Sample Final Exam for ENGL 337

Instructions: Write your responses in ink and use an exam booklet. I strongly encourage you to read through the exam carefully and then to spend some time planning your response (suggested time for this activity: 15 minutes).

 

Section I (Suggested Time: 30 minutes): Choose three of the following four quotations. Identify the excerpt (author and text), then state the significance of the quotation (5 points each; 3 X 5 = 15 points).

 

A) Beauty is truth, truth beauty.

 

B) In every voice, in every ban,/ the mind-forg'd manacles I hear.

 

C) zooks, sir, flesh and blood,/ That's all I'm made of!

 

D) We yield, enthralled, to things repugnant, base

Note: for examples of strong responses to IDs, check out the linked responses to an ENGL 230 exam.

Section II (Suggested Time: 30 minutes): Choose three of the following four terms and explain the significance of each (5 points each; 3 X 5 = 15 points).

 

A) the sublime vs. the beautiful

 

B) the verse novel

 

C) Pre-Raphaelites

 

D) ballad

Note: for examples of strong responses to terms, check out the linked responses to an ENGL 230 exam.

Section III (Suggested Time: one hour): Choose one of the following four poems and write a detailed analysis in essay form. You might consider discussing such things as the reasons the poet chose the verse form s/he did; the relation between the form of the poem and its content; the effect of such stylistic devices as alliteration, assonance, rhyme, meter variation, caesuras, enjambement, line breaks, etc.; and the relation of the poem to its literary-historical context. The paper should be structured around some organizing thesis or main argument that you then pursue throughout your analysis of the poem. (30 points).

Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur" or "Carrion Comfort"

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "To George Sand: A Desire" or "To George Sand: A Recognition"

For those of you who wrote the second paper on EBB: George Meredith, Modern Love, XXVIII: "I must be flattered" or XXIX: "Am I failing?"

Note: for another example of a strong response to an essay question, check out the linked response to Wordsworth's "The World Is Too Much with Us."

 

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