QUESTIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS FOR RALPH WALDO EMERSON’S “THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR”
QUESTIONS AND ASSIGNMENTS FOR RALPH WALDO EMERSON’S “THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR”
Read Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “The American Scholar.” Below, you’ll find some questions that invite you to work further with the selection.
QUESTIONS FOR A SECOND READING
1. Emerson’s prose is difficult to read and the difficulty is not simply the difficulty of long sentences or big words. Emerson’s writing is difficult because it is unusual. His sentences and paragraphs don’t do what we are trained to think sentences and paragraphs are supposed to do. As readers, we are not trained to read him.
Question
23.1
undefined. As you reread, see if you can derive a “theory” to account for Emerson’s prose. What are his characteristic sentences? How are they constructed? How are they voiced? How would you outline or describe a characteristic paragraph? If you take a section, say the section he marks as section II, how is it organized? How does he get from paragraph to paragraph and from beginning to end? And how is this system different from the system you were taught in school — as both a reader and a writer? (As an exercise, you might want to try to write an Emersonian paragraph.)
[Points: 10]
Question
23.2
undefined. At the end of his essay, Emerson says, “If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.” As you reread this essay, what do you come to understand about “instinct,” as Emerson refers to it? Could you say, for example, that Emerson is arguing that every student should be free to do what he or she wants? If so, what role would teachers or writers play in a person’s education? If not, what should a student do other than take notes, read carefully, and follow the rules?
[Points: 10]
Question
23.3
undefined. The scholar in this essay is both a person who learns and a person who teaches. (The latter is described most fully in the section on the scholar’s duties.) How does Emerson describe the best possible relationship between a scholar and his or her teachers? How does he describe the best possible relationship between the scholar and those he or she would teach? In what ways, if at all, would the scholar change as he or she moved from the role of student into the role of teacher?
[Points: 10]
Question
23.4
undefined. In section I of the essay, Emerson charts the growth of a young person’s mind and at the end concludes that, if all goes well, “Know Thyself” and “Study Nature” become “at last one maxim.” What does he mean by this? It sounds lofty and pious, but if you take your own case or the case of a child you know well, how might you use section I to comment on current practices in American education? What would be your most useful and powerful examples?
[Points: 10]
Question
23.5
undefined. In section II of the essay, Emerson talks about the relationship between the scholar and the “mind of the past” and, in particular, about the proper and improper uses of books. Books, he says, “are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst.” What do you suppose Emerson would say is the best use of this essay? As you read through the essay, what kind of reader does Emerson invite you to be? What would you have to do — specifically and at specific places — to be an “Emersonian” reader of Emerson?
[Points: 10]
Question
23.6
undefined. Emerson says that in the three numbered sections of his essay he has “spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by books and by action.” Let’s say that you wanted to take Emerson as a guide and imagine an appropriate “Emersonian” curriculum or institution. Write an essay (cast, perhaps, as a position paper or an article for an alumni magazine) that uses “The American Scholar” to comment specifically on the curriculum at your own school. (It might be useful to go to your college catalogue, or whatever documents your school has prepared to explain its curriculum, to see what they have to say about the role of nature, books, and action in a person’s education.)
[Points: 10]
Question
23.7
undefined. Let’s imagine Emerson himself as a teacher who wants to have his students read “The American Scholar” (perhaps along with some other selections from this anthology). What kind of assignment might he give? What, that is, would he ask you to do with the readings? What would he do as your teacher? Write an essay that considers both how, in practice, a modern teacher might encourage an Emersonian use of books and why, so far as you are concerned, a modern teacher might want to. Further, you might want to consider the challenges and limits of his approach as well.
[Points: 10]
3. There is no question but that Emerson’s text is difficult to read, and the difficulty is not simply a matter of big or unusual words. The text just doesn’t do what we expect it to do. Some of its elusiveness can be attributed to the time during which it was written — expectations were different then — but this should not keep you from making the most of your own responses as a reader. For one thing, it’s not completely true; not everyone in the 1830s wrote like Emerson. For another, it assumes that a non-specialist cannot or should not read works from the past. One way of imagining your connection to the 1830s is to imagine that your encounter with this text is somehow typical — that you, too, are Emerson’s contemporary.
Take a section of the essay that you find characteristically difficult. (Section II is an interesting one to work with.) Reread it, paying close attention to the experience of reading. Where are you surprised? Where are you confused? How might this be part of a strategy, part of Emerson’s design? What is Emerson doing? What is he asking you to do? This should be an exercise in close reading. You want to pay attention to how paragraph leads to paragraph, sentence leads to sentence; to notice the ways examples or statements are offered and taken away.
Question
23.8
undefined. Write an essay in which you describe in close detail the story of what it was like to read this section of “The American Scholar.” Tell a story of reading, one where you and Emerson are the main characters — complicated characters, not stick figures (the Innocent Child and the Inscrutable Genius). When you are done, see what connections you can make with Emerson’s argument — with what he says is a proper relation between readers and writers. In what ways might his difficulties and yours be said to be unfortunate? In what ways might they be signs of his attempts to get the language (and a reader) to do what he wants them to do?
[Points: 10]
4. It’s obvious that Emerson’s essay is addressed to men. A text such as this can be an occasion for a close reading of the ways in which an author creates or imagines gender — and all of the social characteristics associated with it, especially what an author considers to be “natural” to men and women. It’s possible to think of an author’s claims for something as being “natural,” in other words, as a device that both masks and reveals social attributes that could be said to be constructed through culture. The word “natural,” or an author’s implications that some things are “natural” to men or women, can become, then, a site for a close study of the beliefs and values an author might be assuming about men and women or about manliness and womanliness.
This assignment has two parts. The first invites you to work with Emerson’s “The American Scholar” to study how he figures what is “natural” for men, and, therefore, by implication what might be (or might not be) natural for women. The second part asks you to situate this understanding of Emerson’s construction of men and manliness — and his indirect construction of women and womanliness — in a larger context defined by something else he has written.
For the first part of this assignment, then, pick two or three passages from Emerson’s “The American Scholar” where you understand him to be writing about what he takes to be “natural” to men or manliness. Write an essay in which you discuss the assumptions about men and women he reveals in these passages. What, too, do the passages mask or hide about his assumptions about women?
Question
23.9
undefined. To complete the second part of this assignment, you will need to go to the library, or to use the Internet, to locate another essay by Emerson that has to do with education and culture, so that you can enlarge your critique of gender in Emerson’s writings to include his figuring of what’s “natural” to men and women in this additional text. Once you have read and studied this additional text, write a second section to your essay in which you extend your discussion of Emerson. How does your second reading inflect your first one of “The American Scholar”? What else can you say now? Or what do you want to say differently? You’ll want to work closely with two or three significant passages from each of the texts you’ve chosen, but even before you do that, you’ll want to choose these texts carefully, so that they allow you to write about how he figures what he sees as “natural” for men and women.
[Points: 10]
1. In each of the three sections of “The American Scholar,” Emerson charts out influences on the mind and spirit of the scholar. In section I, for example, he says, “the first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. . . . The scholar must needs stand wistful and admiring before this great spectacle.” “The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar,” he says in section II, “is the mind of the Past, — in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of institutions, that mind is inscribed.” And in the third section Emerson argues against the image of the scholar as “a recluse, a valetudinarian, — as unfit for any handiwork or public labor” in favor of the scholar as a “man of action” in the world.
Several other authors in this anthology also show their concern for the education of young Americans, although they are writing from different points in history with different investments in the classroom as a site of learning, and they are writing about a different set of students from the white elite who attended Harvard in 1837. For example, you could turn to any of the following: Gloria Anzaldúa, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” (p. 24 of the print book); Joshua Foer, “The End of Remembering” (p. 159 of the print book); Richard Miller, “The Dark Night of the Soul”; Walker Percy, “The Loss of the Creature” (p. 297 of the print book); Richard Rodriguez, “The Achievement of Desire” (p. 336 of the print book); Kathryn Schulz, “Evidence” (p. 360 of the print book); or David Foster Wallace, “Authority and American Usage.” (p. 386 of the print book)
Question
23.10
undefined. Write an essay in which you respond to Emerson as a student, as an American scholar of the second decade of the twenty-first century, as a student who has just read one of the other selections listed above, and as a student who also has a mind of his or her own. Emerson speaks to the importance of nature, the past, and action. What are the major concerns of this other writer? And what about you—where do you locate yourself in this discussion? How do you understand the influences today, for good or for ill, that will shape the American scholars of your generation?
[Points: 10]
Question
23.11
undefined. Emerson, in “The American Scholar,” seems to be arguing for freedom or for a form of education that allows students to be free. A similar capsule summary could be given of the essays by Paulo Freire, “The ‘Banking’ Concept of Education” (p. 214 of the print book); Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone” (p. 315 of the print book); and Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Racial Identities.” (p. 40 of the print book) If we grant them this common ground or common motive, it is interesting to consider the significant differences in their arguments. Write an essay in which you compare Emerson’s essay with one of the other three. What does “freedom” come to mean for each? What does this freedom have to do with knowledge or vocation or method or whatever it is that a student is supposed to gain by an education?
[Points: 10]