Examination Description and Sample Examination Question
 
The final examination will consist of textual identifications, explications, and essays.  The textual identifications will be worth 8 points each, the explications 30 points each, and the essays 50 points each. A total of 496 points are available on the examination, of which you must complete 200; the exam is worth 20% of your final grade. You may also complete an additional 50 points as extra credit. 
 
I presume you are familiar with essay questions.  The essay questions on this exam will not be focused on a single work.  Instead, they will ask you to make connections between various works we have read or watched in order to explore some larger issues about literature and film of war. 
 
Explications will ask you to examine a poem you have not read before by a poet you have and discuss not only its meaning, but how the poet conveys that meaning effectively to the reader. 
 
Textual identifications may not be familiar to you. Here are instructions and a sample excerpt and identification:
 
Following are thirty-two passages excerpted from the works we have read this semester.  Choose up to twenty of them.  For each, you should do three things:   1) identify the author (2 points, last name is sufficient); 2) identify the work’s title (2 points); 3) explain the passage’s significance in 100-125 words (6 points). You should also identify who is speaking — whether the narrator in a novel, the speaker in a poem, or a specific character or characters.  Note that in the quotations, I have replaced the names of some characters, places, and other revealing words with asterisks (******** ). There will always be eight asterisks, regardless of whether the word being replaced has two letters or fifteen.  
 
Do not provide a longer answer than I have requested.  The following example is sufficient:
 

Rage:

         Sing, Goddess, ********’ rage
Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks
Incaculable pain, pitched countless souls
Of heroes into Hades’ dark,
And left their bodies to rot as feasts
For dogs and birds, as Zeus’ will was done.
   Begin with the clash between ******** —
The Greek warlord — and godlike ********.

   Which of the immortals set these two
At each other’s throats?
 
Homer, Iliad
Homer begins by establishing “Rage” as the theme of his epic and invoking the muse. The rage is Achilles’, but Homer uses the word menis, usually reserved for gods. He thus depicts Achilles as dealing with passions beyond what normal men can handle, and which will lead to immense suffering for his people. Yet this suffering is ultimately the will of Zeus: the end of the passage makes clear that the gods are responsible for everything, as the poet asks which of the “immortals” causes the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon. Homer has quickly established three more major elements of the epic: Achilles as the unenviable hero, the slaughter and suffering of war, and the gods’ power over human events.
 
This is not the only possible answer, but it would earn full credit.
 
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