Final Exam (10 July 2008)

Relative weight: 35-40% of final grade   Format: In-class or email

Format: Take-home or in-class. Open-book, open-notebook.

Schedule:

*        No attendance expectations on 10 July.

*      To take the exam in-class, simply show up at our classroom during the regular class period with paper, pen, and as many notes, print-outs, and books as you like. You must complete the exam between 3 and 6pm on 10 July. Writing on fronts and backs of pages is acceptable. In-class exams are read separately from email exams to limit impact of unequal times, opportunities, legibility, etc.

*        If you write the exam online, you are not expected to spend more than about 4 hours writing the exam. Three hours of writing may be adequate.

*        You may write and submit your exam via email any time after 6pm, Tuesday, 8 July. The deadline for email submission is noon Saturday, 12 July. If you can’t make the deadline, communicate.

*        Email students keep a log of your writing schedule so that I can have some idea of how much time students are spending. Stops, starts, and pauses are okay. 

Content: 2 essays of more than one hour each. Write in your preferred order. 

Overlap between the two essays and with your midterm may be inevitable. Cross-referencing is preferable to repetition. Welcome to regard these essay assignments as extensions or complements to your midterm essay and to extend or redevelop ideas you started there.

Essay 1 assignment: Comprehensive review of course and your learning curve.

Length: 1.5 – 2 hours. 6-9 paragraphs? (depending on length, etc.)

Texts: Refer to at least four course readings from throughout the semester, though a few more are welcome.

Please give a title to your essay.

Topic: Since this course attempts a comprehensive survey of American multicultural  literature and history, this essay seeks a similar response by the student. The essay will be evaluated on the quality of its writing and reference to our shared texts and objectives, but also for its attempt to comprehend the course's multicultural landscape.

Write a reflective essay describing and evaluating your learning experience with this course in terms of your own interests, the course’s readings, and our use of the Immigrant Narrative as a model or norm for describing multicultural American literature.

• Assume the perspective of a student, educator, or citizen interested in multicultural issues. Such an interest does not predetermine expectations of your political, personal, or professional positions on such subjects. Welcome to provide representative details of your own backgrounds or situations, but not required.
   

• Since you started a related discussion in your midterm essay, welcome to review your major points there as efficiently as possible--that is, you may refer or remind rather than restate completely.
   

• Your audience will be the instructor, but also future students. Given the range of texts this course might cover and the competing issues it constantly faced, how did you make the course work for you? What starting point or form did you start and work with?
   

• Relate your personal and professional interests to the course’s texts, subject matter, and objectives. What did you enter the class knowing? What did you wish to learn? How far have those interests been satisfied? What was useful or helpful to have learned, and why? What can you do with what you've learned? What might be your next move?
   

• Coordinate your personal and professional interests with the course's, particularly readings, objectives, and the immigrant narrative as a key to the American multicultural landscape. What are the advantages and shortcomings of this approach? What other possibilities for organizing multicultural literature might be proposed? Is there an argument for simply “celebrating difference?”
   

• Briefly review one or both of your research postings. How did that freelance work express your interests, plus or minus the course's? Explain the posting(s) in terms of family background, acquaintance, teaching or learning environments, political, social, and religious movements, or reading experience in schools or beyond--or simply in terms of this course.

This longish description is only to provide possibilities to those uncertain how to proceed. You can't do everything listed above, so don't regard it as a checklist. Develop your own angle according to the requirements. I’ll read your essay on its merits as long as it relates to the course’s readings and objectives.

Essay 2 assignment: Identifying and criticizing America’s dominant culture—or not!

Length: 1 – 1.5 hours. 5-7 paragraphs? (depending on length, etc.)

Texts: Refer to readings of the Exodus story, Of Plymouth Plantation, and two other relevant texts from this semester (e. g., Crevecoeur, the excerpt from Hunting Mr. Heartbreak, but other texts are possible).

Give a title to your essay.

Topic: This course has attempted to identify an elusive subject that is unattractive if not repellent to some students of multiculturalism:

• the USA’s dominant culture: its manifestations, makeup, and ideology
   

• Relevant to immigrant literature: What kind of culture do immigrants assimilate to? 

Reviewing required and selected texts, consider the following questions:

• What do we mean when we refer to the dominant culture? Is it an elite group or a larger mass? What are some of its potential identifying markers, institutions, or styles? What other names or labels are possible, with what limits or consequences? In brief, how have you come to terms with the concept?
   

• Why does the dominant culture tend to resist or elude analysis or even the impulse to analyze? What are some of the attractions and repulsions, rewards and punishment attendant to such an investigation?
   

• Objective 4: How helpful is the "national migration" variation on the immigrant narrative in identifying the dominant culture and measuring its relations to immigrant and minority cultures?
   

• Describe characteristic qualities of the dominant culture: attitudes toward education, intermarriage, mobility, and the family.
   

• [optional depending on content in final classes] In what ways does the dominant culture provide a functioning "base culture" that maintains or redevelops connections to the traditional past even as it progresses rapidly into a relentlessly revolutionary future? Consider the primacy of literacy and the combination of future-oriented capitalism and "old-time" Protestant Christianity, or the counter-pressures of individualism and family values.
   

• As a unifying theme, consider what you learn from this part of the course and this final writing exercise.

Do not regard this long topic-description as a checklist--not enough time! Develop a line of thought on the subject that connects to essential texts, objectives, and ideas from the course. As with the first essay, welcome to identify your personal and professional backgrounds and attitudes relative to this topic.

Grading standards:

Quality of writing: central theme consistently present throughout essay + power and appeal; unity, organization, and development; transitions and connections; surface quality (absence of chronic errors); inclusion of titles.

Evidence of learning: All exams are expected competently to use central terms and themes from objectives with examples from shared texts.

Extension of learning: The best exams not only comprehend the course’s terms, objectives, and texts but also refresh, extend, or vary terms and themes in the student's voice with examples from the course and from experience in and beyond our classroom. Make our course meet the world!