English 253—Take-home final exam

1500-1700 words--25% of grade

Due Thursday June 9, 1:10 p.m. emailed as Word attachment to both instructors.

Write a symposium or platonic dialogue featuring six speakers conversing about one of the topics listed below. The speakers may be authors or characters in works we’ve studied. Allow the speakers to agree, disagree or respond in other ways to the comments of others.

The conversation can mix brief quotations--within quotation marks--with paraphrases or extrapolations of what the speakers might say. The paraphrases or extrapolations should adopt the speaker's style of expression. (Include page or title references in parentheses.) You may use some quotes and references to works assigned but not discussed in class.

1. Piety—Obeying the rules declared by religious, governmental and family authority

2. Growing up—the transformations from childhood to maturity

3. The experience of nature and outdoor life.

4. War and patriotic duty

5. Getting and spending: life in the marketplace

6. Passion, love and marriage

7. Relations between parents and children

8. Freedom vs. servitude

9. Solitude or loneliness

10. Romanticism, realism and modernism

Sample exam by Professors Inchausti and Marx

Another sample exam by a student
( to illustrate a freer approach that's also acceptable, but that would be improved by more specific references or quotes from the texts)