English 253 Spring 2011 Take-home Final Exam

(1500-1700 words)

The exam involves an overview of readings, lectures and responses as well as detailed references to specific texts. It requires you to write a symposium or platonic dialogue featuring six speakers conversing about one of these topics:

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

· Growing up—the transformations from childhood to maturity

· The experience of nature and outdoor life

· War and patriotic duty

· Getting and spending: life in the marketplace

· Passion, love and marriage

· Relations between parents and children

· Freedom vs. servitude

· Solitude or loneliness

· Romanticism, realism and modernism 

The conversation can mix brief quotations--within quotation marks--with paraphrases or extrapolations of what the authors might say. The paraphrases or extrapolations may adopt the speaker's style of expression. (Please include page references in parentheses.)

Sample, written by Professors Inchausti and Marx, on the topic of “Education and Teaching”:

________________________________________________________________________

Frederick Douglass (Narrative of the Life):

It became clear to me that “education and slavery were incompatible with each other.” (22)  “Nothing seemed to make my Mistress more angry than to see me with a newspaper.” (22) “The plan which I adopted to get an education, and the one by which I was most successful was that of making friends of all the little white boys whom I met in the street.  As many of these as I could I converted into teachers. With their aid, I finally succeeded in learning to read.” (23) “What I got from reading was a bold denunciation of slavery, and a powerful vindication of human rights.” (24) But “as I read and contemplated the subjects of slavery and human rights, behold! That very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come true, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish.” (24 “It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. In moments of agony I envied my fellow slaves for their stupidity.” (24) If ignorance is bliss, then education is discontent: perhaps, a divine discontent—but discontent nevertheless. “Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever.” (24) and reading set me on a course that would either kill me or set me free. “Get caught or get clear, I will try it.” (38) So for me education makes life less comfortable but more significant. You can’t do it half way. It lays obligations upon you that can either make you or destroy you.

Mrs. Ramsay (To the Lighthouse):

Mr. Douglass, what you are saying reminds me of my husband, the professor of philosophy. “He was incapable of untruth; …[he] never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all of his own children…who should be aware from childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished.” (4) But in fact “To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people’s feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilization so wantonly, so brutally, [is]…so horrible an outrage of human decency that…There [is] nothing to be said.”(13) And the people he surrounded himself with—the fawning students who flattered his tender ego—the way they spoke in incomprehensible “ugly academic jargon, that rattled itself off so glibly” (9) talking about “who had won this, who had won that, who was a ‘first-rate man” at Latin verses, who was ‘brilliant but I think fundamentally unsound…” (6) and about “the influence of something upon somebody.”(9) But despite all that education I was not “able to tell him the truth, being afraid, for instance about the greenhouse roof and the expense it would be, afraid that he might guess, what [I] a little suspected, that his last book was not quite his best book…and the children seeing it, and the burden it laid on them…” (9) “His understanding often astonished [me]. But did he notice the flowers? No. Did he notice the view? No. Did he even notice his own daughter’s beauty, or whether there was pudding on his plate or roast beef? He would sit at table with them like a person in a dream.” (51) “Really, [I] sometimes [think I like] the boobies best. They did not bother one with their dissertations. How much they missed, after all these very clever men! How dried up they did become, to be sure. There was something…very charming about Paul…He was so considerate.” (72) Wont you have another helping of beef?

Pozdnischeff (The Kreutzer Sonata):

Leave it to a woman to change the subject—away from ideas about education and on to herself and her damn dinner parties.  “We eat game, meat, and fish, besides sundry other kinds of heat giving food and drink. Now where, may I ask, does all this go?  To produce excesses, abnormal excitement, which passing through the prism of our artificial life, assumes the form of falling in love.” (81) Poor Paul, Poor Minta , Poor Mr. Ramsey.  If “there had been no boating excursions, no dress-makers to arrange wasp-like waists, and so on,” and had Mr. Ramsey’s “wife had been dressed in a plain gown and stayed at home, and he had been leading a normal life,” (81) a humble life, like a peasant, working all day and eating simple foods at night, then he might have had a chance at becoming a true philosopher. Not some academic hack perpetually concerned about his professional reputation. Real sages, like my favorite writer Tolstoy, have no need for clever books, complex music, fame (R!) or murder.  And yes, this is where all this high living and ambition ultimately leads: murder. Mark my words, in the not to distant future men will not just kill their wives. but they will travel across oceans to kill others by the thousands, indeed by the hundreds of thousands, and it will all be the result of “meretricious costumes” “scientists” and  “philosophers”  and "Good homes" I will blame thinkers like Mr. Ramsey and their corrupting female counter-parts who spend all their time worrying about imaginary tables in personless kitchens or how to best serve beef Wellington or protecting "the homefront" I wouldn’t be suprised if late at night—after the kids go to bed—both Mr. And Mrs. Ramsey think about death and oblivion—maybe even suicide-- because in their little world  “Life without vanity has become almost an impossibility” (120) Wait until you spend some time in prison, like I did, and you have some time to think without consuming constantly or fornicating—then you won’t be so taken in by fine living or beautiful moments.  Pain is the real educator. Pain, loss, and getting caught. Oh, yeah, and being set free for justifiable homicide.. Thank you, Jesus.

The Officer “The Penal Colony”:

Ah, my Eastern European compatriot. How refreshing to hear again the voice of piety and faith in the old ways of the homeland (54) and to penetrate beyond the superficiality of womanish “consideration” and humanistic “enlightenment”--those Western heresies that have undermined our hallowed traditions. Only you, who have carried out a just sentence against female transgression and free-thinking art with the beautiful dagger of honor can understand the necessity for inscribing the crime and the sentence--so that the guilty one “will learn it on [her] body.” (57). It is indeed through bodily suffering that spiritual learning is achieved. Let me tell you that around the sixth hour of torment, “even the dumbest one starts to understand. It begins around the eyes. From there it spreads out. A sight that could tempt someone to lie down alongside [the sufferer]. Nothing further happens, the [person] merely begins to decipher the writing…with his wounds.” (61) This is the essence of education, as the old ones well knew. And to maintain that tradition they knew that “the children should be considered first and foremost…Often I would squat down, holding two small children in my arms, right and left. How we all captured the transfigured expression on the tortured face, how we held our cheeks in the glow of this finally achieved and now perishing justice! What times those were, my friend.” (64)

William Blake:

Oh, Pozdnischeff and Mr. Officer, “thou art sick.  The invisible worm that flies in the night, in the howling storm, has found out thy bed of crimson joy, and his dark secret love does thy life destroy.”(The Sick Rose) You begin with a desire for moral purity and end with a torture machine.” And “because the innocent are happy and dance and sing, you think you have done them no injury and are gone to praise God and his Priest and King, who make up a heaven of their misery.” (The Chimney Sweeper) Oh, I forgot, in the Penal Colony no one is innocent—all are guilty—that’s your PREMISE.  Then why did the divine boy on the cloud ask me to pipe a song about a Lamb? (Introduction) Oh, you ideological purists, without contraries there is no progression, and you wish to wipe out all dissent, enforce a single moral law, even write upon the tender flesh of the God children.(Marriage of Heaven and Hell)  I wouldn’t be surprised if He doesn’t send a spike through your skull one of these days just to make a point!  (I prefer Nudist to Penal Colonies by the way.  Most sane people do.) But you are right in one sense:  Education is experience—and as such it is a fall from innocence.  It is a form of corruption, unless one acquires a second innocence on the far side of simple worldliness. That’s what all my works are about—overcoming the contraries that lead to war with a unity available only through the IMAGINATION. Thel chose to remain unborn because she had not the imagination to see past her own death, (Book of Thel) and you my awkward friends—one a murderer, the other a suicide—exhibit the same lack of vision. BREAK THIS HEAVY CHAIN THAT DOES FREEZE MY BONES AROUND!(Earth’s Answer)  

Gary Snyder (“Axe Handles”):

William, you’ve been communicating with that young whippersnapper Bob Dylan—I was married and divorced when he was in gradeschool. He keeps telling people to “leave [their] stepping stones behind” and to “forget the dead” in order find freedom and liberate imagination. But where’d he get that idea? From reading books, books of poems written by people like you and that other William and Thoreau, books about people like Socrates and Jesus, who said to live your own life as discovery. Well I say, we do need teachers who’ve learned from teachers like them. That kind of tradition is what allows me to find freedom.

One afternoon the last week in April
Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet
One-half turn and it sticks in a stump.
He recalls the hatchet-head.
Without a handle, in the shop
And go gets it, and wants it for his own.

…
…I begin to shape the old handle.
With the hatchet, and the phrase
First learned from Ezra Pound
Rings in my ears!
"When making an axe handle
the pattern is not far off."

.... And I hear it again:

It's in Lu Ji's We Fu, fourth century

A.D. "Essay on Literature" - in the

Preface: …

My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen

Translated that and taught it years ago

And I see: Pound was an axe,

Chen was an axe, I am an axe

And my son a handle, soon

To be shaping again, model

And tool, craft of culture,

How we go on”.