ENGLISH 5000 FINAL EXAM FALL 2008

Please respond to each of the following questions 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 are due by 3PM, FRIDAY DECEMBER 12. As grades are due the following Tuesday, there will be no extensions available. Early submissions are welcome, and electronic submissions will be accepted. If you would like me to return your exam this year, please supply an address to which it can be mailed; otherwise you may drop by my office next semester to pick it up.

1. Read the attached passages—the first from Milton's Paradise Lost, in which Eve tells 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 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 recent critique of psychoanalysis ("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 it, 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 try to answer your objections and correct your misconceptions.

3. Find two related essays from this semester’s syllabus and prepare a brief class lecture on them. That is, find two 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.