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OLLSCOIL NA hÉIREANN, GAILLIMH
NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, GALWAY
SECOND SITTING 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 SECTIONS
PLEASE USE A SEPARATE ANSWER BOOK FOR EACH
SECTION
Section A: Gothic Literature (Dr Tilley)
1. Write an essay on one of the following topics, keeping in mind that your answer must cover the work of two authors:
a) How is madness, or the fear of madness, used in Gothic fiction?
b) “You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou also dead—dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me didst thou exist—and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.” (Edgar Allan Poe, “William Wilson”) Discuss, with reference to two authors on the course.
c) How is violence, as a narrative device, employed in the works of two authors on the course?
Section B: Literature of the American South (Dr Carlson)
1. Identify and give the significance of three of the following four symbols or quotations from Alice Walker’s Meridian.
a) The Sojourner
b) “To Lynne, the black people of the South were Art.... to her, nestled in a big chair made of white oak strips, under a quilt called The Turkey Walk, from Attapulsa, Georgia, in a little wooden Mississippi sharecropper bungalow that had never known paint, the South—and the black people living there—was Art.”
c) “So this, she mumbled, lurching toward his crib in the middle of the night, is what slavery is like. Rebelling, she began to dream each night, just before her baby sent out his cries, of ways to murder him.”
d) “It was a decade marked by death. Violent and inevitable.... For many in the South it was a decade reminiscent of earlier times, when oak trees sighed over their burdens in the wind; Spanish moss draggled bloody to the ground; amen corners creaked with grief; and the thrill of being able, once again, to endure unendurable loss produced so profound an ecstasy in the mourners that they strutted... .”
2. Answer one of the following essay questions with reference to both William Faulkner’s Light in August and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.
a) The subject of racial identity in the South is represented as problematic in both Light in August and Their Eyes Were Watching God. Discuss.
b) Provide examples of at least two dominant symbols and/or images from both Light in August and Their Eyes Were Watching God and analyse how they are used to create meaning in the texts.
EN288 (1)
4. The following lines are the beginning of Donne’s “Elegy on his Mistris”:
By our first strange and fatall interview By all desires which thereof did ensue, By our long starving hopes, by that remorse Which my words masculine perswasive force Begot in thee, and by the memory Of hurts, which spies and rivals threatned me, I calmely beg. But by thy fathers wrath, By all paines, which want and divorcement hath, I conjure thee, and all the joint which I And thou have sworne to seale joint constancy, Here I unsweare, and overswear them thus, Thou shalt not love by wayes so dangerous. Temper, ô faire Love, loves impetuous rage, Be my true Mistris still, not my faign’d Page; I’ll goe, and, by thy kinde leave, leave behinde Thee, onely worthy to nurse in my minde, Thirst to come backe; o! if thou die before, My soule from other lands to thee shall soare,
First, explain the implied context of these lines—who is talking to whom, and what about? Second, in light of those lines, evaluate the justice of Samuel Johnson’s comment on the Metaphysical poets: “From this account of their compositions 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.”
5. Students at Donne’s law school—the Inns of Court—frequented Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Is there any sign in Donne’s poetry that he learned techniques of dramatization from the theatre? 6. What stanza forms do Donne’s “Songs and Sonnets” take, as compared with Shakespeare’s Sonnets?
SECTION B: Shakespeare (Mr Kavanagh)
Answer any one question.
1. Compare and contrast either two comedies OR two “Roman plays” on the course.
2. Discuss the theme of identity crisis in The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night.
3. Discuss at least two plays on the course which place a strong emphasis on physical violence.
4. Are relationships between parents and children key to an understanding of the “Roman plays”? Discuss in relation to Titus Andronicus and Coriolanus.
5. Explore any of the following themes in relation to at least two plays on the course:
(a) racial difference (b) the marriage plot (c) the warrior-child
END
