Ryan Ryersen 11-3-16

Today. in class we looked further into tons of different pieces of text. Tone is now a text is stated and it relies on adverbs. Today we particularly looked at how tones can intensify, weaken or completely change throughout a text. Today we particularly looked at The Tell Tale Heart, by Edgar Allen Poe. This story is considered part of dark romanticism. The idea of romanticism is this value of feeling as opposed to reason. When talking about romanticism I usually think of a text about nature or feeling. Which makes it strange to categorize The Tell Tale Heart, a story about a man murdering somebody in the same category as a text such as Rip Van Winkle, by Washington Irving a much more light-hearted text.  We analyzed The Tell Tale Heart for elements of romanticism and determined whether they had a more positive or negative tone. Most people found the tones to be negative due to the nature of the story.  I found the first element of romanticism,  values feeling over reason, in the story with a negative tone. I found this when the narrator is describing the reason as to why he wants to kill the man. He said the man “He had never wronged me”(Poe) but his eyes made him feel evil in his gut. This shows the the narrator is following his gut over reason.  This leads to the last idea of romanticism, the idea of absolute truth. The idea that there are things such as pure good, pure evil etc. A rationalist would would find that most people and things are not absolutely one thing for they are a mixture of many attributes. These opposing views show yet another difference between rationalism and romanticism.