Final Examination
You may use an outline. If you do so, please pass the outline(s) in with your exam. You must answer one question from Part I, one from Part II, and one from Part III.
Your Part II or Part III essay will ALSO be your essay for some or all of the 12 available spring term points; please indicate which one you want to count thus.
I. Regarding world religions (30 pts):
1. Discuss three of the four religions we studied this term (Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam). With regard to each, please discuss
A) the relationship between the divine and the human;
B) the elements and purposes of religious practice;
C) the form and goal of the religious community.
II. Regarding Homer (20 pts):
2. Discuss the exchange between Achilles and Priam in Book 24 (lines 473-669) of The Iliad in dramatic (how is it related to the action of the poem) and ethical (how is it related to the moral/ethical development of the characters involved) terms. If you choose this question, please bring your copy of the poem to the exam so that you can refer to it.
3. Compare and contrast the treatment of heroism in The Iliad and Hamlet. You may choose to compare Hamlet to either Hektor or Achilles in particular, or the respective worlds to each other more generally.
4. In the introduction to the Fagles translation, Bernard Knox claims on page 29
“...The Iliad accepts violence as a permanent factor in human life and accepts it without sentimentality, for it is just as sentimental to pretend that war does not have its monstrous ugliness as it is to deny that it has its own strange and fatal beauty, a power, which can call out in men resources of endurance, courage and self-sacrifice that peacetime, to our sorrow and loss, can rarely command…(Simone Weil) presented her vision of Homer’s poem as an image of the modern world.
The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad, is force. Force as man’s instrument, force as man’s master, force before which human flesh shrinks back. The human soul, in this poem, is shown always in its relation to force: swept away, blinded by the force it thinks it can direct, bent under the pressure of the force to which it is subjected. Those who had dreamed that force, thanks to progress, now belonged to the past, have seen the poem as a historic document; those who can see that force, today as in the past, is at the center of all human history, find in the Iliad its most beautiful, its purest mirror.
She goes on to define what she means by force: “force is what makes the person subjected to it into a thing.” She wrote these words in 1939…but before (the article) could be printed Paris Europe
Respond to Knox’s and Weil's claims. For example, you might observe that, in your view, the poem has other contenders for "true hero" or "true subject" and provide some evidence for such a claim. Or you might agree with them and say why you agree with them. You might contrast violence in the poem with violence in Sonatine or Troy
5. Write your own question about Homer, get it approved by me no later than 28 May, and answer it.
III. Regarding everything else (50 points)
6. Compare and contrast the attitudes toward the material world displayed by Plato, Rousseau, and Sartre (or another of the existentialists if you prefer). Please show in your response how the material world figures in the larger system described by the philosophers discussed.
7. Drawing on Woolf, Austen, and at least one other writer we studied this year, compare and contrast the way mothers and motherhood are depicted in the literary texts you’ve chosen.
8. Identify and discuss at least two ways Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead builds upon Waiting for Godot; identify and discuss at least two ways Stoppard departs from Beckett.
9. Hamlet: …What have you, my good friends, deserved at the hands of Fortune that she sends you to prison hither?
Guildenstern: Prison, my lord?
Hamlet: Denmark
Rosencrantz: Then the world is one.
Hamlet: A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons, Denmark
Rosencrantz: We think not so, my lord.
Hamlet: Why, then `tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison. (II,ii,239-251)
The metaphor of human experience as a form of imprisonment is used explicitly here by Shakespeare; it is used explicitly by each of the existentialist writers we studied; it is used both implicitly and explicitly (notably as a narrative device) by Plato. Discuss Shakespeare (Hamlet), Plato, and one of the existentialists (Sartre, Camus, Solzhenitsyn) along the following lines:
a) what is the nature of the “prison”;
b) how do humans come to be “imprisoned”
c) how can humans “escape” from the “prison”?
The epigraph from Hamlet is provided as a thought-provoker only; you need not limit (probably should not limit) your discussion of Hamlet to this one passage.
10. Write and respond to a question that requires you to draw on at least two topics or texts that were part of the seminar. Get the question approved by me no later than 28 May 2010.
11. Case Study Option
Imagine This: you are visiting a relative in a nursing home. Your relative’s roommate engages you in conversation. She/he says “I know that I am going to die soon, and I’ve been wondering if I have led a good life. Can you help me figure that out?”
The Task: draw upon material studied this year to delineate some criteria you can offer to this person you have just met. The perspectives of the Existentialists, Austen, Woolf, Plato, Rousseau, religion, Shakespeare, Stoppard, and Homer offer differing approaches to the question of what constitutes a “good life”; draw upon and compare at least three of these perspectives in your presentation. You may present your findings in writing or in other formats appropriate for the project. You may work in pairs. Your completed project must be turned in at the scheduled exam period.
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