Spring 2011 Comprehensive Examination
M.A. Program in English
Instructions
Responses to the following two questions are due at 9:00 AM on Saturday, April 9, 2011.
The response to each question should be 1500-2000 words. To keep your responses
within this limitation, be sure to offer analysis, not plot summary; assume your audience is
familiar with the works you are discussing. In addition, quote sparingly. Use MLA parenthetical
citation form and attach a list of works cited for each question.
Responses should be typewritten or computer-printed, double-spaced. Answers to the
two questions should be stapled together. Do not put your name on your responses. Instead,
put your student ID number on the first page of each. Please turn in THREE copies of each
essay.
M.A. Exam Text Question:
Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (the Old Arcadia)
Sidney’s text is constituted by dualities and apparent contradictions; although one of the
first major pieces of prose fiction in the Early Modern period, it is filled with poetry; the rakish
heroes of the piece spend most of their time disguised as women in their effort to seduce the
heroines, yet inadvertently attract the affections of other men. The Arcadia also exists in two
versions: the New Arcadia was published by Fulke Greville in 1590; and the Old Arcadia,
composed for Sidney’s sister’s household around 1580 and circulated widely in manuscript
during Sidney’s lifetime, was not published until 1926. As a result of these dualities and
contradictions, The Arcadia invites a number of different critical approaches and suggests a
number of critical questions. For example, how does gender (and the play of gender) influence
the text’s construction, and how does its presumed (or actual) audience respond? How does the
piece exploit and manipulate the conventions of the prose romance and the poetic pastoral? And,
how does the text imagine and reconfigure the political world of Elizabethan England?
Choose one apparent contradiction within the text and read it through a critical approach,
incorporating and responding to scholarship about Sidney placed on reserve for you in The
College’s library. Remember that this is a research essay in which you must demonstrate your
familiarity with secondary scholarship as well as contemporary literary theory. Scholars have
used many theoretical approaches to Sidney’s text including textual scholarship (i.e. comparisons
of the “New” and “Old” Arcadias), cultural studies, gender/queer theory, reader-response theory,
deconstruction, and others. For the purposes of this essay, however, analyze Sidney’s text using
one theoretical approach. Your final draft should be properly documented in MLA format and
include a "Works Ccited" page.
M.A. Exam Theme Question: “Childhood”
Whether or not childhood is understood differently in different cultures and/or different
time periods has been debated. Using three texts from three different cultures, write a critically
and theoretically informed essay that explores the theme of childhood in your chosen texts.
Successful responses provide thoughtful and coherent readings of the literary works.
Less successful responses may show an obvious difference in the amount of attention offered to
each text and may settle for readings that skim the surface.
Remember that this essay is a theoretical/research endeavor and, as such, should
demonstrate familiarity with a body of critical and theoretical writings as well as your chosen
primary texts. Your essay must have an analytically sophisticated thesis and employ secondary
sources on the texts you use. Your final draft should be properly documented in MLA format
and include a “Works Cited” page.
M.A. Exam Poetry Question
Spring 2011
You are to choose ONE of the following two poems and write an analysis of it . “Staring
at the Sea on the Day of the Death of Another” was published by American poet May Swenson
(1913-1989) in 1972; “Necrophiliac,” by the American Rosanna Warren (1953-), who is
celebrated as a writer of elegies, was published in 1993. Your analysis should consist of a
unified interpretation of the poem drawing directly upon its constitutive elements. Among the
elements that you might choose to discuss are imagery, structure, figurative language, tone,
formal qualities (including syntax, stanza, and lineation), rhythm, and sound.
Your answer will be judged on the coherence of your overall interpretation as well as
your insight into how various aspects of the poem enable that interpretation.
Staring at the Sea on the Day of the Death of Another
May Swenson
The long body of the water fills its hollow,
slowly rolls upon its side,
and in the swaddlings of the waves,
their shadowed hollows falling forward with the tide,
like folds of Grecian garments molded to cling
around some classic immemorial marble thing,
I see the vanished bodies of friends who have died.
Each form is furled into its hollow,
white in the dark curl,
the sea a mausoleum, with countless shelves,
cradling the prone effigies of our unearthly selves,
some of the hollows empty, long niches in the tide.
One of them is mine
and gliding forward, gaping wide.
Necrophiliac*
Rosanna Warren
More marrow to suck, more elegies
to whistle through the digestive track. So help
me God to another dollop of death,
come on strong with the gravy and black-eyed peas,
slop it all in the transcendental stew
whose vapors rise and shine in the nostrils of heaven.
Distill the belches, preserve the drool as ink:
Death, since you nourish me, I’ll flatter you
inordinately. Consumers both, with claws
cocked and molars prompt at the fresh-dug grave,
reaper and elegist, we collaborate
and batten in this strictest of intimacies,
my throat an empty sepulchre, my tongue
forever groping grief forever young.
* Necrophiliac: lover of the dead