the ways in which the landscape paintings featured there are like and not like works of science.
Focus on one or two paintings for illustrative details to support your points.
8) Discuss the differences in the use of mountain imagery in traditional Chinese landscape paintings and those of the Hudson River School, making reference to at least one representative work from each genre.
9) Choose a poem and landscape painting that you feel have affinities with one another, and discuss these in detail.