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OLLSCOIL NA hÉIREANN, GAILLIMH
NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, GALWAY
SEMESTER II EXAMINATIONS, 2008/
SECOND ARTS EXAMINATION
EN288 Specialist Studies
Professor A. Minnis
Professor H. McDermott
Dr. J. Carlson
Dr. E. Tilley
Professor A. Frazier
Mr. S. Kavanagh
TIME ALLOWED: TWO HOURS
ANSWER EITHER EN288(1) OR EN288(2)
EN288 (1) Dr Carlson and Dr Tilley
ANSWER BOTH SECTION A AND SECTION B
PLEASE USE A SEPARATE ANSWER BOOK FOR EACH SECTION
Section A: Gothic Literature (Dr Tilley)
1. Identify the speaker and explain the significance of three of the following four quotations:
a) “’This faculty, the power of speaking to me, will be my undoing. It won’t let me pray, it interrupts me with dreadful blasphemies. I dare not go on, I could not. Oh! Doctor, can the skill, and thought, and prayers of man avail me nothing!’”
b) “With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but two. I say two, because the state of my own knowledge does not pass beyond that point. Others will follow, others will outstrip me on the same lines; and I hazard the guess that man will be ultimately known for a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous and independent denizens.”
c) “They are in my ears still, his supreme surrender of the name and his tribute to my devotion. ‘What does he matter now, my own?— what will he ever matter? I have you,’ I launched at the beast, ‘but he has lost you for ever!’ Then for the demonstration of my work, ‘There, there!’ I said to Miles.”
d) “He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it. His face was set, and high duty seemed to shine through it; the sight of it gave us courage, so that our voices seemed to ring through the little vault.”
2. Answer one of the following questions. The texts to be used for this section are: Poe (“Ligeia,” “William Wilson,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,”), The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde , Dracula , Sheridan LeFanu (“Green Tea,” “Carmilla”), The Turn of the Screw. Please note that you must discuss the work of TWO authors in your answers.
a) The literary critic T.J. Lustig says that many of the works we’ve studied “examine the crumbling edges of the Victorian edifice, the selves which lie behind its assumptions of integrity, the violence and the discontent which both created and terrified its civilization.” Discuss, with specific reference to the work of two authors from the list above.
b) How does the presentation of the monstrous in gothic novels change over the century? Discuss, with reference to the work of two authors from the list above.
Section B: Literature of the American South (Dr Carlson)
1. Identify and give the significance of three of the following four quotations from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.
a) “She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled it from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see.”
EN288 (2) Professor Frazier and Mr Kavanagh
ANSWER BOTH SECTION A AND SECTION B
PLEASE USE A SEPARATE ANSWER BOOK FOR EACH SECTION
Section A: John Donne and Samuel Johnson (Prof Frazier) There are two parts to this section of the examination: 25 multiple choice questions; and a short essay.
Multiple choice questions (25 minutes)
- Compared with Shakespeare, in age John Donne was a) 10 years older; b) 8 years younger; c) the same age; d) 28 years younger.
- In religion, Donne was a) a diehard Catholic; b) a Puritan of Puritan parents; c) first a Catholic, later a Protestant; d) an atheist
- In Songs and Sonnets , Donne’s sonnets in form are a) Shakespearean sonnets; b) Italian sonnets; c) irregular in form; d) unrhymed.
- Donne’s place of graduate study, the Inns of Court, was a) on the Continent; b) in Cambridge; c) in London, across the Thames from the Globe; d) in London, between the Globe and the Fortune Theatres on the south bank.
- During his lifetime, a book of Donne’s poems a) was a bestseller; b) was never published; c) was published quite late; d) was published in his youth but censored by the Queen.
- ‘Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide/ Late schoolboys’ is Donne’s contemptuous remark to a) the father of his mistress; b) a friend from the Inns of Court; c) his complaining girlfriend; d) the sun rising and peeping through his window.
- ‘O my America! My new-found-land,/ My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned’ is a line actually addressed by Donne to a) just as it seems, the new world discoveries by Columbus; b) the naked body of his mistress; c) Christ, his Savior; d) St. Paul’s Cathedral.
- ‘Betray, kind husband, thy spouse to our sights,/ And let mine amorous soul court thy mild dove,/ Who is most true and pleasing to thee then/ When she is embraced and open to most men’ is the ending of a sonnet addressed to a) Christ; b) Donne’s best friend, Lord Herbert, c) Shakespeare; d) an unnamed Protestant in London with a beautiful wife.
- A metaphysical conceit, according to Johnson, is a) a vain philosophical idea; b) an extended metaphor in which the most heterogenous ideas are yoked together; c) an opinion of oneself as being immortal; d) any reference to modern science or nature in a love poem.
- In the following stanzas—
If they be two, they are two so [they=our souls] As stiff twin compasses are two; Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show To move, but doth, if th’ other do.
And though it in the center sit, Yet the other far doth roam, It leans and hearkens after it, And grows erect, as that comes home.
there is a) personification; b) a pair of quatrains of a sonnet; c) a conceit, d) an epigram.
- According to Samuel Johnson, one of Shakespeare’s flaws as a writer was that he loved a quibble. By ‘quibble,’ Johnson meant a) dickering over a price; b) hairsplitting attitude to terminology; c) an unseemly conflict; d) a pun.
- Johnson believed that a problem with the Metaphysical poets was that they a) were uneducated; b) were overeducated show-offs; c) only expressed ordinary notions, not original ones; d) misused technical terms because they did not know their true meanings.
- According to Johnson, the proof of a literary work’s greatness is that a) it is a bestseller & pleases many; b) it pleases many and pleases for a long time; c) it was created in antiquity; d) it is judged to be great by the finest critics.
- Shakespeare’s particular superiority, according to Johnson, is that a) the justice of his representations of general nature; b) he writes so expressively of love; c) his stunningly metaphorical use of language; d) he captures so perfectly the spirit of his age.
Short Essay (35 minutes). In his essay on Cowley, Samuel Johnson makes the following criticism of metaphysical poets like Donne: “it will be readily inferred, that they were not successful in representing or moving the affections. As they were wholly employed on something unexpected and surprising, they had no regard to that uniformity of sentiment which enables us to conceive and to excite the pains and the pleasure of other minds: they never enquired what, on any occasion, they should have said or done.” In a reasoned response to this criticism, make close reference to the poems of John Donne, and, if you like, those of Shakespeare. It is acceptable also to draw upon the samples of Donne’s poetry in the multiple-choice questions above.
Section B: Shakespeare (Mr Kavanagh) Answer any one question.
1. Could the relationship of Shakespeare’s early plays to his later plays be described as a relationship of simplicity to complexity? Discuss in relation to two comedies OR two ‘Roman plays’ on the course.
2. Discuss the construction of identity in The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night.
3. Discuss the representation of violence in at least two plays on the course.
4. Discuss the representation of the parent-child relationship in Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus.
5. Explore any of the following themes in relation to at least two plays on the course: (a) the racial outsider (b) separation and reunion (c) childhood
END
