Exam 2 Study Guide

Literature and the Environment, Spring 2024, O'Donnell

last updated: April 23, 2024

Exam date and time: Monday, April 29 3:50-5:50pm

This exam counts for 25% of the final grade.

Exam Guidelines and Format

A. I will administer this exam online. Here's how that will work:

- At 3:30pm on Monday, I will post the exam on D2L, in a news item, on the front page.

- You will write up your responses to the exam, then save those as a word document and upload them to the dropbox on D2L by 6pm.

- Please include 1) a descriptive title; 2) your name; 3) the date; 4) page numbers.

B. Aside from being administered online, this exam will have the same format as the first exam, as follows:

The exam will present you with a choice of 10 identification prompts--significant quotes, terms or phrases, proper nouns--which will in turn be drawn from the 17 prompts listed below.

Out of the 10 prompts on the exam, you will then, in turn, choose 8. For each of those 8, you will write a "mini essay" -- that is, three or four clear, complete, self-explanatory sentences -- in which you identify 1) the context or definition; 2) the author(s) and text(s) with which prompt is associated; 3) an important issue associated with the prompt.

Let me emphasize one point: Write complete sentences.

17 Prompts

1. Earth Day

2. The Green Revolution

3. Ecofeminism

4. "If a people in adding a hundred and fifty years to itself subtracts fifty thousand from its land, what is there to hope?"

5. ". . . many people conclude that [our age] places an undue value on material things. But that cannot be so, for people who valued material things would take care of them and would care for the sources of them."

6. "And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature."

7. "The Keystone"

8. "A junkyard is a wilderness. Both are devotees of decay."

9. "Thinking Like a Mountain"

10. "The marsh might have kept on producing hay and pairie chickens, deer and muskrat, crane-music and cranberries forever."

11. "'The trees in the storm don't try to stand up straight and tall and erect. They allow themselves to bend and be blown with the wind. They understand the power of letting go,' continued the voice."

12. "Winds are advertisements of all they touch, however much or little we may be able to read them; telling their wanderings even by their scents alone."

13. Rule #3: "Don't bird in a hoodie. Ever."

14. Koanic and aphoristic writing.

15. "Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in."

16. "They spoke of change, and how they hold the moon in their bellies and wax and wane with its phases. They mocked the presumption of even-tempered beings and made promises that they would never fear the witch inside themselves."

17. "But the longer I stared at it, the less comprehensible the creature became. The more it became something alien to me, the more I had a sense that I knew nothing at all – about nature, about ecosystems."