ENGL 385 American Ethnic Literature: Final Examination Review Sheet

the famous rabbit-duck picture Gregory Eiselein

Final Examination Review Sheet

The final exam will be worth 100 points. Please bring a blank blue book or blank loose-leaf paper (but no spiral notebook paper please) for your answers on May 18th. You may not use your books or your notes. There will be three parts to the exam.

Part 1. Identifications. This section will be worth eighteen (18) points. I will give you seven quotations from texts we've read this semester. You will need to identify six of them by providing the name of the author, the title, and an explanation of the quotation's significance.

Part 2. Short Answer. This section will be worth twelve (12) points. I will give you brief questions about the texts. You will answer each question.

Part 3. Essay Questions. This section will be worth seventy (70) points. It will be divided into two sections. Each section will contain two questions from the following list. You will need to write an essay in response to one (1) question in each of the two (2) sections.

1. Most of the writers we’ve studied this semester provide accounts of what it feels like to be an outsider. They create characters who are excluded because of their race, nationality (and/or immigrant status), ethnicity, skin color, language, religion, and/or gender; they depict feelings of isolation and alienation; they show readers how the world looks from the perspective of an outsider.

Select one of these writers and write a short essay that addresses the following two questions. How does this writer represent or convey a specific experience of being an outsider? What specifically do readers learn (about the world, themselves, or others) from reading and understanding this particular experience of alienation, exclusion, or marginalization? When answering these questions, please be specific, and please refer back to the details of the selected text.

2. Write an essay that examines either the way Monkey Bridge represents the Vietnam War or the way Maus represents World War II.

3. Identify the various kinds of borders crossed in Caramelo. What is the significance of all this border crossing in Caramelo?

4. Imagine that you have been asked to teach a course on "American Values and American Culture" for a local high school. You've pretty much decided which texts you want to teach; but you feel that you must add a contemporary text (something published within the last two decades or so), and you would really prefer to use a text from your study of American Ethnic Literature. Which contemporary text from our course would you use to teach this course about American values and culture? Why would you select this text? How would it help you raise the ideas, questions, and issues you think are most important to the course?

5. During the course of the semester we have encountered a number of different ways to tell the story of a life. These different genres include: novel, autobiography, corrido, essay, drama, fictionalized autobiography, autobiographical fiction, family story, slave narrative, short story, poetry, graphic novel, etc.

Write an essay in which you focus on one particular text to discuss the connection between an author's genre and the content and purpose of his or her story. Is the kind of story he or she tells appropriate to the events and ideas in the story itself? Why or why not?

6. Consider any of the texts that we have read so far this semester. Which one of these texts is the most political? Why? What are its political aims? How does it try to use literary writing to achieve that aim?

7. Compare Frederick Douglass to Vladek Spiegelman. In what ways are they similar as people, characters, historical figures, story-tellers, and heroes (or anti-heroes)? In what ways are they different? What seems significant about these similarities or differences?

8. American ethnic literature seems to have a variety of relationships to American history. Some texts seem to aim to correct the historical record, to add to it, to rewrite it in a more truthful manner, or to remind readers about it in an especially emotional or political manner; other literary texts seem to fictionalize, distort, or play with historical facts and events; and still other literary texts seem to complicate our entire understanding of the border separating truth from fiction or history from storytelling. Using three texts studied this semester, discuss the different ways American ethnic literature uses or incorporates history ("what really happened" and the evidence that proves it, historical events, real people, or documents, etc.).

9. This question will also take some creativity and imagination. Use the voice, style, and attitudes of any author listed in one column I to retell the story of one of the characters listed in column II. For example, have Frederick Douglass--using his style and his attitudes--tell Zitkala-Sa's story or Spiegelman's style to tell Mai Nguyen's life.

I: Art Spiegelman, Sandra Cisneros, Zora Neale Hurston, Adah Isaacs Menken, Frederick Douglass

II: Mai Nguyen, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, Beneatha Younger, Zitkala-Sa, Consorcio

10. Discuss the following questions, using an analysis of works by three of the following authors: Spiegelman, Cisneros, Cao, Menken, Alexie, Zitkala-Sa, Douglass, or Hansbery. What is the role of religion within those three texts? What is the relationship of religion to ethnic identity and/or racism in those three texts?

11. Discuss the representations of women in A Raisin in the Sun, Caramelo, and Monkey Bridge. What types of female characters populate these books? How do these writers view these characters? What narrative, thematic, or political purposes do they serve in each of the books?