For the examination, please bring bluebooks, pencils and/or pens.
The final examination will consist of three sections.
Note: The exam counts as 60 points out of a possible 160 points in the course, or just over one-third of your course grade.
Part I
10 Passages— 1 point each (10 points possible)
(approx. 15 minutes)
The first section of the exam will ask you to identify the author and title of the text from which ten short passages will be selected. The passages will significant to the novels and might be used in the second and third parts of the exam.
Part II (25
points): Approximately 45-60 minutes
Write a brief
essay (4 or more single-spaced handwritten pages) in response to the topic
below.
The concern with “found” documents or unmediated types of writing (like letters, diaries, notes and so on) is a particular feature of the gothic novel, and in Dracula we find this concern reach almost comical proportions. What these found documents attempt to establish is authenticity, an especially important concern for the gothic, which often attempts to make the implausible plausible. But as a brief review of the novels we have read this quarter shows, gothic novels are not alone in this desire for authenticity. Each of the texts we have studied this quarter attempts to convince us of its reality, and no where is this practice more evident than in the choice of narrator for each text.
Focusing on Dracula
and at least two but no more than four other novels read this quarter,
identify the main narrative techniques we have encountered this quarter
and explain how the choice of narrative technique (and sometimes the
choice of narrators) affects the authenticity of the story (i.e. whether
we believe it to be true).
Part III (25
points): Approximately 45-60 minutes
Write a brief
essay (4 or more single-spaced handwritten pages) in response to the topic
below.
Professor Van Helsing says of Mina Harker, “She is one of God’s women, fashioned by His own hand to show us men and other women that there is a heaven where we can enter, and that its light can be here on earth. So true, so sweet, so noble, so little an egoist — and that, let me tell you, is much in this age, so sceptical and selfish” (201). Van Helsing’s praise of Mina exploits eighteenth and nineteenth century notions of women as both fragile creatures weak dependent upon men for protection and self-sacrificing defenders of moral purity and domestic stability, and women—in all their vulnerability, power and desire—stand at the center of most of the novels we have studied this quarter.
Focusing on Dracula
and at least two but no more than four other novels read this quarter,
identify the chief representative female types we have encountered this
quarter and explain what these representative women suggest about a
woman’s “proper” place.