ENGLISH 4030 FALL 2005 FINAL EXAM QUESTIONS
Ten of the following passages, all drawn from this semester’s reading, will appear on Monday’s exam, and you will be asked to explain six or seven of them. You should try to describe what each statement means in the context in which it appears, and the way in which it exemplifies or is connected to the chief concerns of the writer.
1. As his proposition approaches adequacy, he will find, not only that it has increased greatly in length, but that it has begun to fill itself up with reservations and qualifications--and most significant of all--the formulator will find that he has himself begun to fall back upon metaphors of his own in his attempt to indicate what the poem "says." In sum, his proposition, as it approached adequacy, ceases to be a proposition. (Brooks, "The Heresy of Paraphrase")
2. Critical inquiries are not settled by consulting the oracle. (Wimsatt and Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy")
3. In other words, in the analysis of these lines from Lycidas I did what critics always do: I "saw" what my interpretive principles permitted or directed me to see, and then I tuned around and attributes what I had "seen" to a text and an intention. (Fish, "Interpreting the Variorum")
4. The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. Since I mean by sign the whole that results from the associating of the signifier with the signified, I can simply say: the linguistic sign is arbitrary. (Saussure, from Course in General Linguistics)
5. A wrestler can irritate or disgust, he never disappoints, for he always accomplishes completely, by a progressive solidification of signs, what the public expects of him. (Barthes, "The World of Wrestling")
6. The grammatical model of the question becomes rhetorical not when we have, on the one hand, a literal meaning and on the other hand a figural meaning, but when it is impossible to decide by grammatical or other linguistic devices which of the two meanings (that can be entirely incompatible) prevails. Rhetoric radically suspends logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration. (DeMan, "Semiology and Rhetoric")
7. …the detective's act consists in annihilating the
libidinal possibility, the "inner" truth that each one in the group might
have been the murderer (i.e, that we are
murderers in the unconscious of our desire, insofar as the actual murderer
realizes the desire of the group constituted by the corpse) on the level of
"reality" (where the culprit singled out is the murderer and thus the guarantee of our innocence). Herein lies the fundamental untruth, the existential falsity of the
detective's "solution": the detective plays upon the difference
between the factual truth (the accuracy of facts) and the "inner"
truth concerning our desire. (Žižek, "
8. In other words, acts and gestures, articulated and
enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core,
an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality
within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality. If the "cause" of desire, gesture
and act can be localized within the "self" of the actor, then the
political regulations and disciplinary practices which produce that ostensibly
coherent gender are
effectively displaced from view. (
9. Although it is true that the prison punished delinquency, delinquency is for the most part produced in and by an incarceration which, ultimately, prison perpetuates in its turn. The prison is merely the natural consequences, no more than a higher degree, of that hierarchy laid down step by step. The delinquent is an institutional product. (Foucault, from Discipline and Punish)
10. But the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient (the East as a career) despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a "real" Orient. (Said, from Orientalism)
11. Yet the moot decipherment by another in an academic institution (willy-nilly a knowledge-production factory) many years later must not be too quickly identified with the "speaking" of the subaltern. (Spivak, from "Can the Subaltern Speak?")
12. What is perhaps more puzzling is the fact that many of those works that have been central to our understanding of what literature is are also thematically preoccupied with racial issues. But the reason for this is not far to seek: it lies in the dual connection made in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought between, on the one hand, race and nationality, and, on the other, nationality and literature. (Appiah, "Race")
13. We must conclude, then, that this book is less an introduction than an obituary, and that we have ended by burying the object we sought to unearth. (Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction)
14. Few people are likely to bet that the institutional structure of academic literary study will change, but this is because in a world of educational expansion it was always easier, when challenges arose, to change the paradigm instead. In a world of contraction, though, it may be simpler and more sensible to alter the structure. (Menand, "The Demise of Disciplinary Authority")
15. One is deeply reluctant to make progressive claims for a body of cinema as spectacularly nasty toward women as the slasher film is, but the fact is that the slasher does, in its own perverse way and for better or worse, constitute a visible adjustment in the terms of gender representations. That it is an adjustment largely on the male side, appearing at the furthest possible remove from the quarters of theory and showing signs of trickling upward, is of no small interest in the study of popular culture. (Clover, "Her Body/Himself")
16. Book buying, then, cannot be reduced to a simple interaction between a book and a reader. It is an event that is affected and at least partially controlled by the material nature of book publishing as a socially organized technology of production and distribution. (Radway, "The Institutional Matrix of Romance" )