English  204 Spring 2005--Final Exam Preparation guide

Part  1 50%--60 minutes

In five of the seven following quotations, do four of the six following tasks. [All quotations will be passages read, performed or discussed in class.

1.  Identify author and/or title.

2.  provide a clear paraphrase

3.  describe the mood or character of the speaker

4.  state one or more themes

5.  explicate some interesting aspects of the language: metaphor or other figure of speech, sound reflecting sense, and pattern and variation of meter.

6. relate to contemporary historical events or developments

Example

Fair quiet, have I found thee here,

And Innocence thy Sister  dear!

Mistaken long, I sought you then

In busie Companies of  Men.

Your sacred Plants, if here below,

Only among the Plants will  grow.

Society is all but rude

To this delicious Solitude.

Sample answer:

This is a stanza from "The Garden" by Andrew Marvell. 

The speaker addresses fair quiet and its sister innocence with personification and apostrophe, saying that he mistakenly searched for them in society but now finds them in the retreat of nature.  The plants that represent these divine qualities can only be found in the woods.  Solitude is better than society.

The speaker's mood is elated at having found a place of relief, rest, and enjoyment.

Themes include pastoral celebration of vegetative nature and rejection of city life, and also appreciation of quiet and solitude—aspects of the contemplative as opposed to the active style of life.

In addition to apostrophe and personification, the speaker makes a witty paradox about society being rude and gives solitude a desireable taste with the slurpy sound of "delicious."  The regular iambic tetrameter and rhymed couplets create a sense of undisturbed harmony.

Marvell often expresses pastoral longing for the green world as an escape from the strife of passion and of politics and war that troubled England in the mid-seventeenth century.

Part  2 50%--60 minutes

Three of the topics listed below will be on the final exam. You will choose one of them for an essay of about 500 words. Dont spend many words on introduction or conclusion.

1. Obedience and rebellion are each rendered attractive by revolutionary changes taking place in society and culture during the Early Modern period(1500-1660): Renaissance--the  rebirth of learning--and Reformation--the breakdown of central religious authority.  Writers of the period portray rebels both as heroic and as damned.  Discuss the  competing claims of obedience [self-sacrifice, humility, order, tradition] and rebellion [individualism, ambition, freedom, innovation] as displayed in three of the following:

Utopia ,  Part 1

Tamburlaine

The Tempest

Genesis or Exodus or The Gospel of Matthew

The writings of Queen Elizabeth

Paradise Lost or "Areopagitica"

Francis Bacon's "The Idols of the Mind

2. Compare and contrast the way romantic love is represented in three of the following relationships.  Pay special attention the themes of a)affection and desire and b)the connections between love and death

Ferdinand and Miranda

Mary Wroth's Pamphilia and Amphilanthus

John Donne and his beloveds

Milton's Adam and Eve

Ann Bradstreet and her husband

3. Pastoral is usually regarded as an idealized vision of life in nature or the countryside generated by a rejection of the city or the court.  Describe aspects of the pastoral ideal in three of the following works:

The Bible (Genesis, Psalms, The Song of Songs)

Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"

Poems by Andrew Marvell

Paradise Lost

4. The new technologies of print and papermaking along with the expansion of trade and commerce during the early modern period made for a dramatic expansion of literacy. The humanist Renaissance of learning and the Protestant Reformation of religion placed great emphasis on the practise of reading—particularly upon reading with insight and personal response. Discuss the theme of reading, study and learning as presented in at least three of the following works. If possible compare and contrast treatments and attitudes.

5. Relate  Ann Bradstreet's characterization of "New England" vs "old England" to images of a "New World" found in three of the following: Thomas More's Utopia, Sir Walter  Ralegh's Voyages, the New Testament's "Kingdom of Heaven," The Tempest's "Brave  New World," and Milton's new world of Earth.

6."Thou art a figurative,  a metaphorical god...in whose words there is such a height of figures, such voyages  such pergrinations to fetch remote and precious metaphors, such extensions, such  spreadings, such curtains of allegories, such third heavens of hyperboles, so  harmonious elocutions, so retired and reserved expressions..." John Donne, Expostulation  19

"The idols  imposed by words on the understanding are of two kinds: they are either names  of things which do not exist...or they are names of things which exist,but yet  confused and ill defined and hastily and irregularly derived from realities...which  spring out of a faulty and unskillful abstraction..." Francis Bacon, "The Idols  of the Mind."

Using these comments by Donne and Bacon as extreme positions, discuss early modern writers' attitudes toward and/or uses of language.

7.  The right to read and interpret the Bible for oneself was a central principle of the Protestant Reformation. Discuss ways that three authors of the Early Modern period are inspired as artists by the Bible and ways they expand, alter and interpret it for their readers.