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| Allegory | Poststructuralism | Cultural Studies |
| Prosody | Transcendentalism | Restoration |
| Sonnet | Tragedy | Feminist Criticism |
| Neoclassic | Modernism | Psychoanalytic Criticism |
| Irony | New Historicism | Romantic |
PART TWO asks you to write two well-developed essays, based on several different courses you have taken. Answer two of the following questions. Reflect as much as possible what you have learned about various periods, topics, terms, and critical methods. Within your answer, DO NOT write two separate mini-essays on two separate periods or works. Each of your answers should be a unified essay drawing examples from more than one historical period.
A. Robert Southey once wrote to Charlotte Brontë, ″Literature is not the business of a woman's life, and it cannot be.″ His condescending point of view toward women raises broader questions about the role of women in the production and consumption of literature. Discuss two or three principal ways in which women writers and or readers have affected our responses to literature. Make specific reference to at least two works drawn from different periods, literary or critical, in developing your response.
B. The critic Mikhail Bakhtin posits that the novel comprises ″a plurality of independent unmerged voices,″ in other words different kinds of language, juxtaposed to emphasize that they are in a condition of conflict. Bakhtin's example is the novels of Dostoevsky, but the concept is far broader (Sidney's sonnets, The Canterbury Tales, plays of Shakespeare, Dickens's novels, Ulysses). Discuss the plurality of voices in two works (not necessarily novels) drawn from different periods.
C. An assumption may be made that the narrator of a work of fiction differs from the actual living author who wrote the work. The narrator may be an ″implied author,″ interested in and knowledgeable about the characters and events he or she reports on but not directly involved with them; or, at the other extreme, the narrator may be a character in the story with a definite purpose in telling the story as he or she wants to tell it. The narrator may, in short, express a wide range of relationships to the narrative.
Discuss the effect of narrative point of view on overall style, characterization, and theme, using as examples two works of fiction drawn from different periods that differ from one another in their narrative point of view, indicating the kind(s) of narrator(s) used in each work.
D. Ralph Ellison says in Shadow and Act that the mainstream of American culture is not the problem; it is that somebody has mystified the mainstream by obscuring the role of African-Americans. Any viable theory of a period of literary history obligates us to find which expressions, poems, plays, or fictions have been obscured and now must be uncovered. Where in literary history do you see literatures, populations, or modes of expression that have been marginalized? Explain.
E. In his ″deconstruction″ of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, J. Hillis Miller discusses the ″denial of the possibility of making the reader see by means of literature...Heart of Darkness,″ Miller asserts, ″is posited on the impossibility of achieving its goal of revelation....″
Can this notion of a ″revelation of the impossibility of revelation″ be applied to any other major work you have read? Good examples to explore might be key scenes which, at least on the surface, appear to be ″revelations″ or ″epiphanies″ in, say, Hamlet, Wuthering Heights, or Joyce's ″The Dead.″
