English 3040: Final Exam Study Guide Students will complete a final exam on December 3rd during the final class period. The exam will cover all material presented over the course of the semester. It will be comprised of a terms identification section, a short answer section, and an essay question. Students will receive a set of essay questions before Thanksgiving break. Students will submit their response to the essay question in the Online Writing Environment before coming to take the final exam. The exam is worth 20% of your final grade and will take place on rd
Thursday, December 3 . Students must submit their answers to the essay questions in the Online Writing Environment before taking the exam on the 3rd. Literature‐Based Questions Students should be familiar with all of the literary works we have read this semester. Students should be prepared to identify quotations from the works we have read, provide author name, title of the work, speaker, and a context for the quotations. To study for this portion, students should review the texts we’ve read this semester and make note of the main characters and themes. Students will be presented with 6 quotations and will be expected to respond to 5. Theory‐Based Questions Students should be familiar with the literary theories we’ve covered this semester. Students should review the list of terms attached to each handout and should be familiar with the important figures associated with each movement. Review the class notes carefully. Terms In addition to the theoretical terms covered in your class handouts, students should be familiar with the literary terms presented at the end of this handout. Students should not only be prepared to define these terms but also to provide an example of a text from our readings that illustrates the concepts you are asked to define. Themes/Topics to Consider for Essay Questions 4.
5.
text. How does society shape her and how does she adapt to either fit within it or rebel against it. Choose one of the works we’ve read this semester and examine the representation of other cultures in the text. How is “otherness” established in the culture and what are the consequences of that establishment? Which peoples are marginalized and how do they deal with/respond to their marginalization? Examine Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice from the perspective of any of the following theoretical frameworks: Queer Theory, Marxism, Feminism, Historicism. Terms caesura: a pause or break in a line of verse. Originally, in classical literature, the caesura characteristically divided a foot between two words, usually near the middle of the line. Some poets however, have sought diversity of rhythmical effect by placing the caesura anywhere from near the beginning of the line to near the end. comedy: in medieval times the word comedy was applied to non‐dramatic literary works marked by a happy ending and a less exalted style than that in tragedy. Dante’s Divine Comedy, for example, was named a comedy by its author because of its “prosperous, pleasant, and desirable: conclusion and because it was written not in Latin but in the vernacular. Compared with tragedy, comedy is a lighter form of drama that aims primarily to amuse. It differs from farce and burlesque by having a more sustained plot, weightier and subtler dialogue, more lifelike characters, and less boisterous behavior. The borderline, however, between comedy and other dramatic forms cannot be sharply defined, as there is much overlapping, and different “kinds” are frequently combined. Even the difference between comedy and tragedy tends to disappear in their more idealistic forms. High comedy and low comedy may be further apart than are tragedy and some serious comedy. […] Comedy may be considered to deal with people in their human state, restrained and often made ridiculous by their limitations, faults, bodily functions, and animal nature. In contrast, Tragedy may be considered to deal with people in their ideal or godlike state. Comedy has always regarded human beings more realistically than tragedy and drawn its laughter or satire from the spectacle of individual or collective human weakness or failure; hence its tendency to contrast appearance and reality, to deflate pretense, and to mock excess. Connotation: a word's suggested or associated meaning. Not the literal sense of the word but the figurative sense, what the word implies. Students should choose one of the following questions and write a short essay responding to the prompt. Your response should be approximately 2 pages and should be a complete essay (introduction, body, conclusion). Your essay must be submitted in the Online Writing Environment before you take the exam. You may quote from the primary texts or from Parker, but you must cite your quotations. You may not quote from outside sources. Essay Question Choices 1.
2.
3.
Using a poem or short story of your choice, cite at least three dramatically different interpretations all based on a deconstructive reading. Apply Freud’s theories to Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” and articulate a psychoanalytic interpretation of the poem. Choose one of the texts we’ve read this semester and analyze the woman’s position. What are the cultural forces that shape her understanding of herself, as related in the couplet: two consecutive lines of verse with end rhymes. Formally, the couplet is a two‐line stanza with both grammatical structure and idea complete within itself, but the form has gone through numerous adaptations, the most famous being heroic verse. […] Shakespeare always ends his sonnets with a couplet, and often he will use a couplet to signal the end of a scene that is otherwise in prose or blank verse. dramatic monologue: a poem that reveals “a soul in action” through the speech of one character in a dramatic situation. The character is speaking to an identifiable but silent listener at a dramatic moment in the speaker’s life. The circumstances surrounding the conversation, on side of which we “hear” as the dramatic monologue, are made clear by implication, and an insight into the character of the speaker may result. Although quite an old form, the dramatic monologue was brought to a very high level by Robert Browning, who is often credited with its creation (although scores of speeches in Dante’s Comedy and especially in the Inferno amount to posthumous dramatic monologues). End‐stopped lines: lines in which both the grammatical structure and the sense reach completion at the end. The absence of enjambement or run‐on lines. English 3040: Intro to Literary Studies 1 epiphany: literally a manifestation of showing‐forth, usually of some divine being. The Christian festival of Epiphany commemorates the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles in the form of the Magi. It is celebrated on Twelfth Night, January 6. Epiphany was given currency as a critical term by James Joyce, who used it to designate an event in which the essential nature of something—a person, a situation, an object—was suddenly perceived. It is thus an intuitive grasp of reality achieved in a quick flash of recognition in which something, usually simple and commonplace is seen in a new light, and, as Joyce says, “its soul, its whatness leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance.” This sudden insight is the epiphany. The term is also used for a literary composition that presents such epiphanies, so that we say that the stories that make up Joyce’s Dubliners are epiphanies. framework story: a story inside a framework, a story inside a story. Perhaps the best‐known examples are found in the Arabian Nights, the Decameron, and the Canterbury Tales. The extent to which the framework becomes an actual plot with in which other plots are inserted varies greatly. In the Decameron the tellers of the tales assemble and talk, and there is no plot in the framework. In the Canterbury Tales there is a plot in the framework, although it is very limited. metaphor: asserts the identity, without a connective such as like or a verb such as appears, of terms that are literally incompatible. Metaphor is composed of a tenor and a vehicle: the tenor is the idea being expressed and the vehicle is the image by which the idea is conveyed or the subject communicated. In the example "he is in the winter of his life," winter is the vehicle and old age is the tenor. Winter conveys the idea of old age. Two common types of metaphor are synecdoche and metonymy. In synecdoche the whole is replaced by the part or the part by the whole: give us this day our daily bread. In metonymy something is named through something closely related to it: Scepter and crown must tumble down. novel: Novel is used in its broadest sense to designate any extended fictional narrative almost always in prose. In practice, however, its use is customarily restricted to narratives in which the representation of character occurs either in a static condition or in the process of development as a result of events or actions. Often the term implies that some organizing principle‐plot, theme, or idea‐should be present in a narrative that is called a novel. In most European countries, the word roman is used rather than novel, thus linking the novel with the older Romance of which, in a sense, the novel is an extension. The conflict between the imaginative recreation of experience implied in roman and the realistic representation of the soiled world of common people implied in novel has been present in the form from its beginning, and it accounted for a distinction often made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries between the romance and the novel, in which the romance was a tale of the long ago, the far away, or the imaginatively improbable; whereas the novel was bound by the facts of the actual world and the laws of probability. romance: since the rise of the novel, romance has been defined by virtue of its relation to that genre of writing. In 1785 Clara Reeve declared, "The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it was written. The Romance in lofty and elevated language, describes what has never happened nor is likely to." This distinction has resulted in two distinct uses of romance. In common usage, it refers to works with extravagant characters, remote and exotic places, highly exciting and heroic events, passionate love, or mysterious or supernatural experiences. In another and more sophisticated sense, romance refers to works relatively free of the more restrictive aspects of realistic verisimilitude. what the true nature of the character is. The novel tends, on the other hand, to show character developing as a result of actions. However natural and formless the short story may sometimes give the impression of being, a distinguishing characteristic of the genre is that it is consciously made and reveals itself to be the result of conscious, skilled work. Furthermore, however slight the short story may appear, its consists of more than a mere record of an incident or an anecdote. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end; it possesses at least the rudiments of plot. sonnet: a poem almost invariably of fourteen lines and following one of several set rhyme schemes. The two basic sonnet types are the Italian or Petrarchan and the English or Shakespearean. The Italian form is distinguished by its division into the octave and sestet: the octave rhyming abbaabba and the sestet cdecde, or cdedce. The octave presents a narrative, states a proposition, or raises a question; the sestet drives home the narrative by making an abstract comment, applies proposition, or solves the problem. […] In the English or Shakespearean sonnet, four divisions are used: three quatrains (each with a rhyme scheme of its own, usually rhyming alternate liens) and a rhymed concluding couplet. The typical rhyme scheme is abab dcdc efef gg. […] Certain poets following the example of Petrarch have written a series of sonnets linked to one another and dealing with a single, although sometimes generalized subject. Such series are called sonnet sequences. Some of the most famous in English literature are Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, Spenser’s Amoreti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. Sublime: Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. […] Without all doubt, the torments which we may be made to suffer, are much greater in their effect on the body and mind, than any pleasures which the most learned voluptuary could suggest, or than the liveliest imagination, and the most sound and exquisitely sensible body could enjoy. […] When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simple terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful, as we every day experience” (Edmund Burke A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful 86). Cuddon, J. A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1998. tragedy: a type of literature focusing on exalted, noble people who experience a fall from grace as the result of their own mistakes, flaws, or destiny. It usually expresses the sense that human beings are inevitably doomed, through their own failures or errors or even ironic action of their virtues, or through the nature of fate, destiny, or the human condition to suffer, fail, and die, and that the measure of a person's life is to be taken by how he or she faces that inevitable failure. The tragic impulse celebrates courage and dignity in the face of defeat and attempts to portray the grandeur of the human spirit. According to Aristotle, the tragic hero's fall occurs because of his hamartia, translated as either tragic flaw, tragic error, or miscalculation. Short story: a short story is a relatively brief fictional narrative in prose. It may range in length from the short‐short story of 500 words up to the “long‐short story” of 12,000 to 15,000 words. It may be distinguished from the sketch and the tale in that it has a definite formal development, a firmness in construction. It finds its unity in many things other than plot—although it often finds it there—in effect, theme, character, tone, mood, and style. It may be distinguished from the novel in that it tends to reveal character through actions, the purpose of the story being accomplished when the reader comes to know English 3040: Intro to Literary Studies 2