Laurentian University Université Laurentienne

LAURENTIAN UNIVERSITY
UNIVERSIT LAURENTIENNE
Date: April 15, 2004
Total number of pages: 5
Professor: Patti Brace
Course and Number: ENGL 2005 EL01

Questions: 3 parts
Time allowed: 3 hours
Other instructions: Here is your chance to show what you know! Read the whole exam over
before you begin to write. Answer all three parts (A, B, C) of the exam. Read the instructions
for each part carefully. Please double space your answers and write on one side of the page
only. Now, take a deep breath and good luck.
PART A (30 % / 55 minutes)
Do all three questions. Each is worth 10 marks.
1.
From the following list, choose five terms and give a short definition and illustration
from the works studied this year:
alliterative verse, frame narrative, epic, synecdoche, blank verse, personification
2.
Identify ten of the following:

Treaty of Waitangi, Pandemonium, Africadia, Cuchulain, Thought-Woman, gyre, Heorot,
Harfleur, Excalibur, Sargasso Sea, Ordnance Survey Map, South Sea Bubble
2.
Identify the author and the title for ten of the following passages:
a)
Like Leonardos idea

Where landscapes open on a waterdrop
Or dragons crouch in stains,
My flaking wall, in the bright air,
Maps Europe with its veins.
b)
Then that strange visitor began to spew flames

and burn the bright courts; his burning gleams
struck horror in men. That hostile flier
would leave nothing alive.
The worm's warfare was widely seen,
his ferocious hostility, near and far,
how the destroyer hated and harmed
the Geatish people, then hastened to his hoard,
his dark and hidden hall, before the break of day.
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
c)
Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
d)
So we did for you too, did we? We did for you in the end. Oh high and mighty
lion, have we really scotched you? Aya-ya-ya ... We women undid you in the
end. I was there when it happened to your father, the great Okiki. I did for him I,
the youngest and freshest of the wives. I killed him with my strength.... I ate him
up! Race of mighty lions, we always consume you, at our pleasure we spin you,
at our whim we make you dance;...
e)
But nathelees, whil I have time and space,

Er that I ferther in this tale pace,
Me thinketh it accordant to resoun
To telle you al the condicioun
Of eech of hem, so as it seemed me,
And which they were, and of what degree,
And eek in what array that they were inne:
f)
As he walked back to the court he thought about that book. Every day brought
him some new material. The story of this man who had killed a messenger and
hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole
chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a reasonable paragraph, at any
rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out
details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: The
Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
g)
As his curate, his comrade, all would be right: I would cross oceans with him in
that capacity; toil under eastern suns, in Asian deserts with him in that office;
admire and emulate his courage, and devotion, and vigour; accommodate quietly
to his masterhood; smile undisturbed at his ineradicable ambition; discriminate
the Christian from the man; profoundly esteem one, and freely forgive the other. I
should smile often, no doubt, attached to him only in this capacity: my body
would be under rather a stringent yoke, but my heart and mind would be free.
l)
h)
My bones are guitar strings

And blues chords you strum,
My bones are slender flutes
And blues the bars you hum.
You wanna stay my man,
Serve me whisky when I come.
i)
Nine times the space that measures day and night

To mortal men, he with his horrid crew
Lay vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulf
Confounded though immortal. But his doom
Reserved him to more wrath; for now the thought
Both of lost happiness and lasting pain
Torments him;
j)
There was no straw, no animal smell. The three Japs, in a group, if not actually
chained then at least huddled, were difficult to make out in the half-dark. But
looking in at them was like looking in from our own minds, our own lives, on
another species. The vision imposed silence on the crowd. Only when they broke
the spell by moving away did they mutter formulas, Bloody Japs, or The
bastards, that were meant to express what was inexpressible.
k)
He had arrived at a convergence of patterns; he could see them clearly now. The
stars had always been with them, existing beyond memory, and they were all held
together there. Under these same stars the people had come down from White
House in the north. They had seen mountains shift and rivers change course and
even disappear back into the earth; but always there were these stars.
Accordingly, the story goes on with these stars of the old war shield; they go on,
lasting until the fifth world ends, then maybe beyond.
In peace theres nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility.
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, conjure up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage.
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect,
Let it pry through the portage of the head,
Like the brass cannon.
PART B. (35 % / 55 minutes)
Please analyze critically the following poem. This discussion should include, briefly, the main
theme of the work (i.e., the plot) and the kind of poem it is. The major part of the discussion
should address formal features of the poem (structure, rhyme scheme, figures of speech, etc) and
their relation to content (central metaphor and the images that make it up).
A Black Man Talks of Reaping
I have sown beside all waters in my day.
I planted deep, within my heart the fear
that wind or fowl would take the grain away.
I planted safe against this stark, lean year.
I scattered seed enough to plant the land
in from Canada to Mexico
but for my reaping only what the hand
can hold at once is all that I can show.
Yet what I sowed and what the orchard yields
my brothers sons are gathering stalk and root;
small wonder then my children glean in fields
they have not sown, and feed on bitter fruit.
Arna Bontemps 1940
Part C. (35 % / 55 minutes)

Write a well-organized essay on one of the following topics. Each topic requires that you refer
to works by three authors, one of which must be from first term. Make sure that your answer
has a clear thesis and offers specific references (you dont have to quote directly, though) to the
works under discussion.
1.
Throughout the world departments of English (so named) are increasingly teaching
postcolonial or new literatures, in itself an excellent thing. But they are wrongly named
for doing so. Even for those many literatures written in the English language, English as
the umbrella term for the study in question seems (however unintentionally) like a
continuation of imperial sway. Caribbean, Indian, African, Canadian, American, Irish, or
Australasian literatures in English are not mere development of some hegemonically
dominant English literature or culture.
Jonathan White Recasting the World (1993)
In light of the above statement, discuss the ways in which postcolonial writers respond
to or recast an inherited British
literary tradition.
2.
Well, we know that reality is constructed to a large extent through language, or that our
understandings or reality are dependent upon constructions rooted in language use.... I
think it is legitimate to have a distrust of how language gets used, in particular, how it
gets used by those in power to disenfranchise others and to suggest that others deserve
their disenfranchisement because they are poor, because they are ignorant, because they
have a tendency toward crime.... Its a two-edged sword, and we have to try to use it to
defend and preserve our community on the one hand, and on the other hand it can also be
used against us.
George Elliott Clarke Interview (1996)
Using the Clarke quotation, in whole or in part, discuss the function of language in the
creation of community and/or identity.
3.
National literatures have traditionally been understood as reflections of the unitque

character and experiences of the nation. That is, it is felt that the unique experience of a
national life generates a national, collective consciousness, or in some formulations a
collective unconscious marked by a distinctive set of values, tensions, myths, and
psychological foci, that produces in turn a certain readily identifiable national character....
This character, and the values, tensions, and myths from which it springs, is then
discernible in indigenous cultural products. Thus the distinctiveness of a national
literature is seen as the natural embodiment of the distinctive national character....
Sarah M. Corse Nationalism and Literature (1997)
With reference to the quotation above, discuss the function of literature(s) in the
production of nation and/or identity. You may want to consider here the genres of the
texts themselves (e.g., epic), the use of stories/myths within them, what they say directly,
etc.
5

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LAURENTIAN UNIVERSITY

Course and Number: ENGL 2005 EL01

Identify ten of the following:

Like Leonardos idea

Then that strange visitor began to spew flames

Being so caught up,

But nathelees, whil I have time and space,

My bones are guitar strings

Nine times the space that measures day and night

PART B. (35 % / 55 minutes)

Part C. (35 % / 55 minutes)

National literatures have traditionally been understood as reflections of the unitque

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