Dolmii Remeliik
Professor Shelley Rodrigo
ENH 241
June 30, 2007
A Reflection on the Enlightenment Period
The Enlightenment period is also known as the Age of Reason. Its main focus is politics and religion. One of the main concerns during the enlightenment period is America’s independence from European influence. This concern is evident in Thomas Paine’s writing, John Adam’s politics, and other writers and thinkers. Therefore, the enlightenment period hosts the era of the Declaration of Independence. In addition, enlightenment writers and thinkers focused on the achievement of liberty, justice, and equality for all.
The enlightenment period is quite different in its approach to understanding as compared to the Puritanism and Romantic approach. Puritans strongly believed in the effectiveness and influence of God on the world, their lives, and therefore, in their writings. The Puritans interpreted all things as symbols with deeper spiritual meanings.
The Romantic period is time of imagination and also of spiritual meaning. In contrast to the enlightenment period, romantic literature praised imagination over reason, emotions over logic, and intuition over science. The ‘critique of slavery’ period is a period that dealt with extreme suffering and inhumanity compared to the other periods. Literature, during this era, is primarily based on the abolitionist movement.
However, all literary period—Puritanism, Enlightenment, Romantic, Transcendentalism, and the Critique of Slavery—share common principles and goals. Each period relate to one another. For example, political and social causes, as well as abolitionist movements, became dominant themes and subject matters on romantic writings. Also, the ideals of the enlightenment period are as much the ideals of the writers (and slaves) of the slavery period.
Understanding the enlightenment period broadens the understanding of all four literary periods. Each period or all periods, somehow, has had an influence over one another. In understanding the literary themes, the enlightenment period is the period of the American Dream, a dream of independence, liberty, justice and equality. There is also much diversity as the country had once been colonized by the Americans and Europeans.
If I had to write about one of the period’s authors, I would have liked to write about Benjamin Franklin and Phillis Wheatley. Franklin because of his political views, his intellect, being a man of science, his perfected writings (which he realized would best deliver his ideas), and his unselfish ways (evident in his self-help book, Poor Richard’s Almanac). Finally, Wheatley because of her remarkable talent in writing and her focus on religion and morals in her poetry. Her poetry would help me understand the religious aspect of the enlightenment period while Franklin’s book titled Poor Richard’s Almanac, would help me understand the rationality aspect of the enlightenment period, and hopefully enable me to learn about the political aspect as well.

Jonathan Kupetz
Shelley Rodrigo
ENH241
30 June 2008
The age of Enlightenment, or the age better known as the American Enlightenment can most easily be defined, and in the easiest terms, as an era in which intellectual or philosophical developments and movements were the basis for authority and belief. These principals gave birth to such great documents as the Declaration of Independence. When Thomas Jefferson wrote this piece of literature...this stentorian admonishment to our country's independence, the suffocation of liberty, he wrote in means that would stir no stigma, or call no cause for future philosophers to analyze. What he also wrote, even more stimulating is an autobiography. The part that is so interesting is that someone can actually live a life worth writing about that will be read 200 years later, but of course that goes without saying when someone writes a biography about themselves, or does it? It also goes without noting that when Thomas Jefferson wrote his autobiography in 1821 he wasn’t envisioning his work, or life to be measured as it still is…he was simply writing of his experiences as a world leader, and revolutionist. The thematic wake and influence that it has had on subsequent generations was beyond his pen, and while he wrote with the intent of nothing more than perhaps an “Enlightening” biography, I’m sure that he knew that his accomplishments would have a seismic feeling throughout time. In the eighteenth century most viewed this time as a time when significant reformations were in order, and when American customs and morals were under strict questioning. It was because of this that the Enlightenment is synonymous with, and often referred to as the Age of Reason. It is this period that modernism owes a great deal of its history, and it is this era in which our founding fathers, American Presidents, and inventors owe their success and influence. Like the other literary periods in the early history of the United States, this era stood at the forefront for change, and in turn influenced the succeeding eras, and authors that encompass American Literature.