Extra topic for Hamlet-Unit essay
Posted on February 22, 2007
Can Roman Polanski's Chinatown be read as an existential tragedy and / or a Nietzschean tragedy?
study guide for final exam
Posted on May 2, 2007
Exam time / date: 3:30-6:30, FRIDAY May 4th (in our regular classroom)
Review session: 10am-11:30, Thursday, May 3rd (LAFAYETTE 302)
* The exam will be open book (no notes / notebooks ... though, clearly, you can write in your books)
The exam will have FOUR sections; sections I and II will be worth 25% of the grade, section III will be worth 20% and section IV will be worth 30%:
I. a discussion of passages drawn from the primary sources; that is, I will give you a passage from a work we covered and you will explain its relevance or importance to the play itself (not so much to its plot as to its conceptual unfolding in terms of notions of tragedy as we have studied that ... and, of course, we've considered tragedy in a wide variety of contexts)
* most of the passages will be drawn from material we covered in class; I could include a couple of passages we did not explicitly address in class but those passages would be conceptually related in some key way to what we did cover; it could very well be that the importance of the passage will be as a demonstration of points made in the secondary readings / theoretical works we covered
** you will be required to do 5 passages (you will have some choice) and each passage will be worth 5 points
II. a discussion of passages drawn from the secondary readings / theoretical works we covered; as above, these will mostly be passages we covered in class, but if I include anything not covered in class it will be related in some obvious way to what we did cover from the major readings (Aristotle, Nietzsche, Booth, Freud, Girard, etc.); you will be asked simply to explain the core assertion being made in the passage, though you might find it helpful to provide some broader conceptual context for the passage
* you will be required to do 5 passages (you will have some choice) and each passage will be worth 5 points
III. a series of questions asking for essay type responses (but short anwers); I will ask about things we considered in class in some form, but you may need to show me that you can apply things we learned in one context to a different context (which is always a good test of our learning)
* you will be required to do 2 questions (you will have some choice) and each response you give will be worth 10 points
IV. a longer essay question that asks you to reflect in some way on your own understanding of tragedy as that has developed over the term; you could prepare for this by asking yourself what it is that you take to be definitive of tragedy; it will be necessary to provide support for any claims you make by referring to specific examples from either the primary reading (or viewing, in the case of films) or the secondary/theoretical material
* in responding to the question in this final section, you might feel the inclination to draw on material that appears elsewhere on the exam; that's fine, but I don't want you merely to repeat core ideas you've already presented in earlier responses ... in other words, if you draw on material that appears elsewhere on the exam, you must find a way to develop your ideas (be more specific, give different examples, compare and contrast wih ideas you have not covered, etc.)