ENGL 223-004, 2008W
Dr. Mary Chapman
Exam instructions
TIME: 2.5 hours (150 minutes)
The questions are designed to take 120 minutes so that you will have 30 minutes extra to: read the
questions thoroughly, choose to answer questions that can demonstrate your breadth and depth of
knowledge, prepare an outline for the essay, and proofread your paper afterward. Ideally your
exam answers should try not to duplicate material written for other parts of the exams or in other
work done for this course. Some overlap is, of course, inevitable, but you absolutely must NOT
duplicate your term paper topic in PART TWO.
PART ONE (choice of 6?) 30 marks (allow 20 minutes for each answer, 60 minutes in total)
Choose three of the following passages and for each one write a short, multi-paragraphed, essay
(minimum 2 pages) that identifies the author and work excerpted and provides a close reading (i.e.
detailed interpretation) of the passage. Do NOT summarize plot. Interpret the literary tropes
(images, metaphors, voice, tone, mood, etc.) and discuss the significance of these tropes in the text.
Think of these short essays as designed to identify the specific tropes in particular passages, interpret
their meaning, and consider the broader themes in the texts as wholes which these tropes exemplify.
PART TWO (choice of 6?)
30 marks
(allow 60 minutes in total)
Choose ONE of the following questions and write an essay in response to it, using examples from at
least 3 works on the syllabus. I recommend taking the first 5 minutes to make an outline.
Texts we examined: Scarlet Letter, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Benito Cereno, Melting Pot, The Monster, “The
American Scholar”, “Experience”, “Threnody”, “When Lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d”, “Why Do
they shut me out of Heaven?”, “I was the slightest in the House”, “Wild Nights!”, “Because I could not
stop for Death”, “I felt a Funeral in my Brain”, “The Inferior Woman”, “White Woman Who Married a
Chinese”, “The Fish”, “Silence”, “America”, “Harlem Dancer”, “The Weary Blues”, “The Negro Speaks
of Rivers, and “Yet Do I Marvel”