MAY 13TH OUR FINAL EXAM

OUR FINAL EXAM will be held on Monday, May 18^th, 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 2^nd 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.