Due Wednesday, June 11, by 5:00 p.m. If you've completed the exam BEFORE that time, please bring it to the Honors College office and put it in my mailbox OR slip it under the door to my office. I'll be in 308 Chapman from about 3:00 pm on Wednesday for hand-delivery of exams.

Here are the term's general questions, according to the syllabus:

How do we know who we are, and how do romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism define a self? How does literature of the last two centuries invent, contest or corroborate earlier definitions of the human? How does literature foment and challenge love, revolution, evolution, science, colonialism, fascism, and nihilism? Where is reading, writing, and thinking headed in this new millennium, and what modes will we use to understand our literate selves?

Take a two-hour block of time between now and 4:50 pm Wednesday and write TWO essays chosen from the list below. Use your essay to demonstrate your familiarity with the texts and issues mentioned. You may treat the scenarios in classic essay form, or create an imaginative conversation between/among characters. In either case, be as probing and specific as you can. You may consult the passages along with their contexts and plan your essays ahead of time. You may refer to other class texts as appropriate. Maximum length: two blue books or 1000 words, typed double-space (approximately 500 words per essay). Please keep in mind that the essays' purpose is to have you assess the interrelationships among our texts and themes.

Culture and cultural relativism: What makes things "well" or "not well": gender? Language? Power? Death? Possessions?
Uchendu, in Things Fall Apart, page 134: "Have you not heard the song they sing when a woman dies?

"'For whom is it well, for whom is it well?
There is no one for whom it is well.'

"I have no more to say to you."
Methwold, in Midnight's Children (from "Methwold" chapter): "Look around you: everything's in fine fettle, don't you agree? Tickety-boo, we used to say. Or, as you say in Hindustani: Sabkuch ticktock hai. Everything's just fine."

Transcendence: What role does picture or representation play in ideas about transcendence? How does the idea of transcendence change between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries?
Scenes of Clerical Life, "Janet's Repentance," page 299: "In this artificial life of ours, it is not often we see a human face with all a heart's agony in it, uncontrolled by self-consciousness; when we do see it, it startles us as if we had suddenly waked into the real world of which this everyday one is but a puppet-show copy. For some moments Mr Tryan was too deeply moved to speak."
Orlando, page 271: "Having asked then of man and of bird and the insects, for fish, men tell us, who have lived in green caves, solitary for years to hear them speak, never, never say, and so perhaps know what life is--having asked them all and grown no wiser, but only older and colder (for did we not pray once in a way to wrap up in a book something so hard, so rare, one could swear it was life's meaning?) back we must go and say straight out to the reader who waits a tiptoe to hear what life is--Alas, we don't know."

The self and identity: What defines the self? What constitutes identity? What affects the definition of identity?
Orlando, page 308: "Then she called hesitatingly, as if the person she wanted might not be there, "Orlando?" For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not--Heaven help us--all having lodgment at one time or another in the human spirit? Some say two thousand and fifty-two. So that it is the most usual thing in the world for a person to say, directly they are alone, Orlando? (if that is one's name) meaning by that, Come, come! I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another."
Midnight's Children, near the end of the "Sam and the Tiger" chapter (page 457) : "Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I", every one of the now-six-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world."

Death: How does death redeem, define, discover, or destroy human understanding?

Sexuality and gender: How does sexual stability or instability define modernism?
Orlando, page 252: "You're a woman, Shel!" she cried.
"You're a man, Orlando!" he cried.
God of Small Things, page 27: "Baby Kochamma turned it into a lush maze of dwarf hedges, rocks and gargoyles. . . Baby Kochamma spent her afternoons in her garden. In sari and gum boots. She wielded an enormous pair of hedge shears in her bright-orange gardening gloves. Like a lion tamer she tamed twisting vines and nurtured bristling cacti. She limited bonsai plants and pampered rare orchids. She waged war on the weather. She tried to grow edelweiss and Chinese guava."

Time: What makes time slow or fast? [If you want to add Midnight's Children to this question and think about "ticktock" and time become human, you may.]
God of Small Things, page 321:
" Tomorrow?
Tomorrow.
They knew that things could change in a day. They were right about that."
Scenes of Clerical Life, "Janet's Repentance," page 202: More than a quarter of a century has slipped by since then and in the interval Milby has advanced at as rapid a pace as other market-towns in her Majesty's dominion . . .But pray, reader, dismiss from your mind all the refined and fashionable ideas associated with this advanced state of things, and transport your imagination to a time when Milby had no gas-lights. . . ."

Nature: Who decides what's natural? Why does "natural" resonate so powerfully in the modern era?
Orlando, page 294: "Hail! Natural desire! Hail! happiness! divine happiness! and pleasure of all sorts, flowers and wine, though one fades and the other intoxicates. . . and anything that interrupts and confounds the tapping of typewriters and filing of letters and forging of links and chains, binding the Empire together. . .Hail, happiness! . . .and all fulfilment of natural desire. . ."
Things Fall Apart, page 208: "In the many years in which he had toiled to bring civilization to different parts of Africa he had learned a number of things. . . In the book which he planned to write he would stress that point . . .Every day brought him some new material. The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. . . there was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger."