Module 2 Homework

Please respond to each of the following questions (approximately 250 words each). Please choose one question to answer at greater length (approximately 500 words). Answers should be thoughtful and demonstrate serious reflection on course readings and class discussion. Each short answer will be worth 10 points; the long answer will be worth 20 points.

1. What determines a person's character, according to Crèvecoeur? Would you expect him to espouse assimilationist or racialist views regarding Native Americans and Africans in the American colonies? Why? (You will want to refer back to the Belmessous article from Module 1 to answer this question.)

2. How does Chateaubriand complicate a schema in which civilization=good and savagery=bad? How does he change both the values and the definitions of those two key concepts (without simply reversing them)? How do racial categories fit into his thinking? How does religion fit in?

3. To what extent is race a fiction in Marie? Do the stories of slavery/abolition and Marie/George provide contradictory accounts of race in America?

4. What is the role of the American wilderness in Atala and Marie? What kind of "character" is it and why does it play such a big role in both books? How does it figure in the characters' experiences? To what extent is it a place of danger, exile, freedom, or solitude? What relationships exist between nature and civilization as places, rather than  as values?

5. Both Chateaubriand and Beaumont used their travels in the United States to think about the values and conflicts of French society. Choose and explain one example of how thinking about racial divisions that were completely different than the ones that existed in France helped them to conceptualize questions relevant to the French context.