OUR FINAL EXAM will be held on Monday, May 18th,
from 3:30 to 5:30, in 4137 Boylan. The first part will consist of three short essays
(1-2 pages each), on passages from works we have studied this semester, asking you to explain why they are important to the
works in which they appear. This means you should explain what the passage is about and relate it to some major theme in the work from which it is taken. I will give
you six passages from which to choose.
This is an example of an excellent essay written by a student on an exam
from an earlier semester:
PASSAGE
Are we turned Turks, and
to ourselves do that
Which heaven hath forbid
the Ottomites?
for Christian shame, put
by this barbarous brawl!
ESSAY
This is Othello, from Othello, breaking up the street brawl
that occurs when Cassio gets drunk and attacks Roderigo. What is important in it is the references to
race and religion, particularly to Islam, the religion of the Turks. Throughout the play, every time the Turks
are mentioned in Venice, it’s always in the context of how hated they are and
how almost sub-human they are. Iago says
something in the quay scene that’s like, “If I’m wrong, you can call me a
Turk,” and Othello, just before he kills himself, tells that story about how he
once saw a Turk abusing a Venetian and killed him for it (just the way he’s
about to kill himself). I don’t know if
the Venetians think of the Turks as a race, the way Othello’s blackness
identifies him as a race, or because at the start of the play they’re fighting
a war with them, but they certainly hate them because they’re not
Christians.
This is the first of two
times Othello specifically identifies himself as a Christian; that’s who the
“we” is in the 2nd line. The
other time is in his last speech, when he calls the Turk he killed a
circumcised dog” (which must mean he’s a Muslim). This brings up the question of why Othello
himself isn’t a Muslim, since he’s from a Muslim country. Maybe he converted to Christianity, but if he
was circumcised as a baby, there isn’t anything he can do about that. So this is really all about what the
professor said about Othello wanting to assimilate, to become a Venetian and
not what Iago called him at the beginning, a “stranger.”
The second part of the
exam will ask you to write a longer essay on one of two topics. Examples of topics I have used in the past
are
A. In Book 1 of The
Courtier, Count Lodovico describes the primary attribute of the ideal
courtier thus: “But above all, let him
temper his every action with a certain good judgment and grace. . . . And
having thought many times already about how this grace is acquired (leaving out
those who have had it from the stars), [it] is to avoid affectation in every
way possible . . . and (to pronounce a
new word perhaps) to practice in all things a certain sprezzatura so as to conceal art and make whatever is done or said
appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it. Therefore we may call that art true art that
does not seem to be art.” To what extent
can this concept be applied to and found in the poems, and in the theories
about poetry, of English poets in the sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries?
B. Trace the conception of either the male lover
or the female object of love in at least three works we have read this
semester, and show how it changed significantly from the mid-sixteenth to the
early seventeenth century.
