EN3364
University of Warwick
Summer Examination 2015
States of Damage
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Time allowed:
2 hours
Seen Examination
Please answer TWO (2) of the following questions. Each answer has equal weight.
Each answer should draw on at least TWO (2) texts, one of which must be from the
module’s syllabus.
Read carefully the instructions on the answer book and make sure that the
particulars required are entered on each answer book used.
Do not repeat material from one answer to another. Do not repeat material from
your assessed essay.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1. “Insomnia is now inseparable from many other forms of dispossession and
social ruin occurring globally” (Jonathan Crary). In what ways has a politicized
conception of sleep and sleeplessness become important to contemporary
American culture?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------2. Analyse Loïc Wacquant’s concept of the ‘hyperghetto’ as restricted
residential space in relation to neoliberal practices of surveillance and control.
How does this phenomenon exist in relation to the middle-class ideal of
home ownership in a ‘good neighborhood’?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------3. Does the representation of the ‘returned veteran’ figure in American culture
serve to reinforce the underlying ideologies of US actions abroad, or act to
radically de-familiarize domestic and national life? Or both?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------4. How does the metaphor of ‘colonization’ allow us to imagine and describe
critical issues in contemporary society?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------5. If Dumenil and Levy are right to suggest a recurring pattern of long-wave
collective, social patterns, does this mean individual decisions are pointless?
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6. In retrospect, in what ways was Occupy Wall Street a success or failure?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------7. In what ways does a culture of risk enable or deform American society?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------8. Joshua Clover suggests that given the dominance of financialisation in the
C21 US economy, non-narrative literary-cultural works represent “a more
adequate cognitive mode for our present situation.” Discuss.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------9. The possibility of ‘good work’ appears increasingly foreclosed in the C21
American labour market and in the workplace itself. Analyse this tendency in
any two of our works, relating it to changes in both the economy at large and
constructions of selfhood, gender, race and/or class.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------10. Using one of the module’s texts (literary or filmic), discuss the possibilities
and pitfalls of cultural realignment, wherein the middle-class shifts its social
alliances in response to its crisis of social reproduction.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------11. What have contemporary American ruins – at home and abroad – come to
symbolize?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------12. Write an essay on new forms of feminist engagement with problems of
representation, expression and mobilization in C21 America.
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