Final Exam Study Page, English 430.

Below you will find questions arranged in two categories, A and B. Your Final Exam will contain three questions from category A and five questions from category B as they appear here. You will have to answer one question in category A and two questions in category B. The question in category A will account for 50% of your grade, the two questions from category B for 25% each. You will have two hour to complete the entire exam. You may bring book and notes. On Final's Day, you will have to turn in (a) paper # 3; (b) all previously graded papers; (3) all preliminary drafts; (4) one printout of your email journal per group.

CATEGORY A

(for answering questions in this category, discuss three to four texts in chronological order)
  1. On the Puritans' passage to Massachussetts Bay on board the Arabella in 1630, their governor John Winthrop announced that they would build a "Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us," implying that the New Englanders were unlike any other people--endowed with special favors, a special destiny, and a special responsibility by God. Trace how the idea of American exceptionalism persists, develops, and transforms in early American literature.
  2. In this course, we have read texts from both early British America and Spanish America. Are the literatures of the British and Spanish colonies comparable? Discuss their differences and/or similarities.
  3. Many of the texts we have read ambivalently oscillate between a New World utopianism and the disillusionment with an American "dream". Discuss.
  4. Sometimes historians have referred to post-Revolutionary America as a "culture of contradictions." Discuss some of the cultural tensions brought about by the American Revolution(s) as far as manifest in early American literature written after the American Revolution(s).
  5. The American historian Edmund Morgan once argued that it was no coincidence that among all the cultures of the West, it should have been the American colonies--many of them societies based on a slave economy--which would first produce the idea that "all men are created equal." To what extent do the texts you have read this semester bear out his thesis that the American ideal of egalitarian democracy corresponded with an ideology of racism and was founded on the material basis of African slavery and Native American genocide?

CATEGORY B

  1. Discuss Christopher Columbus' attempts to make the unfamiliar familiar in the journals of his American discoveries. Discuss
  2. Discuss Cabeza de Vaca's transformation as a character and narrator in his Account.
  3. Discuss Thomas Harriot's Brief and True Relation as an attempt to encourage British investment in overseas colonies.
  4. Discuss the image and role that John Smith fashions for himself in his accounts of Virginia?
  5. Discuss the picaresque elements of Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora's Misfortunes of Alonso Ramirez.
  6. Discuss the significance of one or more of the poetic personas that Anne Bradstreet adopts in her poetry.
  7. Discuss the significance of "suffering" in Mary Rowlandson's True History.
  8. Discuss the significance of the use of "plain style" in William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation.
  9. Illustrate the main tenets of Puritan eschatology as evident in Michael Wigglesworth's Day of Doom.
  10. Discuss Cotton Mather's views on the reasons why New England seems prone to witchcraft in Wonders of the Invisible World.
  11. Discuss aspects of gender in the Salem witchcraft trials as far as manifest in the court records of Susanna Martin's examination.
  12. Discuss the role that the infusion of Enlightenment natural philosophy play in Jonathan Edwards' sermons.
  13. Discuss Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz defense of women's pursuit of knowledge by drawing from her Respuesta
  14. Discuss the Puritan notion of language in Edward Taylor's poetry.
  15. Discuss the significance that William Byrd attributes to the border between Virginia and North Carolina in his Histories of the Dividing Line. What cultural role does the dividing line play for the construction of an "American" (or Virginian) identity?
  16. Discuss the connection between Jefferson's discourse on race and his American patriotism in Notes on the State of Virginia.
  17. Discuss the significance of the fiction of authorship in Ebenezer Cook's The Sot-Weed Factor.
  18. Discuss the significance of the fiction of authorship in Crèvecoeurs' Letters from an American Farmer.
  19. Discuss the sense of self in Dr. Alexander Hamilton's Itinerarium.
  20. Discuss the eighteenth-century Republican idea of "self" as far as evident in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography
  21. Phillis Wheatley's poetry has sometimes been called purely imitative of the universalist poetics of Neo-Classicism. Discuss the tension between Neo-Classicist universalism and autobiographical particularism in Wheatley's poetry.
  22. Discuss the cultural or historical significance of the seduction theme in Hannah Foster's The Coquette.
  23. Discuss the cultural or historical significance of the theme of somnambulism in Charles Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntley.