Study Guide, Exam 2
Engl 4040 Modernism and Postmodernism
O'Donnell, ETSU, Fall 2013
last update: December 6, 2013

 

exam date and time:  Thurs Dec 12, 1:20-3:20pm


About the Exam
1. This exam is worth 15% of your final grade. 

2. The exam will have two sections: I) identification, and II) short essay. Each is explained below.
3. The exam will be "open book:" All the prompts chosen for the exam will first be posted on this study guide web page, and I encourage you to bring your books and notes to the exam. However, I require that you compose your responses during the exam period, rather than composing the sentences ahead of time and transcribing them during the exam.

 

Section I. Identification
This section will be worth half of the exam grade. The section will include a list of ten prompts -- that is, names, titles, concepts, and/or quotes. All ten prompts on the exam will be drawn from the list of 18, below.  From the ten on the exam, you will in turn select seven, to which you will respond in writing.

 

For each of those seven prompts, write a "mini essay" -- three or four clear, complete, self-explanatory sentences -- in which you identify 1) the author(s) and text(s) with which prompt is associated; 2) the context or definition; 3) an important issue associated with the prompt.

 

1. Cave of Swimmers

2. dechronification treatments

3. decolonization

4. postcolonial literature

5. AlliedWasteCVSCitigroupCredit

 

6. RateMe Plus

7. American Restoration Authority (ARA)

8. Zerzura

9. Centaur Excavations at Volos

10. Institute for Historical Review

 

11. Caravaggio

12. "Nevermore" 

13. "...there is a distinct limit, as regards length, to all works of literary art--the limit of a single sitting..." 

14. " [A]s a poet, I may very possibly be more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness (and their combinations and interplay in metaphor on this basis) than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations at the cost of limiting my subject matter and the perceptions involved in the poem." 

15. palimpsest

 

16. epistolary novel

17. Villa San Girolamo

18. sapper 

 

Section II. Short Essay
This section is worth half of the exam grade. Write a short essay--a few hundred words--in which you argue that a particular work is either modernist, or postmodernist, or both, or neither. Be sure to have a point!--that is, a purpose for discussing the work that you discuss, and for adopting the position which you take. The works you may discuss include any of the imaginative literature we've read since early October; any of the poems in the anthology; or "Mr. Death," the film by Errol Morris.