English 668: Final examination

You may ask the secretaries in the main office of the English Department to leave your examination in my departmental mailbox.  You may also drop off the exam between 1 and 3 pm in my office, 2035 Wescoe Hall, on Friday.  No extensions will be granted on the final examination.

Instructions:

Choose two of the following questions.  As you answer each question, you should discuss three texts.  By the end of the examination, you should have discussed at least five different texts.  Your answer to each question should comprise approximately three double-spaced pages.  You need not create a thesis; you are welcome to discuss each text separately.

1.  Discuss three texts in which you find evidence that the relationship between the signifier (the word) and the signified (that to which the word refers) is unstable.  How does that instability inform the larger issues that the texts seem to address (e.g. power, authority, communication, sanity, etc.)?

2.  Many of the texts we've read this semester have appropriated traditional Western/European narrative forms in order to challenge systems of power, such as, for example, Empire, heteronormativity, patriarchy, and capitalism.  Discuss three texts in which you believe this strategy is being invoked.  How is narrative being  used? Are the texts effective at challenging hegemonic systems?

3.  Discuss three texts which engage with the gaze, display, or, more generally, the visual mode of representation.  What do these texts suggest about the relationship between seeing and being?

4.  In "Madness and Narrative Disruption in Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook" (Feminism and the Postmodern Impulse), Magali Cornier Michael claims that modernism recenters and upholds the "illusion of the subject as a coherent and unique entity, grounded in an external reality that underlies all perspectives" (84).  Do you you believe this to be true? Explore this claim with regard to three texts.

5.  Write your own question and answer it.  Note: you will be judged not only on your answer but on your question.  You are {remainder of file lost to time}