Options for taking exam: No in-class option since final exam period is make-up for class canceled on 28 January.

• email: anytime after class on Tuesday 29 April and by 9pm Sunday 4 May; write in Word or Rich Text Format file; attach and paste into email message to whitec@uhcl.edu (or reply to my email)

Format: Open-book, open-notebook

• Use course materials + outside sources (<optional).

• No direct coaching or outside contributions from another person in writing final version, but you can ask for help proofreading as long as editor reviews changes with you. Welcome to consult beforehand with instructor or Writing Center.

• No copying or lifting from outside sources without attribution.

Contents: Two (or maybe 2 & 1/2) essays

Essay 1: 1-hour+ essay on overall learning experience (details below) 

Essay 2: 1-hour+ essay on 1 or more of 4 options detailed below

Optional short essay describing and evaluating Charlotte Temple and/or Edgar Huntly (if not discussed in Essays 1 & 2).

Contents (overview; details further down)

Somewhere in your final exam you must discuss both Charlotte Temple and Edgar Huntly, either separately or together. If you don't include them on Essay 1 or 2, add a shorter third essay describing and evaluating one or both of these novels in light of course objectives and discussions. (Details further down.)

Essay 1: 1-hour+ essay on overall learning experience, reviewing and evaluating your midterm Essay 1 and one or both of your research posts. Summarize your overall learning experience in context with the course's Learning Objectives (emphasize one or more).  

Essay 2: (options; for more details, keep scrolling down)

2a. 1-hour+ essay on competing definitions of "Literature" from the Renaissance, Baroque, and Enlightenment to the early Romantic era, and how such definitions may apply to the study or teaching of literature.

2b. 1-hour+ essay reviewing & comparing 3-4 periods of study (Renaissance, 17c, Enlightenment, Romanticism)

2c. 1-hour+ essay on "which America to teach?": What built-in advantages, disadvantages to both dominant-culture and multicultural emphases?

2d. 1-hour+ essay on most challenging or inspiring idea or content in the course + resolution.

You may combine one or more of these 4 options, but indicate such combinations in your answer number(s), titles, or otherwise so I'll know what you're doing.

Some overlap with Essay 1 may be acceptable, but if your content for Essay 1 focuses on the content of one of these options, please choose another option.

Optional short essay #3 describing and evaluating Charlotte Temple & Edgar Huntly.

Format requirements:

• Number & title each essay. (Of course you can add the title after you draft your essay[s].)

• Don’t copy out long passages from texts. Quote briefly; otherwise remind your reader of events, characters, situations in texts.

• No need for documentation except for something surprising. Refer to texts by full title and full name of author the first time; abbreviations welcome thereafter; e. g., “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” > “Sinners”

Required references:

• Throughout the exam, refer to at least 7 or 8 major texts from across the semester, not just since the midterm, but most of your texts should be post-midterm. Don't let your exam focus exclusively on one or two classes and their texts. Of course you may refer to some texts more extensively than to others, but you can't just do a hit-and-run on Charlotte Temple and Edgar Huntly.

• Charlotte Temple and Edgar Huntly must be extensively featured and referenced at some point(s) in your exam. That is, you need somehow and somewhere to demonstrate that you did the required reading and thinking. If you can't work them into your essays, write a separate essay reviewing and evaluating either or both.

• Refer at least once somewhere in your exam to a previous final exam from LITR 4231 2010 final exam submissions or LITR 4231 2012 final exam submissions.

Audience: A member of our class or a student in a future semester, or maybe a member of your family or other teachers so they may see what you learned. Your ultimate audience is the instructor, but my response may address whether you demonstrated learning that another reader might follow, comprehend, and care about.

Content Details: Essay 1

Essay 1: 1-hour+ essay on overall learning experience, reviewing and evaluating your midterm Essay 1 and one or both of your research posts. Summarize your overall learning experience in context with the course's Learning Objectives (emphasize one or more).  

Length: 6-9 paragraphs

Required references:

3-4 course texts, mostly since midterm; you may cover 1-2 texts in more detail than others. Connect texts to each other by comparing subjects, themes, characters.

1-2 Objectives: you may only cover part of an objective, but use its terms and develop its idea(s). If you can connect to other objectives, all the better. Don’t just mention the objective(s), but work with them by applying to texts and reconsidering.

Possible uses of midterm and research post references: Essay 1 may be the most obvious place to refer to your midterm and one or both research posts. You could start the essay by reviewing what you wrote for the #1 Long Essay or other parts, then extend or redeveloping those ideas in application to new materials from later in the course. When discussing your midterm (or your later learning), you could also review how and why you chose your research topics (and what you learned from one or both). However, you can reserve these references for Essay 2 if they apply to your subjects there.

Topic choice and development: You may range among texts, periods, course organization or style, but above all have an overall personal and professional point about your learning experience to develop, stretch, or alter as you work through materials. What has mattered? How and why?

Possible organization: point A to point B

• Point A: What I came in knowing and how or why I knew what I did (e.g., what you'd read, what you've been taught);

• Point B: What I read and learned, and how the course's readings and discussions have extended, challenged, or changed my knowledge;

• (possible) Point C: What would I want to read or learn next? or How do I apply what I learned to further reading, study, or career?

Content Details: Essay 2

2a. 1-hour+ essay on competing definitions of "Literature" from the Renaissance, Baroque, and Enlightenment to the early Romantic era, and how such definitions may apply to the study or teaching of literature.

Possible background: Our course's texts fall historically between the two poles of literary history emphasized in high school and popular college curriculum: The Renaissance of the 1500s-1600s (mostly Shakespeare) and the Romantic era of the 1800s (Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Poe, Emily Dickinson, the Brontes).

Questions: What model(s) of "literature" do those familiar periods offer, and how do they compare to the literature studied in Early American Literature?

As a result, what do most of us have in mind when we  think of "literature" or attempt to define it?

What assumptions do most of us make about the nature and purposes of literature, or the kinds of texts we enjoy and study in a Literature course?

How may a course like Early American Literature frustrate, vary, or expand those possibilities, positively or negatively?

Should teachers of literature expand the appeal and application of literary studies by including nonfiction and legal or historical documents? Or should literary studies appeal primarily to those who are already committed to reading, the imagination, and the life of the mind?

Other possible terms and consideration: Instruction and entertainment; mimesis; novel; fiction; escape; identification; vicarious experience; nonfiction; "extra-literary"; legal or historical documents; reader-friendly; lyric poetry, religious or political texts.

Course Objective 2: To read Early American Literature as an origin story about the beginnings of North American culture and literature.

Add: oral > written

2b. 1-hour+ essay reviewing & comparing 3-4 periods of study (Renaissance, 17c, Enlightenment, Romanticism) (Course Objective 5)

Write a unified essay containing the following elements:

• Review "periods" webpage & discuss purposes and limits of studying literature & history by periods.

• Select three of the periods covered by our course for review and discussion. (You may do all 4 if inclined.)

Renaissance

Seventeenth Century

Enlightenment / Age of Reason

Romanticism

• Choose from four to six texts total from our course to illustrate and complicate these periods. Some texts may embody more than one period—no problem, just explain.

• Refer to at least one piece of music from our music web reviews

Native American Music; European Renaissance music; Baroque music; "Classical" Classical Music (Enlightenment); Romantic Music 

• Welcome to refer to one or more works of art from our visual art web reviews: Enlightenment / Romantic visual art; Neo-Classical Style of Architecture (not required)

2c. 1-hour+ essay on "which America to teach?": What built-in advantages or disadvantages are there to either dominant-culture or multicultural emphases in reading selections for studies of American literature?

Or are these categories becoming obsolete as "black-and-white America" gives way to a brown America of intermarriage, trans-national migration, geographical mobility, integrated schools, changing curricula, economic inequality, and global consciousness? What identities are possibly taking the place of "great white fathers" versus "women and people of color?"

How does teaching or study of American literature and culture reconcile the patriotic assumptions of our political and educational systems with the injustices that come evident when we read multicultural literature?

How well do American devices for progress—esp. self-government via literacy or education—compensate for past exclusions and oppressions of ethnic, gender, and religious minorities?

How can we remain patriotic Americans while acknowledging uncomfortable truths without turning our fellow Americans into pure villains, mere victims, or insiders-outsiders?

More simply, use terms and ideas from Course Objective 4 and possibly Objective 6, copied below.

objective 4. To reconcile the "Culture Wars" over which America is the real America?—To ask hard questions without simple or final answers. (Answers evolve with changing world.)

• Which America to teach?

  • "Founding" by "great white fathers" and / or multicultural voices of African America, Native America, Spanish and French colonization, women, and others?

  • To acknowledge “heroes, villains, and victims” as symbols necessary for a good story but also recognize cross-cultural, intertextual, evolutionary, and other narrative dynamics.

• Is America a religious nation peculiarly blessed by God or a secular state with people of various beliefs devoted to materialist lifestyles? . . .

• Is America in decline or making progress? . . .

objective 6. Can American history tell a single story? Trans-historical unity?

Options:

• Providential history: from "fate / destiny" to Biblical narratives, incl. models for secular story-telling

• Evolution as continuity + change

• the romance narrative of quest or journey as progress or decline

• Ongoing transition: tradition > modernity [> + religious or cultural reaction of retrenchment & revival]

Cross-cultural strategies

syncretism

Mestizo identity

intertextuality

2d. 1-hour+ essay on most challenging or inspiring idea or content in the course + resolution.

Some overlap with Essay 1 or other Essay 2 options is possible and not a problem—just refer to what you wrote elsewhere, reinforce and extend while minimizing repetition.

Write an essay about something you've learned that has stayed with you, that you've found yourself thinking about in other situations or classes, that challenged, reinforced, or extended ideas or attitudes important to you and all of us.

You may initially focus your idea and essay on a single "A-Ha!" moment in a text, discussion, or presentation, but extend the idea through several periods or classes of our course. For instance, if you emphasize "creation stories," don't remain stuck in our second class meeting but apply the term to later texts, even our concluding novels.

Greatest danger: Don't stay stuck on one single moment, text, or insight, giving the impression that you only had one isolated success. Connect your insight or realization to other texts or authors at other stages of the course.

As usual, write about something that matters to you and should matter to others.

• Religion, incl. Great Awakening and / or Puritans

• Literature as voice of repressed or marginalized identity, either ethnic, gender, class, or religion?

• The gothic or sublime

• How different was the past?

• A popular platitude is that people everywhere and always are basically the same, but how different was life two or four centuries ago? What expectations and possibilities are revealed in our texts?

• Material and spiritual aspects of American culture

• What's surprising or familiar about early American literature?

• How much smaller the world was then, and how many fewer people and shorter lives, but how much bigger and more possible everything kept becoming.

Optional short essay #3 describing and evaluating Charlotte Temple & Edgar Huntly.

Length: At least 4 paragraphs, but more can be better.

If you used either Essay 1 or Essay 2 to discuss our two novels sufficiently to demonstrate your reading and comprehension, you may ignore this part of the exam.

But if your two long essays featured only texts besides these novels, write an essay discussing one or both of these novels and their significance at the end of our course.

Demonstrate your reading and comprehension of these novels by comparing and contrasting them and/or by discussing how they fit into our course, especially as a conclusion.

If you discussed one of these novels in a previous essay, no need to start over; refer to that essay in making comparisons and contrasts between the two texts while emphasizing the novel that hasn't shown up till now.

Other possible considerations:

• How do these novels exemplify Romanticism?

• How do these texts exemplify the novel or fiction? How do they anticipate later developments in fiction—even today's popular fiction or film?

• What do familiar forms of fiction offer that earlier forms of literature do not?

Evaluation criteria for essays: Readability & surface competence, content quality, and unity / organization.

• Readability & surface competence: Your reader must be able to process what you're reporting. Given the pressures of a timed writing exercise, some rough edges are acceptable, but chronic errors or elementary style can hurt.

• Content quality: Comprehension of subject, demonstration of learning, + interest & significance: Make your reader *want* to process your report. Make the information meaningful; make it matter to our study of literature and culture. Reproduce course materials, especially through reference to terms and objectives, but also refresh with your own insights and experiences. Avoid: "You could have written this without taking the course."

• Thematic Unity and Organization: Unify materials along a line of thought that a reader can follow from start to finish. (Consider "path of learning": what you started with, what you encountered, where you arrived.)

general guidelines for exam grades

• The best exams, even from students who don’t get everything, are essays where people are actively learning something, making connections between texts across the semester and to other courses, and enjoying the possibilities even while they write. If you’re bored and would rather do something else, that feeling will be infectious and your reader will soon feel that way too.

• Another key is how much your writing uses the course's terms and objectives as opposed to talking about whatever you would have said without taking the course.

Content and organization are inseparable. The more you organize, the more your ideas develop and connect to others, forming larger ideas.

Most common problems in midterms:

• Forgetting or ignoring objectives and course terms.

• Failing to review or even mention discussion of terms in class or on linked pages. (A real killer is starting a discussion of the Enlightenment by citing Webster's Dictionary and ignoring what class discussed and what links provided.)

• Forgetting or failing to proofread, edit, and improve before submission.

• Writing like you'd rather do anything else and never think about any of this unless an exam forced you to.