ENGLISH 5000 FINAL
EXAM SPRING
2014
Please
respond to each three of the
following questions in essays of about 1000-1200 words. Your essays should observe the conventions of
exam essays generally--they should have a strong, solid thesis supported by
numerous and specific examples. Feel
free to quote from anything we've read this semester, but be sure to identify
fully and correctly, in footnotes or endnotes or in-text references, anything
you do cite. A "works cited"
page is not necessary. Avoid duplication in your responses.
Exams,
submitted as a single electronic document, are due by 6PM, THURSDAY, MAY 15.
As final grades are due by the following Tuesday, there will be no
extensions available, except in truly extraordinary circumstances. Early
submissions are always welcome.
1. Read
the attached passages—the first from Milton's Paradise Lost, in which Eve recalls
for Adam the story of her creation (IV. 440-92), and the second from the Beach
Boys’ 1964 album “Shut
Down Vol 2.” (Listen here,
if you like.) Then write an essay in which you sketch out what a psychoanalytic
critique of each passage would look like, and what a feminist or
gender-oriented reading of each would look like. Some questions to consider: What details in
the passages would each approach focus on?
What would the goal of each reading be?
Where (if anywhere) would they coincide or cross paths, and where (if
anywhere) would they interpret differently?
(It might be easiest to treat each passage separately, but that’s more
of a guideline than a rule.)
2. In a
notorious critique of the use of psychoanalysis in interpretation
("Chaucer's Pardoner on the Couch: Psyche and Clio in Medieval Literary
Studies," Speculum 76 [2001]:
638-80), the medievalist Lee Patterson concludes with the following
observation:
As both scholars and especially teachers, we must inform
ourselves as fully and generously as we can of positions with which we find
ourselves out of sympathy. The tedious
jeremiads that have of late been declaiming on the "crisis of the
humanities" too often mistake vigorous diversity for armed warfare, too
often contrast current disagreements with a nostalgic lost consensus that never
existed in the first place. But if
critical vigor is to remain creative, if the fragmentation that the doomsayers
seem so eager to promote is to be avoided, adherents of every position must think through, with the scholarly thoroughness
for which medieval studies has always been justly admired, both the critical
practices they espouse and those they find unhelpful (680).
With this
injunction in mind, identify the critical school or approach that you have
found least congenial or convincing
this semester. Describe its tenets,
succinctly but thoroughly; then discuss your objections to it. And then--this is the most important part of
this question--describe the way in which an adherent of this school would
answer your objections, correct your misconceptions, or otherwise try to
overcome your lack of sympathy.
3. Find
three related essays from this semester’s syllabus and prepare a brief class
lecture/lesson plan on them. That is,
find three related items (and the relation is up to you—antagonistic,
congenial, superficially unrelated but connected by similar structures of argument)
that would be of value to a group of students (and the make-up of those
students is up to you—highschoolers, community college students, undergrads,
fellow MAs—though you should try to be realistic about their likely capacities)
for some reason (because they illustrate important or interesting concepts,
represent characteristic ways of thinking, provide some kind of important
challenge, have always bugged you), and draft a class presentation of the sort
that you would use to get that point (or those points) across to those
students, in a way that is both fair and accurate to the essays themselves and
clear about the larger critical, theoretical, and pedagogical issues involved
in the class of which they would hypothetically be a part.
4. In
1982 the distinguished, Pulitzer-Prize-winning critic Walter Jackson Bate
published an essay in Harvard Magazine
entitled “The Crisis in English Studies.” It is, as you will immediately note, another
polemical intervention into the “theory wars” of the 1980s, like the work of
Terry Eagleton and David Lodge, though unlike those two Bate takes a decidedly
conservative and Arnoldian stance on the state of literary studies. Your assignment is to write a response to
this essay in the form of a letter to the editor of the magazine. You are free to adopt any position you like
in the letter—you can praise Bate, or bury him—but in the course of your reply
you must support your argument by quoting
directly from at least six different texts we have read over the
course of the semester.