ENGLISH 5000 FINAL EXAM FALL 2011

Please respond to three of the following questions--#1 and two of the next three--in essays of about 1000 words (3-4 typed, double-spaced pages). Your essays should observe the conventions of exam essays generally--they should have a strong, solid thesis supported by numerous and specific examples. Feel free to quote from anything we've read this semester, but be sure to identify fully and correctly, in footnotes or endnotes or in-text references, anything you do cite. A "works cited" page is not necessary. Avoid duplication in your responses.

Exams, submitted as a single electronic document, are due by 10PM, TUESDAY, DECEMBER 13. As grades are due the following Tuesday, there will be no extensions available, except in truly extraordinary circumstances. Early submissions are always welcome.

1. Read the attached passages—the first from Milton's Paradise Lost, in which Eve recalls for Adam the story of her creation (IV. 440-92), and the second from the Beach Boys’ 1964 album “Shut Down Vol 2.” (Listen here, if you like.) Then write an essay in which you describe what a psychoanalytic critique of each passage would look like, and what a feminist or gender-oriented reading of each would look like. Some questions to consider: What details in the passages would each approach focus on? What would the goal of each reading be? Where (if anywhere) would they coincide or cross paths, and where (if anywhere) would they interpret differently? (It might be easiest to treat each passage separately, but that’s more of a guideline than a rule.)

2. In a notorious critique of the use of psychoanalysis in interpretation ("Chaucer's Pardoner on the Couch: Psyche and Clio in Medieval Literary Studies," Speculum 76 [2001]: 638-80), the medievalist Lee Patterson concludes with the following observation:

As both scholars and especially teachers, we must inform ourselves as fully and generously as we can of positions with which we find ourselves out of sympathy. The tedious jeremiads that have of late been declaiming on the "crisis of the humanities" too often mistake vigorous diversity for armed warfare, too often contrast current disagreements with a nostalgic lost consensus that never existed in the first place. But if critical vigor is to remain creative, if the fragmentation that the doomsayers seem so eager to promote is to be avoided, adherents of every position must think through, with the scholarly thoroughness for which medieval studies has always been justly admired, both the critical practices they espouse and those they find unhelpful (680).

With this injunction in mind, identify the critical school or approach that you have found least congenial or convincing this semester. Describe its tenets, succinctly but thoroughly; then discuss your objections to it. And then--this is the most important part of this question--describe the way in which an adherent of this school would answer your objections, correct your misconceptions, or otherwise try to overcome your lack of sympathy.

3. Find three related essays from this semester’s syllabus and prepare a brief class lecture on them. That is, find three related items (and the relation is up to you—antagonistic, congenial, superficially unrelated but connected by similar structures of argument) that would be of value to a group of students (and the make-up of those students is up to you—high schoolers, community college students, undergrads, fellow MAs—though you should try to be realistic about their likely capacities) for some reason (because they illustrate important or interesting concepts, represent characteristic ways of thinking, provide some kind of important challenge, have always bugged you), and draft a class presentation of the sort that you would use to get that point (or those points) across to those students, in a way that is both fair and accurate to the essays themselves and clear about the larger critical, theoretical, and pedagogical issues involved in the class of which they would hypothetically be a part.

4. Jonathan Culler writes in his “What Is Theory?” chapter that “A characteristic of thinking that becomes theory is that it offers striking ‘moves’ that people can use in thinking about other topics” (7). We’ve seen, especially over the latter half of our semester, critics associated with several different schools apparently employing very similar sorts of “moves” to make their claims. Describe and discuss three or four of the moves typical of modern critical-theoretical work and supply specific examples of these moves in action in different critics. Speculate, if you like, about the conclusions your analysis might point to: does a certain constellation of moves add up to a coherent paradigm for contemporary lit-crit undertakings—that is, are methods and goals always mutually implicated? or is there, to borrow Graff’s words, coherence without consensus in the field today?