Comprehensive Exams

• Senior Comprehensive Exams
• How to Prepare for Senior Comprehensive Examinations
• Important Literary Terms (Revised November 2010)
• Sample Exam

Senior Comprehensive Exams

Senior Comprehensive Exams are required of all students in all tracks of the Literature program. The following guidelines will apply:

1. The Senior Comprehensive Exam is given once in the Fall Semester (usually in September) and once in the Spring (usually in February). Grading is pass/fail, although some particularly outstanding exams are sometimes awarded a "High Pass."

2. Students who pass are not allowed to re-take the exam merely to improve their performance.

3. Students who fail the exam must register to take it again during the next regularly scheduled offering. No special or individual make-up exams are given.

4. Students who need a professional internship or student teaching should plan their schedules in advance so that if possible, the internship and Senior Comprehensive Exam are not taken in the same term.

5. The student is responsible for knowing this set of guidelines and for understanding the general content and purpose of the exam as is explained on the Literature Department website.

Rubric for Evaluating Comprehensive Exams

 

Timetable for Comprehensive Exams Fall 2012

• Last date to sign up for exam: May 4
• Spring informational meeting: April 19, 12:15
• Poetry and Essay workshop: August 23, 12:15
• Required meeting before exam: September 6, 12:15
• Comps: Sat. September 8, 8:30 - 4

 

How to Prepare for Senior Comprehensive Examinations

(All tracks: Literature, Creative Writing, Teaching of English)

From the faculty's point of view, Comprehensive Exams help the department maintain a balanced offering, indicate areas of weakness in emphasis or teaching, and give an excellent indication of the abilities of our students. But Comprehensive Exams are of value to the student as well. They require students to review four years of study and to pull together an overall view of literary history, terms, concepts, ideas, and values; they ensure that Department of Literature and Language graduates will leave UNC Asheville with a real sense of accomplishment. The exams are not limited or tied to the content of required courses taken in the Literature major; they are not intended as a big "final examination" covering work assigned in courses. Instead, they assure that students graduating with a degree in Literature are competent in Literature, not matter which courses they have taken, or where, or with which instructor. No course is designed primarily to prepare for the comprehensive. The learning which must take place for students to complete the exams satisfactorily is their responsibility; the synthesis of materials from diverse courses and from other reading and thinking must take place in the students mind and under their own supervision. Faculty members in the department are always happy to discuss literary issues with their students, but they are not responsible for providing a review or for limiting the contents of the examinations to what they know has been taught in a particular class.

Long Range Preparation

When the opportunity is offered, students should choose paper and test topics that allow them to bring experience from one course into another. They should examine the sample test copy after each term's work and note the new materials and ideas that they can now use in completing the test questions.

For students who have been doing good work in their courses and who have worked seriously on their writing skills, the Comprehensive Examinations should not be a source of worry. Still, students should make both long range and short range preparations.

Soon after deciding to major in Literature, students should ask the department secretary for a copy of one or two previous exams and study the entire test. They should try to understand the scope of the questions and how the test is designed to discover both knowledge (specific and general) and skills in organizing and interrelating. In all classes, they should note the ways the instructor is often preparing them not only for the work immediately at hand but also for interrelation with other works, other genres, and other periods. Students should ask questions that will touch upon themes that come up in several classes, appear in different periods, and which are expressed in fiction, poetry, and drama. As E. M. Forster wrote, "[O]nly connect." The ability to see relationships and distinctions is one of the highest functions of human intelligence.

Short Range Preparation

Students who have followed the advice on long-range study will notice that the sample test has asked them to look at literature both in specific ways and in broader, more general ways. The most important preparation for both already will have been accomplished, but a month or two before the scheduled exam, students should begin a systematic review.

Experience has shown that students who form study groups often do best. By throwing questions at each other, and by engaging in extended literary discussions, they find themselves invigorated and fully prepared. Each student individually might want to select several specific plays from different eras and different genres (comedy, tragedy, etc.), several works of fiction from different eras, and a collection of major poets to quickly skim back over, to review class notes on, and to have at-the-ready for examples and discussion on the exam. But note that it is not a good idea to memorize long sections of poetry, drama, or fiction. The exam does not expect students to remember everything, only to apply their general intelligence and learned literary skills to specific ideas, issues, and values that good literature addresses.

Important Literary Terms (Revised November 2010)

Ideas and Movements

• Aesthetic Movement
• Classicism
• Expressionism
• Harlem Renaissance
• Humanism
• Imagism
• Impressionism
• Magical Realism
• Modernism
• Naturalism
• Neoclassicism
• Neoplatonism
• Platonism
• Postmodernism
• Pre-Raphaelitism
• Realism
• Romanticism
• Sentimentalism
• Surrealism
• symbolisme
• Transcendentalism

Fiction

• Beast Fable
• Bildungsroman
• Episodic plot
• Epistolary Novel
• Fabliaux
• Flat Character
• Frame Tale
• Gothic Novel
• Interior Monologue
• Metafiction
• Narrator
• First Person
• Omniscient
• Third Person
• Unreliable Narrator
• Free Indirect Style or Free Indirect Discourse
• Novel of Manners
• Picaresque Novel
• Plot
• Point of View
• Point of View
• Polyglossia
• Romance (narrative)
• Round Character
• Stream of Consciousness

Drama

• Aside
• Catharsis
• Chorus
• Closet Drama
• Comedy
• Comedy of Humors
• Comedy of Manners
• Commedia Dell'arte
• Deus ex machina
• Dramatic Irony
• Epilogue
• Farce
• Free Indirect Style or Free Indirect Discourse
• Hamartia
• Masque
• Melodrama
• Mime
• Miracle Play
• Morality Play
• Mystery Cycle
• New Comedy (Greek)
• Old Comedy (Greek)
• Prologue
• Protagonist
• Sentimental Comedy
• Soliloquy
• Stock Character
• Strophe/Antistrophe
• Tragedy
• Tragicomedy
• Unities

Poetry

• Accent, Beat, or Ictus
• Alliteration
• Caesura
• Dramatic Monologue
• Epic
• Feminine or Double Rhyme
• Internal Rhyme
• Incremental Repetition
• Lyric
• Ballad
• Carpe Diem
• Confessional Poetry
• Eclogue
• Elegy
• Metaphysical Poetry
• Metrical Terms
• Accentual-Syllabic Verse
• Accentual Verse
• Alexandrine
• Alliterative Verse
• Anapestic
• Ballad Stanza
• Blank Verse
• Dactylic
• Enjambment
• Free Verse
• Foot
• Iambic
• Hexameter
• Meter
• Pentameter
• Spondaic
• Tetrameter
• Trochaic
• Pastoral
• Refrain
• Rhyme
• Rhyme Scheme
• Rhythm
• Slant Rhyme
• Sonnet
• Cycle
• English/Shakespearean
• Italian
• Stanza
• Heroic Couplet
• Quatrain
• Spenserian Stanza
• Tercet
• Terza Rima
• Verse

Style

• Allusions
• Anticlimax
• Antithesis
• Aphorism
• Apostrophe
• Bathos
• Epic
• Epigram
• Euphemism
• Hyperbole
• Imagery and Figures
• Metaphor
• Metonymy
• Onomatopoeia
• Oxymoron
• Pathos
• Persona
• Personification
• Rhetoric
• Rhetorical Appeal
• Simile and Epic Simile
• Symbol

Periods

• Augustan (ancient and 18c)
• Elizabethan
• Enlightenment
• Fin de siecle
• Jacobean
• Reformation
• Renaissance
• Restoration
• Victorian

General Theoretical Terms

• Archetype
• Author Function
• Deconstruction
• Canon
• Conventions
• Deconstruction
• Dialogic
• Discourse
• Exemplum
• Feminist Criticism
• Genre
• Hermeneutics
• Hybridity (postcolonial)
• Ideology (Marxist)
• Intentional Fallacy
• Intertextuality
• Irony
• Lacuna
• Linguistics
• Marxist Criticism
• Mimesis
• Myth
• Narratology
• New Criticism
• New Historicism
• Orientalism
• Pathetic Fallacy
• Parody
• Pastiche
• Postcolonial Literature
• Poststructuralism
• Psychoalytical Criticism
• Queer Theory
• Reader-Response Criticism
• Redaction or redactor
• Self-reflexivity
• Semiotics
• Signifier/Signified
• Simulacra
• Speech Act Theory
• Structuralism
• Subaltern
• Verisimilitude

 

Literature and Language Senior Comprehensive Examination -  Fall 2010

 Honor Statement:

I pledge on my personal honor and integrity that all the answers I will provide for both Part 1 and Part 2 of this exam will be my own.

Signature_______________________________________ Date ____________

Part 1

(160 minutes)

 I. Chronology (10 minutes)

 Identify ten (10) of the following by the century in which they flourished

1. William Shakespeare and Philip Sydney
2. Jane Austen and William Wordsworth
3. John Milton and Miguel de Cervantes
4. Henry Fielding and Thomas Gray
5. Jonathan Edwards and Voltaire
6. Socrates and Aristophanes
7. Horace and Virgil
8. Jack Kerouac and Maya Angelou
9. Frederick Douglass and Mark Twain
10. Giovanni Boccaccio and Dante Aligheri
11. Edgar Allan Poe and Emily Dickinson
12. T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost

II. The Workings of Literature (70 minutes)

A. Genres and Literary Movements (35 minutes)

In a concise paragraph or two, define two (2) of the following genres or literary movements, offering examples of important works and authors, identifying the eras in which they flourished, explaining characteristic features and discussing any social or intellectual developments that may have shaped the genre or movement.

1. Imagism
2. Magical Realism
3. Modernism
4. Metaphysical Poets

B. The Features of Drama and Fiction (35 minutes)

Define two (2) of the following terms and briefly discuss how each operates to create meaning in literary works, citing specific examples of texts and authors to support your answer. In general, it will be a good idea to treat two examples for each term, in order to explore a range of functions or issues.

1. Farce
2. Epistolary Novel
3. Dramatic Irony
4. Metafiction

III. Literature, Culture, and Ideas I (Literary History) (80 minutes)

Choose one of the following questions and write a thoughtful, well-informed, well-written, and well-edited essay in response to it.

Essay Questions

1. Often in literature the order of narration does not follow the chronological order of the action. Choose two works from two different periods to discuss the effects of such narrative dislocation, for example, effects of focus or emphasis, suspense, discovery of causation, discovery of meaning. Draw some explicit comparisons or contrasts between the two works. You may use epic poems, plays, or novels.
2. Hamartia is a term used by Aristotle, often understood as a “tragic flaw,” but more properly translated to mean an “error” or “mistake in judgment. Aristotle applied the term to tragic heroes in classical drama whose hamartia caused the tragedy of the play to unfold. The term, though, might be more widely applied in the history of literature. Choose two different works (drama, fiction, or epic poetry) from two different eras in which the protagonist’s (male or female) hamartia triggers negative consequences for him or her, as well as, perhaps, for other characters in the piece. Consider the socio-historical milieu in which each work was written or set and how that might have affected the protagonist’s actions as well as the events which flowed from them.
3. Discuss how the idea of evil is treated in two works from two different periods. Consider cultural contexts in your discussion and explicitly compare the two works.
4. Discuss two-to-three works from different periods in which the protagonist’s gender significantly affects the protagonist’s actions, as well as the consequences of those actions. Consider the era in which the work was written or set.
5. One of the things literature can do for us is to allow us to experience cultures quite different from our own. Select two works from two different centuries, each of which provides a detailed portrait of a very different culture. Describe some of the ways those cultures are portrayed as different from your own. Are there also ways in which elements of these cultures are, perhaps surprisingly, similar to yours. Consider how the purpose of the text or the authorial context may have affected the ways in which each culture is depicted.
6. Choose two works of literature, from two different national literatures, two different periods, or two different genres, which interrogate the diverse dynamics of power within their cultures.

Part 2

(170 minutes)

I. Short Answer Terminology (20 minutes)

Choose ten (10) terms. Define each briefly, using complete sentences. Note: giving an example may clarify what you have to say, but alone it will not stand as a definition.

1. Frame Tale
2. Picaresque novel
3. Chorus
4. Neoclassicism
5. Soliloquy
6. Ballad
7. Feminine rhyme
8. Epic simile
9. Metonymy
10. Pathos
11. Enlightenment Period
12. Mimesis

 II. Formal Analysis and Close Reading of Poetry (70 minutes)

Poetry Section

A. Short Answer

•  There are two parts to the poetry question. For the first part, read the following poem by Gwendolyn Brooks and provide short answers to the questions. After that, you’ll find instructions for writing an essay about two other poems.

 

the rites for Cousin Vit

BY GWENDOLYN BROOKS     

1. Does this poem use a rhyme scheme? If so, please indicate, using the conventional method of notation, what the rhyme scheme is here.
2. Is this poem written in meter? If so, identify the form here.
3. If this poem is written in meter, are there any lines that use substitutions or variations on the regular metrical pattern? If so, please write down one line what uses a substitution and scan it here, using the conventional method of scanning a line of poetry.
4. Are there any metaphors in this poem? If so, give an example of a metaphor here.
5. Is there an example of enjambment in this poem? If so, write down the line that uses enjambment here.
6. Is this poem written in a received, fixed form? If so, identify the form here.

 B. Essay

Following are two poems, one by Gwendolyn Brooks and the other, a poem in two parts, by contemporary African-American poet Terrance Hayes. “The Pool Players. Seven At The Golden Shovel” was published in 1960. “The Golden Shovel” was published this summer in Terrance Hayes’ most recent book, Lighthead. In a unified, tightly focused, complete essay, write about at least one aspect of the relationship between these poems by Brooks and Hayes. Your essay must make it clear that you understand both poems—showing awareness of how various elements, such as voice, tone, imagery, rhythm, rhyme, and other sonic elements, and line work in each of the poems to enact the poem’s experiences, feelings, and ideas.

 THE POOL PLAYERS.

SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

 

 

 

 

 

The Golden Shovel

after Gwendolyn Brooks

I. 1981

 

 

 

 

II. 1991

                                                       Terrance Hayes