ENGLISH 4030 FALL
2005 MIDTERM EXAM QUESTIONS
At Wednesday’s exam you will
be asked to explain four of the following excerpts, all but the last of
which are drawn from this semester’s reading.
You should try to describe what each statement means in the context from
which it is drawn, and the way in which it exemplifies or is connected to the
chief concerns of the writer.
1. Literary history (and, with that, the historicity of
literature) is a fiction. (Kolodny, “Dancing Through the Minefield”)
2. To put it another way, the field-coverage model solved
the problem of theory. (Graff, “Taking Cover in Coverage”)
3. Thus the “anxiety of influence” that a male poet
experiences is felt by a female poet as an even more primary “anxiety of
authorship”—a radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can never
become a “precursor” the act of writing will isolate or destroy her. (Gilbert and Gubar, from The Madwoman in the Attic)
4. We have introduced a new class of psychical material between the
manifest content of dreams and the conclusions of our enquiry: namely, their latent content, or (as we say) the
“dream-thoughts,’ arrived at by means of our procedure. (Freud, from The Interpretation of Dreams)
5. Few myths have been more advantageous to the ruling caste
than the myth of woman: it justifies all privileges and even authorizes their
abuse. (De Beauvoir, from The Second Sex)
6. Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of
individuals to their real conditions of existence. (Althusser, from Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses)
7. “Woman” is not each one of us, but the political and
ideological formation which negates “women” (the product of a relation of
exploitation). (Wittig, “One Is Not Born
a Woman”)
8. I would like to suggest that the question of judgment is
the wrong question to raise in the context of
canon-formation. The selection of texts
for preservation certainly does presuppose acts of judgment, which are indeed complex
psychic and social events; but these acts are necessary rather than sufficient
to constitute a process of canon-formation. (Guillory, “Canon”)
9. Androcentricity is a sufficient condition for the process
of immasculation. (Schweickart, “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of
10. …the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in
order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in
order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e. in order that he shall
make the gestures and actions of his subjection “all by himself.” (Althusser,
from Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses)
11. Here, then, literature serves as the unconscious for
psychoanalysis, representing mythically, through its plot and characters, that
which is repressed in conscious life. (Meltzer, “Unconscious”)
12.. The mode of production of material life conditions the
general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the
consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social
existence that determines their consciousness. (Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy)