Schedule & Format--both options are open-book and open-notebook.

• Write exam in-class during final exam period (7-9:50, Thursday 8 December 2011)
  OR
• Write and send by email anytime after 1 December--deadline is Saturday noon, 10 Dec.

Notify instructor if you will take the exam in-class; office hours Thursday

Content: 2 essays of app. 2 hours each.

Length: At least 6-8 paragraphs each. Best essays are usually longer than average, overflowing with relevant ideas connecting texts, objectives, discussions, presentations, your research.

Essay 1: Describe and evaluate your learning experience, referring to texts, objectives, research, and midterm.

Essay 2: Compose a dialogue between four texts since the midterm (Objectives 1, 2, 3 & possibly others)

Requirements:

• Both essays must have titles.

• Make at least one reference to a previous final exam submission from earlier course offering (links above).

• In Essay 1, make at least one reference to your midterm submission.

Two helpful hints:

• Most common error in midterms was disregard of Course Objectives in syllabus.

• Meet your reader by using shared terms.

Essay 1: Referring to the following sources, describe and evaluate your learning experience in our seminar:

• 2-3 course texts

• your midterm—review, evaluate, & extend or transition

• one or both of your research posts, or your research project (essay or journal)

• Objective 3 concerning "American resistance to or ignorance of postcolonial criticism"  and "issues of American ignorance of larger world and alternative worldviews"—language or tone may vary.

• content from student presentations, seminar discussions, methods, or lectures--what highlights? What worked and what didn't? What built on previous learning, what challenged previous learning, what surprised you?

• other objectives

• reference to your midterm and the learning you described or demonstrated there

Integrate these and other dimensions of our reading, research, and discussions into a central comprehensive thesis concerning a "learning outcome" or estimate of progress in your career.

Following are prompts or cues—not a checklist:

• "Learning experience" or "learning outcome" is not necessarily a life-changing experience. Apply the seminar to your developing personal and professional profile. Instructor wants to know what students enter knowing and thinking, and what parts of the course do students connect to and carry with them.
   
• What aspects of the course (content, texts, or methods) did you found most challenging or rewarding? What have you learned relative to your career as a reader, teacher, or researcher?
   
• Refer to at least one objective, or as many as helpful. The most common problem for midterms was neglect of objectives, which provide dependable language for meeting the seminar and instructor.
   

Essay 2: Referring to Objectives 1 & 2, compose a thematic dialogue between four texts since the midterm.

• The theme or subject of this dialogue is your choice—e. g., gender, tradition/modernity, voice, self-other--but your essay must address objectives 1 & 2 concerning dialogue, intertextuality, and the novel.

• For other dialogue-topic possibilities, review objectives.

• Consider Obj. 2a: "How may literary fiction instruct or deepen students’ knowledge of world history and international relations compared to history, political science, anthropology, etc.?" Evaluate fiction's usefulness for learning about the colonial-postcolonial dynamic and other issues in world cultural history.

• What do you learn from intertextuality or dialogue that differs from single-text or single-author studies?

Major texts or sources: (At least two should be from the five fictions immediately below)

The Man Who Would be King, Train to Pakistan, Jasmine, Things Fall Apart, Heart of Darkness.

Other possible texts or sources:

White Teeth

other films or websites reviewed in seminar

(The following list may be revised)

Derek Walcott, “A Far Cry from Africa”

Walcott, "The Season of Phantasmal Peace"

Achebe, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness"

W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

Leopold Sedar Senghor, from A Prayer for Peace

Chinua Achebe, "Named for Victoria, Queen of England" (handout)

article on wife-beating in Africa; Talking their Way out of a Population Crisis;

Web/Film Review: AlJazeera English video: Africa: States of Independence—Scramble for Africa

Welcome to refer to any text(s) before midterm, but keep refocusing on texts since midterm.

Evaluation standards: As in most Literature courses, quality of reading and writing is the key to judging excellent work from competent work—not just reproducing data but organizing it into a unified, compelling essay.

• "Unified": Thematic continuity and transitions are essential. Connect parts to form larger ideas. Pause between paragraphs to review what you've written or to preview what comes next. Summarize. Explain. Review and preview.

• "Compelling": Exams require comprehension and expression of instructional contents, but excellence is achieved by students extending or refreshing what they learn with new examples, insights, and expression.

• Style: At the graduate level, competence with surface issues like spelling, punctuation, and grammar is taken for granted. An occasional careless error won't kill your grade, given time pressures, but repeated or chronic errors are remarked and factored.

• Audience: Write so someone in our seminar could recognize your terms and explanations and enjoy your personal contributions and style. Future students may read your essays in our "Model Assignments." Keep the instructor in sight—connect with shared terms and texts, and "write up" in terms of organization and ambition of thought.
  
• Your instructor naturally likes to see you valuing and using his ideas from lecture and syllabus, but mere repetition or coverage is frustrating, so integrate instructor's and course's materials with your intellect, your voice, your career and aspirations.
  
• Worst possible reaction: "You could have written this essay without taking the course."

Instructor's Reaction & continuing dialogue:

About a week after submission, you'll receive an email from the instructor including your grade report with your research grade, your final exam grade, and notes.

Consider replying to instructor. Graduate students work with faculty somewhere between master-apprentice and colleagues. Discussing written work can be a starting point for learning to interact with faculty. If you don't communicate in this way, look for other opportunities. Professors can be intimidating and unhip, but they're used to cooperating if you cultivate chances. We're just older versions of yourselves!

The final exam is designed to give the student considerable choice in emphasis and outcomes while requiring coverage and competence in common course materials. In the most successful submissions for these and similar exercises, students use their own voices and references to express and advance ideas or themes developed by the seminar's texts, objectives, lectures, presentations, and discussions.

A dependable principle for such preparations is to start as early as possible so that your conscious and unconscious mind have time to work through the mental operations implicit in your interests and the subject matter. One hour a week ahead is worth two hours the night before.

1. Start notes for the final. Write down any impulse toward the subject matter, no matter how obvious or blunt. When you return to your notes, review them--extend some, cut some, put different notes together.

2. Review assignment, model assignments, evaluation standards.

3. Review & reread parts of texts that either worked for you or remained puzzling.

4. Start drafting. Professors or professional readers can usually detect the difference between raw, unedited prose that was recently composed and never reviewed, and prose that has been reviewed, refined, and extended.

5. Have a trusted reader read what you've written. Ask them to indicate what worked and what didn't. Many readers won't tell you what didn't work because they'll just glide or bump through it, but you can infer by process of elimination.

6. Welcome to email or phone instructor any time before or during submission-window. Always better to solve problems beforehand, plus I like seeing you working on problems. I check emails more often than phone messages.

7. When you think you've finished, put the exam aside for at least an hour, then give it a final read-through: proofread, edit, correct, improve. At the graduate level, "better" is more important than "late." But if more than a little late, communicate with professor before he communicates with you.