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ENGL 267 World Literature 1,700-present , Spring 2009
Xianfeng Mou
Mid-term essay questions:
Requirements and reminders:
- Choose four questions to answer. Do not answer two similar questions if you are reminded that between A and B, and sometimes C, choose only one.
- Read each passage carefully, identify which social or artistic movement it belongs to, explain how its author echoes or disagrees with the major beliefs of that particular movement. Explain also how this passage speaks to the rest of the text. You can consult your textbooks and notebooks. If you discuss it with your classmates, take care you two do not write on the same piece using the same ideas or wordings. That constitutes plagiarism.
- Do not summarize plots.
- When you answer, indicate which passage you are explicating. But you do not need to copy the long questions.
- Each question requires one and half pages to be adequately addressed. But please do not exceed eight pages for four questions.
- When a question relates to more than one author or one literary work, focus on the first one, and touch lightly on the other works.
- It is due March 25, before class starts.
The Enlightenment Age in the European tradition believed in reason and rationality to oppose the hierarchical control of the previous historical periods. On the other hand, the Enlightenment was also set against the disruptive power of passions and emotions. Enlightenment intellectuals located meaning in the individual mind. These beliefs had repercussions in their view of human nature, the truth in literary representation, and the genre writers favor, the relationship between the group and the individual.
1) In this context, discuss Swift’s attack on the British culture of his time, his desire to escape, and upon being expelled his attempt to live in an isolated island, till his final decision to go back to reform his wife and children.
2) Under this context, explain whether Voltaire believed the common people could be enlightened. Do the main characters, such as Candide, Pangloss, the duke’s son, Cunégonde experience change throughout their stories?
3) As we discussed in class, Swift took pains to put distance between what he wrote and the fact that he authored the story. He took elaborate measures to tell the reading public that what they saw was not what he wrote. He published two letters, A Letter from Captain Gulliver to His Cousin Sympson and The Publisher to the Reader. Consider the content of his main text, and these two letters and explain why Swift took those elaborate gestures from the point-of-view of the writer, of the reader to the social background. Comment on whether his attacks are well-grounded. (If you choose 1), do not do 3).)
4) In the context of question 3), explain Lu Xun’ gesture of writing his story from the point of view of a madman in Diary of a Madman.
5) Lu Xun, in his Diary of a Madman, which often regarded as the first story marking the birth of modern Chinese fiction written in vernacular Chinese, focuses on the cannibalistic nature of traditional Chinese culture. Use relevant details where the madman believes everybody, including his elder brother, has eaten humans. At one point, the madman even doubted that he himself might have eaten humans without knowing it. Zhang Ailing, in Love in a Fallen City, also describes how “the family” sacrificed its members. Use concrete details from these two works to illustrate the cannibalistic nature of the culture, it modern manifestations, and the effectiveness of individual resistance. (Between 4 and 5, choose only one)
6) Lu Xun’s writing, in a way, also follows the spirit of the Enlightenment Age in his fight against the hierarchical oppressive culture of feudal China. Lu Xun, however, has the benefits of a century than European Enlightenment intellectuals. Does Lu Xun hold a similar view towards the common people as Swift and Voltaire do? What is Lu Xun’s attitude towards Englightenment? How do you understand his metaphor of waking up people sleepy and dying in the iron house? How do you understand his cultural position of “cheering on from the sideline?” How do you connect his authorial self-positioning to his belief that art must speak to current life? Do you appreciate his cultural position?
7) Emily Dickinson, now celebrated as one of America’s best poets, turned on the patriarchal teachings and traditions on their head by consciously choosing the constricted life society demanded of women. She belongs to the Age of Romanticism. Romantic thinkers believed in the innate rights of the individual, the infinite possibilities of the individual, and the sacredness of individual imagination. This emphasis on individuality led to women’s struggle for freedom. But her insistence on her individuality both empowered her and left her with a sense of helplessness and hurt. Her poems No. 258 “There is a certain Slant of light,” No. 341 “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” No. 435 “Much Madness is divinest Sense,” all in one way or another describe the price she has paid for her choice. Focus on any one of them to explain your understanding of how she felt or what she thought when she wrote them.
8) Emily Dickinson, however, is also celebrated as a Transcendentalist poet believing in infinite possibilities or the individual’s connection to the over-soul. For that, she is also known as being a feminist poet in the sense that she advocated a woman’s right, or a female poet’s right, to her infinite consciousness or imagination. Her poetic voice always carries her gender specific speaking. Explicate her poem No. 754 “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—” according to your understanding. (Between 7 and 8, choose only one.)
9) Identify the following passage, give its title and the author, and the name of the character who speaks these lines. Then explain why the author rewrote this classic story for his contemporary audience. At the same time, also explain the characters mentioned in this passage, why the speaker contrasts herself with Phaedra, Theseu with Hippolytus.
“I love, I own, a heart that’s never bowed
Beneath Love’s yoke, but stayed aloof and proud.
Small glory Phaedra gained from Theseus’ sighs!
More proud than she, I spurn the easy prize
Of love-words said a thousands times before,
And of a heart that’s like an open door.
Ah, but to move a heart that’s firm as stone,
To teach it pangs which it has never known,
To bind my baffled captive in a chain,
Against whose sweet constraint he strives in vain:
There is what excites me in Hippolytus;
10) Romanticism famously celebrates the individual. The theory of a genius was actually born during the late 18th century. Writers, with their ability to create worlds, very often are considered as genius figures. But the concept of a genius also carries a potential dark side. Take Goethe’s Faust as an example. Faust is obviously on a quest. What is he searching for? Why is he questioning which term—WORD, MIND, FORCE, or ACT—possesses the creative power? Is he questioning that the four terms must be united into one to be effective? Why does he admit a dog, later changed into a fog, hellish foams, then changed into a traveling scholar? Why does Faust agree to go on a journey with the traveling scholar who represents the spirit that negates? And what Faust has learned through his experience at the end of his journey concluded in the Norton selection?
It says, “In the beginning was the Word,”
Already I stopped. It seems absurd.
The Word does not deserve the highest prize,
I must translate it otherwise
If I am well inspired and not blind.
It says: In the beginning was the Mind.
Ponder that first line, wait and see,
Lest you should write too hastily.
Is mind the all-creating source?
It ought to say: In the beginning there was Force.
Yet something warns me as I grasp the pen,
That my translation must be changed again.
The spirit helps me. Now it is exact.
I write: In the beginning was the Act.
11) In a way, we can say Goethe is trying to understand how the world is created and how the story world is created. As we mentioned in class, writers sometimes tell the process of their artistic creation. Some writers, however, prefer not to tell directly but to blend their process of artistic creation into the story itself. Which category does Cao Xueqin’s Story of the Stone belong to? Explain your answers with evidence from the text.
12) In the context of question 11), which category does Yasunari’s Snow Country belong to? Remember that story grew out of a short story and took many years to take the shape it is now in.
13) In the context of question 11), which category does Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich belong to? Explain your answers in detail. (Between 11, 12, and 13, choose only one.)
14) The birth of each new school of thoughts under new social and philosophical conditions always seeks to modify those schools of thoughts that came before it. On the other hand, some important belief systems, once born, never die. They remain in the cultural environment and shape people’s thoughts and actions, sometimes imperceptibly. Take Flaubert’s Madame Bovary for example. It is fairly well-known as a masterpiece of Realism. Flaubert himself is noted for saying, to the effect that, Madame Bovary’s desires represents his own desires, and that he wrote the novel as a therapeutic gesture to rid himself of those foolish, rosy, or purple Romantic themes, clichés, character types, or Emma’s desire to experience a genuine love as being hit by a thunderbolt. Explain what the cardinal beliefs Realistic writers cherish, explain where Flaubert conforms to and where he deviates from those beliefs.
15) What is Flaubert’s emotive attitude towards Emma? Would you agree with the understanding that Emma was trapped by the environment, that she as a woman, aspires to a higher existence than life allows her? What does she want to achieve by agreeing to Charles performing the operation on the stable boy’s clubfoot? Would you agree that Emma’s desire for genuine love is legitimate, only she mistakes sensuous luxury and abandon for genuine love, that she was played by the cruel Rodolphe from the very beginning? Would you agree that women nowadays have more freedom to develop to their full potentials or they are still constricted?
16) For most of the time, we are reading male writers’ works. When they write about women, their attitudes differ remarkably from that of women writers who write about women. But sometimes women writers sound just like male writers. Many times authors keep a neutral emotive attitude so that readers cannot figure out what the writer is inclined to. Now think back this half semester and evaluate Kate Chopin’s emotive attitude towards Edna. Does Chopin sympathize with Edna, or rebukes Edna, or appreciates Enda, or satirizes Edna? Use details from the text to support your points.
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Created by Xianfeng Mou, spring 2009, All Rights Reserved. Added on 08/26/09.
