Lit Hist II: Monsters & Madness

ENGL3073 Midterm Essay Exam Questions

See general instructions here . Your combined responses should be a total of 3-5 pages long (double-spaced, 10- or 12-point font, 1" margins all around).

Do not use a single work of literature as a primary focus more than twice across Sections A & B. Repeating a text is fine for Section C.

Section A (worth 50%): two questions (answer from questions listed here), one on major genres and one on examples of literary influence

A.1 Realism and representationalism in East vs. West: Compare the effects achieved in dramatic forms such as kabuki, kunque, and bunraku/puppets, poetic forms such as haiku and later imagist forms, fantasy in the early Chinese novel [Suggested writers and texts: PEACH BLOSSOM FAN, JOURNEY TO THE WEST; lectures 2.1 , 3.1 , discussions 2.3 , 2.5.21 , 3.2 , 3.3 , classes 1.29.21 , 2.5.21 ]

A.2 Satire and social critique: What were key genres, methods, and modes, used for social critique, particularly satire, and what were the targets or butts of these critiques? [Suggested writers and texts: Moliere, Pope, Swift, Blake, RAPE OF THE LOCK, TARTUFFE, GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, OROONOKO; writers on colonialism, abolition, the slave trade, social conditions during the Revolutionary period; lectures 2.1 , 4.2 , 6.1 , discussions 2.4 , 4.2 , 4.3 , 7.1 , classes ]

A.3 Attitude towards classical writers, texts, forms, and rhetoric: How did the 18C and some Romantic writers make use of classical literature in the genres/forms such as the epic/mock-heroic, ode, pastoral, sonnet) and language (such as poetic diction) they employed? [Suggested writers and texts: Pope, Byron, Wordsworth, RAPE OF THE LOCK; lectures 5.2 , discussions 4.2 , classes 2.10.21 ]

Section B (worth 40%): two questions, your choice from these on key issues central to the unit

B.1 Change in ways of looking at, experiencing, and understanding nature: How did writers focus on, position themselves within, and experience the effects of the natural world in the Romantic period? [Suggested writers, concepts, texts: Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, landscape, sublime, “I Wandered Lonely,” “Tintern Abbey,” “Skylark,” “Nightingale,” Blake’s illustrations to SONGS OF INNOCENCE & EXPERIENCE; lectures 5.1 and discussions 5.2 , 7.2]

B.2 Experience, confessionalism, sentimentalism: What is the importance and desired effect of recounting individual experiences, especially those of the ordinary person and particularly in such a way that rouses sympathetic feeling, in the writings of the Romantic period? [Suggested writers and texts: Wordsworth, Douglass, Equiano, “Preface to LYRICAL BALLADS.” Shelley’s “Defense of Poetry,” “The Cry of the Children,” Silesian Weavers,”; lectures 5.2 and discussions 6.2 , and classes 2.24.21 , 3.1.21 ]

B.3 Shift in ways understanding the imagination: What new claims did poets make and demonstrate for the functions of the poetic imagination and its relation to perception, memory, transformation of experience, and the uniqueness of the poet’s mind? [Suggested writers and texts: Locke and sense experience, Wordsworth, Coleridge’s “Biographia “Literaria,” Hawthorne, “I Wandered Lonely,””On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” Shelley’s “Defense of Poetry”; lectures 5.2 , 7.3 and discussions 5.3 , classes 1.22.21 , 2.19.21 ]

Section C (worth 10%): one question about what you encountered so far in the course that relates to the motifs of “monsters” and “madness.”

EXTRA CREDIT: Identify encounters with a text or a concept from this unit that changed your thinking or provoked new thoughts. Identify the text or concept and explain with specifics its effect on you. Write at least a paragraph centered around a specific text or a specific concept.