LITR 4232 American
Renaissance
final exam 2008
LITR 4232: American Renaissance, UHCL, fall 2008
Official date: Tuesday, 9 December 2008
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If you take the exam in-class, you have from 10am until 12:50pm, 9 Dec. 2008 in Bayou 1218.
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If you take the exam by email, you may spend 3-4 hours total writing the exam, though study and prep time is up to you. Submit your exam any time after 2 December, with a final deadline of Thursday, 11 December , 10pm. Keep a log of when you start, stop, or pause.
Open-book, open-notebook.
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Use any relevant course materials plus brief references to outside sources as helpful
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Discuss assignment and receive suggestions or feedback from classmates, UHCL Writing Center, or mentors, but no direct writing contributions or hands-on editing from another person.
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Don't copy or borrow from outside sources without attribution--honor code violation! (Just tell where you got the idea or words--your research will impress!)
Options
for taking exam:
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come to classroom during exam period and write answers in dark ink in bluebook or on notebook paper, or use a laptop
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spend a roughly equivalent time at a terminal writing an electronic document and sending it to the instructor at whitec@uhcl.edu via email.
Format for all—In-class or email
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This exam is open-book and open-notebook.
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Some questions are comprehensive for the semester, but you may discuss more fully our post-midterm texts.
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Don't copy out long quotations unless you’re commenting very comprehensively on them.
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No need for page numbers for familiar quotations or references.
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After your first reference to an author and title, you may use abbreviated titles, like "Veil" for "The Minister's Black Veil."
Format—In-class
Write in blue or black ink in a bluebook or on paper of your choice. You may write on fronts and backs of pages. Don’t bother erasing anything you don’t want read—just draw a line through it.
In-class protocol: Since you already have a copy of the midterm, come to the classroom at 7pm and begin writing whether instructor is there or not.
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You may consult with the instructor--if not in classroom, phone office at 281 283 3380 or come to Bayou 2529-8.
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No need to ask permission for short breaks.
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Write in blue or black ink in a bluebook or notebook paper on fronts and backs of pages. No need to erase—just draw a line through anything you don’t want read.
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When finished, turn in exam at instructor’s table or bring it to instructor's office.
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If preferred, you may write on a laptop.
Sending your midterm by email: Try both of the following
- Attach your word processing file to an email message. (My computer uses Microsoft Word 2007. The only program it appears unable to translate is Microsoft Works. If in doubt, save your word processing file in "Rich Text Format" or a “text only” format.)
- Paste the contents of your word processing file directly into an email to whitec@uhcl.edu.
Response to email: Instructor will acknowledge receipt of email exam within a few hours--if no response, check address. Grades and notes are returned by email in about a week.
Content:
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Write two essays in response to two of the following questions.
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Spend 1-2 hours on each answer. Better students use most or all their time.
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Please indicate which questions (by number) you’re answering.
Length: Most previous essay answers to similar questions run from 5-8 paragraphs, but sometimes a lot more or a little less depending on paragraph length.
Special requirements:
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Provide titles for your essays. (Titles help set up Model Assignments.)
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Not required but impressive: refer to student presentations or discussions--insights and/or quotations.
Preparing for essay questions / answers:
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Do as much note-taking, outlining, prewriting, and practicing as you find helpful.
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Discuss questions and answers with classmates. It's not cheating to help each other prepare.
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Review questions, preparation, and "practice drafts" with UHCL Writing Center in advance
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For students using word-processors, revise and improve before submitting.
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Work with terms and ideas from Course Objectives (see below):
Course Objectives
1. To use "close reading" and "Historicism" as ways of studying classic, popular, and representative literature and cultural history of the "American Renaissance" (the generation before the Civil War).
2.
To study the movement of "Romanticism,"
the narrative genre of
"romance," and the related styles of the "gothic" and "the
sublime." (The American Renaissance is the major period of American Romantic
Literature.)
Related topics or themes: the Byronic
hero; correspondence
3. To use literature as a basis for discussing representative problems and subjects of American culture (Historicism), such as equality (race, gender, class); modernization and tradition; the individual, family; and community; nature; the role of writers in an anti-intellectual society.
Quality of writing: significant themes are consistently presented, organized, and developed throughout essay; unity and transitions between parts of essay; surface quality (absence of chronic errors); inclusion of titles.
Surface quality: My attitude in reading a timed writing exercise like this is not to watch like a hawk for minor errors but rather to see how far you go in developing our shared ideas. Occasional careless errors don’t count against you, but you may lose credit for chronic problems such as run-on sentences or fragments, or a repeated inability to use apostrophes or divide paragraphs.
Evidence of learning: All exams must use central terms and themes from objectives in developing examples from texts. Knowledge from beyond the course and on-the-spot inventiveness are impressive, but first and foremost demonstrate learning by comprehending and explaining the course’s essential materials.
Extension of learning: The best exams go further than comprehending course terms, objectives, and texts. The student's voice refreshes, extends, or varies objectives, themes, and terms with examples from class, from readings, and from reading and experience beyond our class. Make our course meet your world.
(Questions 1-5 from previous semesters)
Essay Question 1. Describe the characteristics, variations and meaning of the Gothic in several course readings. To what different purposes do various authors use the Gothic? (Objective 2, the Gothic)
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Briefly review Irving’s and Cooper’s use of the Gothic
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Refer more extensively to Poe and Hawthorne
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Additionally refer to at least one other text or author (The Gothic may appear only briefly or tangentially, and we may not have discussed these possibilities, but there are plenty of examples).
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Conclusion: consider the purposes or significance of the Gothic.
Essay question 2. A constantly changing society like America constantly stimulates questions of appropriate moral insight and behavior. Like Rip Van Winkle, we wake every day to a world whose fashions, values, and rules have changed (and except for self-isolation, there seems to be no going back to an earlier, simpler time).
Most Americans react in two extreme ways:
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moral absolutism--“A woman’s place is in the home,” “It’s their own fault,” and “Just say no”
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or, moral relativism: "Live and let live," "You are not the judge of me," "As long as you feel all right about it . . . ."
In contrast to this choice between intense
narrow-mindedness or careless open-mindedness, classic writers like Hawthorne,
Whitman, and Dickinson, or great leaders like Lincoln recognize that
morality
is both important and complicated.
Referring to writings by at least two of these five writers (and to any others for comparison or contrast), describe how problems of good and evil are depicted vividly and significantly but without a simple, reductive moral judgment of who is right or wrong, or innocent or guilty.
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Give a picture of the moral situation in which characters or people find themselves.
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What does a reader learn from the moral situation, and what pleasure or benefit may a reader take from such a scene or story?
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What are the responsibilities, rewards, and risks of studying complex moral issues in public schools as we do here?
Essay question 3. Here are two lyric poems, one by Whitman and another by Dickinson. Which author wrote which poem and how can you tell? Referring to these poems (and briefly to others?), describe, compare, and contrast Whitman's and Dickinson's unique styles and subjects.
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Comment on what aspects of the poem are characteristic of Whitman and Dickinson, and also comment in what ways these poems may not be characteristic—that is, in what ways may they surprise your expectations about Whitman and Dickinson?
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Identify characteristic (or non-characteristic) subject matter and stylistic devices on the parts of the two poets. Details and definitions are welcome, plus locate examples in the poem.
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Conclusion possibilities:
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How does each poem meet and vary the definition of a lyric poem?
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Compare Dickinson and Whitman in relation to each other—What do you gain, learn, or experience from one in contrast to the other?
You are strongly encouraged to refer to the Whitman and Dickinson style sheets:
I Sit and Look
Out
I
sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and
shame,
I
hear secret convulsive sobs from young men at anguish with themselves,
remorseful after deeds done,
I
see in low life the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt,
desperate,
I
see the wife misused by her husband, I see the treacherous seducer of young
women,
I
mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love attempted to be hid, I see
these sights on the earth,
I
see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny, I see martyrs and prisoners,
I
observe a famine at sea, I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill'd
to preserve the lives of the rest,
I
observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the
poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All
these--all the meanness and agony without end I sitting look out upon,
See,
hear, and am silent.
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These are the days when birds come
back,
A very few, a bird or two,
To take a backward look.
These are the days when skies put
on
The old, old sophistries of
June,--
A blue and gold mistake.
Oh, fraud that cannot cheat the
bee,
Almost thy plausibility
Induces my belief,
Till ranks of seeds their witness
bear,
And softly through the altered air
Hurries a timid leaf!
Oh, sacrament of summer days,
Oh, last communion in the haze,
Permit a child to join,
Thy sacred emblems to partake,
Thy consecrated bread to break,
Taste thine immortal wine!
Essay question 4. Write an essay comparing classic, popular, and representative authors and literature in terms of their differing (or overlapping) styles, values, audiences, and appeals (Objective 1).
Define and give examples of classical, popular, and representative literature from our course and beyond. (Suggestions from our course below. Don’t just rename but describe them in ways that fit your definitions.)
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Some authors may fit more than one category.
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What different pleasures, benefits, and challenges does each category offer a reader in our time? How were they received in their own time and by periods following their publication?
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For what different purposes are these types of literature written?
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What may one learn from reading across these different categories of literature?
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What different readers might be attracted to the different categories?
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Which balance of categories, is most appropriate for a college literature class like ours? What about other literature classrooms?
As usual in an essay like this, do a lot of comparing and contrasting from start to finish, for the sake of sparking ideas and weaving organization.
Examples: (not an exhaustive list—you’re welcome to develop your own)
“Classic” authors and texts: Dickinson; Hawthorne; Emerson; Cooper; Irving
“Popular” authors and texts: Irving, Poe, Cooper, Stowe; plus feel free to refer to popular authors with whom you’re familiar beyond this course.
“Representative” texts and authors: William Apess; Frederick Douglass; Sojourner Truth; Harriet Jacobs.
(In the second part of the semester we concentrated less on this category, so your treatment of this category may or may not be equal in length to the other two categories.)
*Also consider authors who combine or cross categories: Poe, Douglass, Stowe, Irving, Fuller.
Essay question 5. Develop a relevant essay topic of your own. Your topic may involve elements from the questions above. Either make fresh combinations of the materials, or extend into new territory, or both.
The following restrictions apply.
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Your personal topic must relate to our course’s texts, objectives, or general framework, or to similar materials in other situations (as in teaching at another grade-level). Your subject’s relevance must be recognizable to a hypothetical member of our class.
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Refer to two or three authors or texts.
Other ways to consider this topic: (Not a checklist, only sparks . . . )
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What did you learn in this course that you didn't expect to learn? How did you learn it? What texts, objectives, or student or teacher comments apply? How were you prepared to learn this by what you knew before our course? What thoughts have you developed in relation to this special subject? What applications would your insight have to the study or teaching of literature of the American Renaissance or beyond?
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Especially for students taking LITR 4236: The Romantic Movement in English Literature, another possibility may be to write an essay focusing on what you’ve learned about Romanticism as a result of taking these courses together. (Or, even if you didn’t take LITR 4236, you may know about Romanticism from other sources.)
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Welcome to email or otherwise discuss with the instructor your potential choice of a topic before taking the exam. (Welcome also to confer on the other questions.)
New questions:
6. Develop an essay on how this course
influenced or reflected your experience as a student and / or teacher of
American Romanticism or its constituent identities: American Literature,
Romanticism, the American Renaissance. Content and / or methods. Connect to
course objectives.
7. Redevelop your midterm essay to
include two writers since the midterm and how they extend the points you made. Also
consider discussing improvements in writing, if appropriate. Welcome to consult.
8. Write an essay defining and describing a term from the course that interested you. What was the source of your interest, and how did two or three texts (at least one since midterm) develop the term or its associated concepts? Locate your discussion within the American Renaissance and summarize your learning in terms of the American Renaissance and our course objectives.
9. Write an essay on an author--why the author matters, examination of representative texts, description of subjects and style, etc. Compare to other authors within or beyond the American Renaissance, but summarize your learning in terms of the American Renaissance and our course objectives.
Note: For 8 & 9 you are welcome to do research on the web or wherever you find it, with the following stipulations:
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Provide minimal documentation for your sources. (This may be informal. No Works Cited needed, but refer to titles, authors, and dates of sources. Give your reader an idea of how you found what you learned.)
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Don't let your research lead too far from the course's terms and objectives. Connect your research to the course so that a member of our class would benefit.
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You are not required to do outside research--it only occurred to me that some of your topics might raise the question of whether it's permissible. It is. But the exam should focus on what we discussed in class.