FINAL EXAM
CAS 101
This exam will cover the history of the printing press, real-time interactive computing, the internet and the web. We have looked at the relationship between information technology and literature since the time of Shakespeare and considered the role that computing has played in information management and mass communication. We have announced the questions in advance so you will have the opportunity to review what we have done and bring together some key ideas from the course. The exam will have three sections. Aside from Part I (memorization), the exam will be open book. You will not be able to use notes, however.
Part I (Memorization)
Write out the memorized lines from *Hamlet* assigned the first day or
two of class. Also tell us who is speaking to whom (or is it a
soliloquy?).
Part II (Identifications)
Identify and discuss the significance five of the following items
Part III (Essays)
Write on both of the following questions
1) When Hamlet twits Polonius about the shape of clouds, when he is
"merry" with Ophelia during the play within the play, in short, when
he
is "mad," Hamlet makes the sorts of apparently arbitrary connections
the
writers of hypertext "literature" revel in. Do you agree? If not,
where
is the difference?
Yet Hamlet says to Guildenstern, "I am but mad north-north-west:
when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw." (II,ii, lines
381-2). Do you think the play ultimately approves of--i. e., wishes to
support or affirm--hypertext? Why or why not? Demonstrate how the play
is either an endorsement or a refutation (a denial) of hypertext and the
arbitrariness of association and meaning.
2) Describe Dennis Baron's ideas on the stages of literary
technology and
apply them to the development of real-time interactive computing, the
internet/web, and hypertext literature.