American Literature
Newmark

Essay Two: Due Wednesday, November 15
Four to Five Pages

Please choose one of the following questions. In your four- to five-page answer, please develop and support an argument drawn from the text. You are required to quote from your primary text on multiple occasions. Also, you must include two additional scholarly references, from which you quote at least twice each. Please include a Works Cited page (as page six).

1. Please choose two of Whitman’s poems and analyze them in the interest of describing the “myth of America” proposed by Whitman throughout his oeuvre. How does Whitman envision the social composition, the material status, and the physical geography of the American future? How is he a “prophet” of this future? Can you find evidence that his attitude about American prosperity and harmony shifted as a result of his Civil War experiences? What are America’s most powerful symbols for Whitman?

2. In “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Melville examines the effects of structures of capitalist democracy on employers and employees. Please take a close look at the relationship between the Lawyer and Bartleby. In whose hands does the power lay? How do inversions of expectations – regarding the relationships between employers and employees, Christians and the unfaithful, the constrained and the free – allow Melville to indict those who participate in the increasingly commercial pursuits of modern Americans? And further, with whom does the reader identify?

3. How is Booker T. Washington’s assertion that white Southerners should “cast down [their] buckets where [they] are” a nativist assertion? He describes clearly that white Southerners, in fact all white Americans, should trust the “love and fidelity” of black Americans and work with them to build the economy of the South. His argument is that black Americans are native too, something that cannot be said of white-skinned European immigrants. With such comments, what is Washington attempting to do? How does his use of a shared nativity allow him to unite black and white Americans, when in many other instances he appears content to keep the races separate? How will this shared nativity ultimately benefit both groups?