Reference no: EM133739655

Problem

The six questions below are being given to you in advance of the final. On the day of the final, TWO of these questions will be chosen at random. Your essay should make a clear and debate-worthy claim, be supported by specific observations about the text(s), and be written in elegant and mechanically flawless prose. Although some of the prompts are short, be sure to write a unified essay and not just a collection of observations.

I. Choose ONE of the five themes listed in brackets below and craft an essay that argues that Twelfth Night is primarily concerned with showing the truth of it. (For example, if you choose A, your thesis might be: "Twelfth Night suggests that wealth not only is not necessary for happiness, but also that it may even make happiness harder to achieve.")[ A. Wealth is an impediment to happiness. B. Challenges to social norms never create permanent change. C. Extreme emotions are problematic, even potentially dangerous. D. Morality is situational and should not be reduced to a set of rules.E. Love is not arbitrary. Some people are soulmates.]

II. John Gay, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift all discussed The Beggar's Opera as Gay was writing it, calling it a "Newgate Pastoral." What might that designation mean? In what way is this play a pastoral? How does it relate to pastorals from previous eras?

III. Compare the use of music across several of the texts we've read this semester. These can include both works designed for performance (The Second Shepherd's Play, Twelfth Night, The Beggar's Opera) but you might also want to consider such texts as Beowulf, The Cary-Morrison Ode, or Spenser's Epithalamion.

IV. Discuss the use of enjambment and the different emotional resonances and other effects authors achieve with it. You could choose to compare two authors (Milton, Donne, and Shakespeare come to mind) or you could attempt to define a taxonomy of enjambment effects, culling examples from multiple authors and texts.

V. In one of the earliest surviving pieces of British Literature, the story of Caedmon from An Ecclesiastical History of the English People, the Venerable Bede writes that through his songs, Caedmon "sought to draw men away from the love of sin and to inspire them with delight in the practice of good works." Is it fair to say that all of the literature we've read has some kind of didactic function -- that each author attempts to train readers in morality? Trace how this theme is supported, denied, or complicated throughout texts across time, noting, when possible the differing methods authors have used to persuade readers to alter their behavior. (You may want to consider Piers Plowman, Everyman, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost, which are explicitly didactic, but it might also be interesting to consider such complex cases as Gulliver's Travels or even "The Nun's Priests' Tale.")

VI. The frankness of Chaucer's work often shocks inexperienced readers who have wrongly assumed that the literary exploration of sexual desire is a wholly modern phenomenon. But of course, the subject is universal and we have seen it not only in Chaucer, but also in the riddles of the Exeter Book, The Book of Margery Kempe, The Faerie Queene, "The Disabled Debauchee", Gulliver's Travels, and Fantomina, not to mention various carpe diem and other renaissance poems. Explore the highly varied ways different authors have treated sexual desire. What different assumptions about sex have evolved across the centuries? What can we learn about shifting cultural attitudes about men, women, and carnal desire by tracing this history?