Comprehensive Exams

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MFA Comprehensive Examination (Fiction) Spring 2002
(3 hours)

General instructions: Please answer two of the three questions. Avoid duplication-- each essay must deal with different authors. Support your argument with specific references to the texts discussed.

1. The importance of social and economic class is often absent from general discussion of American literature, as if America was in fact a classless society. Discuss the roles of class in three different American novels, one from each of these periods: Early American, 20th-century American, and Later 20th-century American. Please talk about how class influences character, and how the author may or may not have considered class an important aspect of the story he or she set out to tell.

2. Beauty has had a long, varied history in fiction. Hardy swooned over it, Austen considered it a commodity to be bought or sold, Kafka more or less dismissed it as irrelevant. "Beauty" is of course an amorphous notion, found? or not found? in the human form, in landscapes, in neon signs, rusty tools, etc. Discuss the incidences of beauty, or its absence, in three different novels from any three periods, one from each period. Please talk not only about the role of beauty in each of the three books, but about their authors' particular sense of where beauty most squarely resides, and how much or little it appears to matter.

3. Imagine that any character from any great book can be summoned at will. Take a character from a novel of one period and introduce him or her to a character from a book of another period. Speculate about what might happen between them. Although you're welcome to have fun with this (we are not in any way opposed to fun), please take it seriously as well. Talk about how these two characters' backgrounds, desires, social state, strengths, and limitations would combine to create a story of depth and importance.

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Playwriting

MFA COMPREHENSIVE EXAMINATION DRAMA FALL 2000

MFA COMPREHENSIVE EXAMINATION DRAMA FALL 2000
1. (One hour) Historian Johan Huizinga defines play as:
... a free activity standing quite consciously outside "ordinary life" as being "not serious", but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an orderly manner (from Homo Ludens).
Does Huizinga's concept of play shed any light on the craft and art of writing plays? If not, why not? Discuss this problem using four or more works by playwrights listed below.

2. (One hour) Regarded as species of poetry, drama is therefore the formation of the word as something that moves between beings, the mystery of word and answer. Essential to it is the fact of the tension between word and answer--the fact namely that two persons never mean the same things by the words that they use, that there is, therefore, no pure reply, that at each point of the conversation, therefore, understanding and misunderstanding are interwoven- from which comes the interplay of openness and closedness, _expression and reserve. (from Drama and Theater, by Martin Buber)

Again, discuss using four or more playwrights from the above list.

3. (One hour) Read the attached dialogue from a contemporary play and analyze the playwright's approach to the theater. Include plot or the lack of it, characterization, and creation of mood in your discussion.

Poetry

Dear MFA Candidate,

Enclosed is the question you'll be asked for the MFA Poetry Comprehensive. It might help you focus your thoughts before entering the exam.

Included with the question will be a number of xeroxed poems. You'll be required to write about two of the poems and will be asked to choose at least three other poems from the collection for discussion.

Since it is a three hour exam, I'd expect you to spend perhaps an hour reading the poems, taking notes, and maybe two hours organizing a coherent essay in response to the question.

Good luck,

Lou Asekoff

MFA Comprehensives Spring 1998

Substitute Teacher

At the last minute, you have been asked to teach an introductory freshman class in modern American poetry. When you arrive at school, you are given the enclosed sheaf of poems (drawn from the stodgy Norton Anthology of Poetry (4th ed.)) assigned to the class by the absent teacher. She asks that you discuss two required poems and at least three other poems in the collection. You have a couple of hours to prepare the lesson.

In the time allotted to you, explain how you would teach the class. What introductory remarks might you make about reading and understanding "modern American poetry"? In what order would you discuss the poems? What differences/similarities might you find between them? Be specific. Refer to imagery, form, tone, diction, "meaning," etc., in each poem. Finally, what concluding remarks could you make to the class about the pleasures (and difficulties) of modern American poetry?

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