CSU Global Writing Center

Answer five of the six following questions.  For full credit, use documented quotes from the readings for full credit.  This essay will be submitted to Turnitin. .  Margaret Fuller 1. A crucial paragraph in “Fourth of July” seems to veer away from the expected path of the essay–public history and public obligations–emphasize that “private lives, more than public measures must be the salvation of the country.”  How does this observation connect to Emerson’s emphasis on the solitary self in Nature and “Self Reliance” and to the Thoreau chapter “Solitude” in Walden? 2. Fuller’s review of Douglass, for all its praise, describes the Narrative as having “torrid energy and saccharine fullness,” and it pauses to chide Garrison’s introductory remarks for their “usual over emphatic style.”  What do these observations suggest about Fuller’s temperament?  Do they dilute the praise of Douglass’s book, or do they have some other effect? Fanny Fern 3. How would you describe the pace of a Fanny Fern narrative?  How does her writing style compare to that of Emerson or Thoreau?  There’s a hectic, breathless quality to Fern in “Aunt Hetty on Matrimony” and “Hungry Husbands,” and that gives the impression of someone talking very fast.  What are the effects of sheer velocity on satire, and how might this speed strike a reading audience?  4. “Aunt Hetty” seems like a stock figure from Anglo-American comedy, the blunt older woman who speaks her mind in rambling monologues to relatives and friends.  What can we imagine as the context in which Aunt Hetty speaks?  Why does most of this monologue come at us as one huge paragraph?  How does the sketch induce us to laugh at Aunt Hetty and her opinions or at the institution of marriage–or at both at the same time?  What are the advantages of assigning these opinions to a quirky relative?  Why doesn’t Fern use a similar strategy in “Hungry Husbands”?  Henry David Thoreau 5. How do the effects Thoreau achieves in “Resistance to Civil Government” differ from those Emerson creates in “Self-Reliance”?  How are the two works conceptually similar but technically different?  Some readers find it hard to follow Emerson’s logic, but not Thoreau’s.  How does his manage a happy balance between logical and analogical thinking?  6. Based on the opening paragraph of “Resistance to Civil Government,” how would you describe Thoreau’s voice?  What phrases, in particular, have a sense of urgency to them, and why might he have wanted to make readers feel that?