Exam Questions: Survey

It is clear that you will have more material (in the syllabus, anthology, additional texts, slides and your lecture notes) than you can communicate in the short time of the oral exam. Your answer will be judged NOT on how it manages to overwhelm with every single detail that you can reproduce BUT on its effectiveness in getting across what is most important, most typical, most helpful in explaining the special nature of the writer(s) or literary period. An effective answer will concentrate on presenting the main points in as fluent a way as possible. It will add a salient, helpful detail here or there, but it will not try to cram in everything that could possibly be relevant. Try not to be too apprehensive: I enjoy teachingenabling you to learnand I want to find out how successful the learning experience has been; it is much more pleasant to discover that you have learned a lot than to search for the opposite. How much detail is required in your response depends on the nature of the question. Since each exam will last roughly the same time (about 15 minutes in total for the survey question and exam text together), a question that asks you to discuss just one author calls for more detail on that author than a question that asks you to discuss the same author alongside two others. When I expect you to compare or contrast two writers, this is explicitly mentioned. A handful of dates you should know by heart, so that you have some fixed points of reference within the literary history you are aiming to master. For instance, the years of Wordsworths birth (1770) and death (1850) are round figures. Learn those so that you can place other writers in relation to those firm dates (e.g. Blake was born earlier, but didnt live quite as long; Keatss brief span occurs within Wordsworths long life). Oscar Wildes life (1856-1900) coincides closely with the second half of the nineteenth century; Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was born in the same year, yet lived half a century longer: you could choose to memorize either Wilde or Shaw as another helpful point of referenceone of perhaps six in all that create the framework within which you can more roughly place other writers and literary periods, so that you have some idea of when Modernism, say, dominated English literature, or that Yeats lived much later than Keats.

1.

Discuss the historical background to the changing nature of literature in the eighteenth century. 2. Sketch the emergence of authorship in the modern sense of the word in the eighteenth century. 3. Briefly discuss Addison, Swift and Pope, focusing on their Augustanism. 4. Discuss Alexander Pope and his works Essay on Man and The Rape of the Lock. 5. Discuss the rise of the English novel in the eighteenth century (why then?) and illustrate by means of Robinson Crusoe. 6. Discuss the works of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne. 7. Discuss the emergence of a sensibility divorced from sense in Gray, Ossian and the early Gothic novel (up to the 1790s). 8. Briefly discuss the significance of Johnson and Burns. 9. Discuss English Romanticism in general and briefly indicate who its most important authors were in the realms of poetry and prose (no extensive explanations of these authors). 10. Discuss the life and works of William Blake.

11. Discuss the life and works of William Wordsworth. 12. Discuss the life and works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 13. Discuss the life and works of Lord Byron. 14. Discuss the life and works of P. B. Shelley. 15. Discuss the life and works of John Keats. 16. Discuss Mary Shelleys Frankenstein. 17. Discuss the life and works of Maria Edgeworth and Sir Walter Scott. 18. Discuss Jane Austens work, starting from these three elements: (1) the features of the Austen heroine; (2) the question whether Austen was a Romantic novelist; (3) her handling of narrative point of view. 19. Discuss the representation of women in the works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bront, and George Eliot. 20. Discuss the Victorian age as a historical term as well as (in general) the literature that is associated with it, including the phenomenon of sages. 21. Discuss the poets Alfred (Lord) Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett, and Robert Browning. 22. Discuss Arnold, the Rossettis, and Hopkins as Victorian poets. 23. Discuss the Bront sisters in general, without entering into the specifics of their works. 24. Discuss Charlotte Bront and her novel Jane Eyre; briefly bring in Jean Rhyss Wide Sargasso Sea (discussed in Section 3: Modern) 25. Discuss Emily Bront and her novel Wuthering Heights. 26. Discuss the life and works of Charles Dickens. 27. Briefly discuss Thackeray and Trollope against the background of social changes in the Victorian Age (cf. also opening section of this chapter). 28. Discuss the life and works of George Eliot, without entering into a specific analysis of Middlemarch. 29. Discuss Middlemarch. 30. Discuss the life and works of Lewis Carroll. 31. Discuss the movements/phenomena of Aestheticism, Dandyism, and Decadence. 32. Discuss the revival of drama around the 1890s and briefly situate and compare Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. 33. Discuss the life and works of Oscar Wilde. 34. Discuss the life and works of Thomas Hardy as a novelist, with special attention to Tess of the dUrbervilles and Jude the Obscure. 35. Situate and contrast A. E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling and E. M. Forster. 36. Situate and contrast the figures of Henry James and Joseph Conrad. 37. Explain why D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf are considered modernists. Compare and contrast these writers. 38. Discuss the life and works of James Joyce, briefly explaining all of his major writings. 39. Starting from the phenomenon of Bloomsday, discuss Ulysses. 40. Discuss Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, briefly explaining the differences between The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, and Four Quartets. 41. Discuss Thomas Hardy and W.B. Yeats as poets. 42. Discuss the War Poets (World War I). 43. Discuss the life and works of Virginia Woolf, without entering into an extended analysis of any of her works. 44. Starting from an explanation of A Room of Ones Own, discuss the various restrictions and limitations that women writers whose work precedes that of

Woolf had to cope with. Try to include instances from several women writers (novelists as well as poets) discussed in the course. 45. Situate the work of W.H. Auden against the background of the state of literature in the 1930s and 1940s (and include some comments on related writers). 46. Discuss the figures of George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene. 47. Discuss English drama in the 1950s and 1960s, including Samuel Beckett (his drama and prose). 48. Discuss the figures of William Golding, Doris Lessing, Kingsley Amis, and Seamus Heaney. 49. Explain the situation of, and some of the most important trends in, recent and/or contemporary fiction in English. Refer to the career of Jeanette Winterson to illustrate some of these trends. 50. Discuss the figures of V.S. Naipaul, J.M. Coetzee, and Salman Rushdie against the background of postcolonial fiction.