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 40 points each, and the essays 80 points each. I have not finished making the exam yet, but it will have at least 450 points on it, of which you must complete 210; the exam is worth 21% of your final grade. You may complete up to an additional 50 points as extra credit. 
 

I presume you are familiar with essay questions.  The essay questions on this exam will not focus on a single work. Instead, they will ask you to make connections between various works we have read in order to explore some larger issues about literature.
 
Explications will ask you to examine a poem you have not read before and discuss not only its meaning, but how the poet conveys that meaning effectively to the reader. The poems will be by authors you have read (but not necessarily just Whitman and Dickinson).
 
Textual identifications may not be familiar to you. Here are instructions and a sample excerpt and identification from a prior exam:
 
Following are thirty passages taken from works we have read this semester. For each that you choose to identify, you should do three things: identify the author for 2 points (last name is sufficient, make sure to include the translator if relevant); identify the work’s title for 2 points (or Dickinson poems, you may use either the number or a recognizable form of the poem’s first line); explain in a few sentences why the passage is significant for 4 points. A reasonable length is 65-85 words (not counting quotations) per answer. Partial credit is possible. However, even if you attempt just to provide the author and title for an excerpt, that counts as 8 points attempted.
 
Do not provide a longer answer than I have requested. The following example is sufficient:
 

The eyes glaze once – and that is Death –
Impossible to feign
The Beads opon the Forehead
By homely Anguish strung.

 
Dickinson, “I like a look of Agony”
In these lines, Dickinson gives an example of how pain prevents deceit. In the agony of dying, no one maintains a false persona. The “Beads” of sweat “opon the Forehead” — they are both upon and open the forehead so that we can see into the dying person’s thoughts — cannot be faked. The final line, which links “Anguish,” the most intense form of both physical and emotional pain, with “homely,” suggesting unattractive plainness rather than extraordinary ugliness, reflects how common this experience is, and possibly Dickinson’s own experience of sitting with the dying.
 
This is not the only possible answer, but it would earn full credit.
 
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