English Questions

Final Exam – English 214, Summer Session II, 2016 – W. Chapman

For EACH of the topics below, write an essay in 40-60 minutes on the respective readings as directed.

1. Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Names Desire, like all good drama, is not just literature to be read. It is to be viewed and heard. In responding to this topic with a well-supported essay, please take into account the stage directions the playwright wrote to create a recurring motif associated with Blanche DuBois, that of the “blue piano” and Varsouviana music, and to create atmosphere for Scene Three, the famous Poker Night sequence. Consider the romantic subplot, Mitch’s courtship of Blanche (he meets her in Scene Four, which was to have the same visual impact as that of a particular Van Gogh painting, All Night Cafe (see the attachment, Van Gogh’s statement in the caption, and Williams’s direction on p. 1176). What part does love play in a courtship begun in such an environment and viewed from each of their perspectives? What does the Young Man represent? Why is Blanche’s story about Allen’s suicide so effective (note the Varsouviana music) in eliciting a marriage proposal from Mitch? And why is Mitch so emotionally distressed at the end of the play?

2. Poetry. We have not addressed the technicalities of verse to any significant degree in this course but have distinguished between distinctive voices or tendencies discerned in the poems of a good many poets. The speaker of a poem is not necessarily the poet but a persona (which means mask). A poet may create a persona that projects oneself, as Whitman and Dickinson do (complex individuals wear many masks), or the poet may create a persona that inhabits the poem in the same way that fictional characters inhabit a story or novel or dramatic characters exist in a stage play. Romantic poets tend to prefer first-person voice, but Modernists such as Eliot, Williams, Stevens, and Moore prefer personae that we recognize generally to be made-up characters. We saw poets veering in the mid-20th century back to a kind of personal poetry in which the speaker is the poet. We even called that Neo-Romantic, or Confessional. So here is your charge: Discuss these trends in the tradition of American poetry by (A) comparing a poem by Whitman or Dickinson with (B) either Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” or Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” and then (C) by contrasting your Romantic and Modern examples with a Neo-Romantic poem by Roethke, Lowell, Plath, Sexton, Ginsberg, Snyder, Kinnell, or one of the African American poets. Finally (D), in the 21st century, do you see Siedlarz, Moran, and Walders fitting into this scheme? Would you call them Neo-Romantic, Post-Modern, or something else? Why?

3. A number of short stories that we have read this summer session were set in the southern states but not necessarily written by southern writers. If you consider the stories by Ambrose Bierce, Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Ron Rash, and Doris Betts, the last two are by far the most local in relation to the Carolinas as well as the most contemporary. Drawing on the examples of Bierce, Chopin, Faulkner, and O’Connor for context, what aspects of the two stories “Redfish, Possums, and the New South” and “This Is the Only Time I’ll Tell It” do you find in the others that might establish a pattern or affirm their place as types of regionalist fiction. Besides setting, consider, for example, characterization, individual vs. cultural or social expectations, social class or economic distinctions, codes of conduct and justice, the role of religion and violent action. (The list here is limited but helpful, acknowledging that as context four stories is a small sample from which to generalize about the latest stories. Inferences are understood to be your own, but you will need to support them based on examples.)