M.A. Exam, Summer 2011
Text Question: Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss
New York Times reviewer Pankaj Mishra hailed Kiran Desai’s award-winning The
Inheritance of Loss as a novel that explores, “with intimacy and insight, just about every
contemporary international issue: globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality,
fundamentalism and terrorist violence,” offering critical perspectives on post-colonial modernity.
It is also a novel in which richly descriptive, disrupted language modulates tone as it represents
divergent places, spaces, and landscapes, and the characters’ movement among—or stasis
within—locations. Focus your essay on an analysis of these factors. For clarity, apply the
following definitions of these key terms:
Place has a specific, concrete form; it is the stable, material shape of a setting for human
relations, where people carry out their lives and enact their identities; places both reflect and
shape identities, existing in relationship to the human production and consumption of meaning;
sense of place refers to this capacity and to the subjective and emotional connections people have
to places. Place is where movement pauses. The boundaries of places are permeable—that is,
places exist and have meaning in relation to other places.
Space is more abstract; it refers to open areas where movement between places occurs;
space may carry a sense of freedom, but also a sense of threat because meaning and identity are
lacking or uncertain.
Landscape refers to the way that a physical topography is seen and interpreted, usually
from the outside, while a subject is inside a place. So a particular physical area may be either a
landscape, a place, or a space, depending on the subject’s relationship to it.
Keep in mind that time—history—is always a factor in places and spaces; the historical
record is spread out.
While your essay should demonstrate your knowledge of the whole novel, concentrate on
accounting for the closing chapters of the novel, in which Biju completes a bizarre,
transformative journey, interwoven with other plot threads.
Remember that this is a research essay in which you must demonstrate your familiarity
with secondary scholarship as well as contemporary literary theory. Be sure to introduce and
frame the material you bring into your essay. Your paper must be properly documented in MLA
format and include a "Works Cited" page.
Theme Question: Engendering Ungender
Dante and Boccaccio in their writings refer to women readers repeatedly. These
references are both real and imaginary. Among fourteenth-century European cities, Florence had
a relatively high literacy rate for women, and real women did apparently read the Divine Comedy
and the Decameron from time to time. But Dante and Boccaccio also use the image of women
readers as a symbol of something else – as a shorthand way of situating their writing in relation
to a certain kind of poetry that took women as its subject matter and also as its ostensible
audience. This genre of poetry – sometimes called the dolce stil novo – was conceived as more
private and personal, less public and politically ambitious, and, hence, less “masculine” than
other genres. As a result, claiming to write for women or focusing attention on (mostly)
imaginary female readers was a way for a poet to indicate that he was not writing in one of the
more pretentious, “masculine” genres (e.g., classical epic or tragedy).
Using three texts from three different cultures, write a critically- and theoreticallyinformed essay that explores what happens when gender takes on an additional meaning or even
a different meaning, becoming a symbol of something other than masculinity or femininity. The
most successful responses will provide thoughtful and coherent readings of the three literary
works, analyzing what happens when gender is used to comment on or represent some other
concern or issue – power relations, cultural conventions, social pretensions, literary aspirations,
emotional registers. Are representations of gender ever really just about gender? On the other
hand, do they ever entirely stop being representations of gender?
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
You are to choose ONE of the following two poems, written by the American poet Sylvia
Plath (1932-1963), and write an analysis of it. 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.
Blackberrying
Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries
Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes
Ebon in the hedges, fat
Ebon: a hard black wood; ebony
With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.
I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.
They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.
Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks—
Chough: bird of the crow family
Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.
Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.
I do not think the sea will appear at all.
The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.
I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,
Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.
The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.
One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.
The only thing to come now is the sea.
From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,
Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.
These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.
I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me
To the hills’ northern face, and the face is orange rock
That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space
Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths
Beating and beating at an intractable metal.
The Arrival of the Bee Box
I ordered this, clean wood box
Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.
I would say it was the coffin of a midget
Or a square baby
Were there not such a din in it.
The box is locked, it is dangerous.
I have to live with it overnight
And I can't keep away from it.
There are no windows, so I can't see what is in there.
There is only a little grid, no exit.
I put my eye to the grid.
It is dark, dark,
With the swarmy feeling of African hands
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering.
How can I let them out?
It is the noise that appalls me most of all,
The unintelligible syllables.
It is like a Roman mob,
Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!
I lay my ear to furious Latin.
I am not a Caesar.
I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.
They can be sent back.
They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.
I wonder how hungry they are.
I wonder if they would forget me
If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree.
There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades, Laburnum: a small tree with yellow flowers
And the petticoats of the cherry.
Colonnade: a series of columns or similar objects
They might ignore me immediately
In my moon suit and funeral veil.
I am no source of honey
So why should they turn on me?
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.
The box is only temporary.