Engl 2328 S03
Final Exam Review

Coverage: readings since spring break. No "identifications".

Key Issues: !IDENTITY!; gender and race; literary genres (autobiography, fiction, poetry); cultural questions!

 

Types of Questions

Identifications:
Authors, titles, and ‘significance.’  I will provide a quotation, which you need to concisely identify.

 

Short Answer:
1-2 Paragraph-long responses to broad questions of interpretation, such as comparing and contrasting the treatment of a similar issue in two different works:

eg. Sterling Brown’s "He was a Man" with Baldwin’s "Going to Meet the Man"

Or: How does the genre/structure/audience expectations of a work influence our reading of it?

eg. Millay’s "I being born" and Rukeyser "Movie".

Longer Answer

Built from the cultural questions on the web page, this question(s) will adapt one or more (i.e. what kinds of behavior are praised and/or blamed) to several literary works.

 

Sample Question and Answer:

1. How do Gilman’s "Yellow Wallpaper" and Brown’s "He Was A Man" explore the experience of those lacking power? Consider the social climate that constrains or subjugates an important figure in each. Then compare the two in terms of how the narrator/speaker suggests a kind of victory for each.

Sample Answer

Gilman's story and Brown's poem deal with a married white woman and a black man who struggle against the expectations their society has for them based on the 'type' of person they are. The female narrator of Gliman's "Yellow Wallpaper," shares with us her struggle for sanity, a struggle that ultimately paints the masculine medical profession as her enemy--since it demands passivity, inaction, and confinement as her cure. Brown's poem details a black man's rebellion, which leads to a lynching; but its drama involves the emphasis of this individual's humanness, since courage, strength and readiness to stand up for oneself were not encouraged of blacks at this time. Curiously, Gilman's narrator remains crazy (escaping only through the fantasy that she liberates the woman behind the wallpaper); and the hero of Brown's poem is abused and killed; the courage or persistence of both is somehow celebrated.