English 2850 Name:
Spring 2020
Prof. Eatough
Midterm Exam
Instructions – READ CAREFULLY!
Please read over the entire midterm, including both these instructions AND the questions, BEFORE you begin writing.
The exam consists of five possible essay questions, of which you only need to complete THREE. (This means that you get to skip two questions.) Each essay will be worth a total of 30 points (for a total of 90 points). Everyone will receive 10 extra points simply for submitting the midterm exam. (Given our circumstances, I think it’s important to reward everyone for continuing to put in the work for this class.) This means that the grade for your midterm will be determined as such:
Essay #1 (30 points) + Essay #2 (30 points) + Essay #3 (30 points) + 10 points of extra credit
=
100 points
All exams should be submitted to Blackboard by the end of the day on Friday, May 1st. (Please note the change of due date.)
ESSAY QUESTIONS
Please choose THREE of the following questions and respond to EACH question in the form of a 500- to 600-word essay. (This means that I should receive three 500-word essays from you, for a total of approximately 1500 words.) You are welcome to write more if you wish, but please try to limit yourself to no more than 900 words for any given essay.
All essays should be clear, well-written, and grammatically correct, but they do NOT need to be structured as formal essays (i.e., the essays do not need to include introductions, conclusions, or thesis statements). Think of these essays as more polished versions of the answers that you provided to the response questions earlier in the semester. Your answers to these essay questions should be much more thorough in their treatment of the question, but they can be structured in the same way (e.g., as a series of 2-3 short paragraphs that lay out your ideas in a clear and concise manner).
You should also make sure that you provide specific pieces of evidence (i.e., direct quotes from the text) to support your ideas.
The essay questions are as follows:
1) Describe how Joseph Conrad engages with the genre of the imperial romance in his novel Heart of Darkness. When answering this question, please provide a detailed definition of the term “imperial romance” before describing how Conrad’s novel borrows from, expands upon, and/or critiques this genre.
2) Using ONE of his poems, discuss how William Butler Yeats uses binaries in his poetry. When answering this question, please explain what a “binary” is before proceeding to explain how such binaries function in Yeats’s writing.
3) Describe the Igbo social structure that we find in Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart. What determines a person’s status in Igbo culture? And what is the larger cultural logic governing who has power and who does not? [Please be as specific as possible in your response. Describe in detail the key terms, concepts, and beliefs that organize Igbo society in Achebe’s novel.]
4) Describe George Bernard Shaw’s critique of Irish nationalism and the Gaelic (or Celtic) Revival in his play John Bull’s Other Island. What does Shaw find objectionable about Irish nationalism? Please be as specific as possible. Explain not only what Shaw thinks is wrong with Irish nationalism, but also why he thinks that nationalism is bad for Ireland.
5) Using ONE of Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories, explain how literature can be used to engage with philosophical questions. What can literature do that other forms of philosophical reasoning cannot? What sorts of philosophical questions is literature well suited to discussing, and why?