The final exam was handed out in class today, you can also find it over there in the sidebar and here. In class on Wednesday, you will have the opportunity to discuss the readings for the exam, which are over there in the sidebar. Please bring a copy to class, along with any questions you have about either text.
If you have questions about the exam, it would be best to ask them in class on Wednesday or by e-mail (with the understanding that I will send the response to the class). I may not see responses to this post in a timely manner.
You CAN, however, respond to this post with your thoughts about what the exam does NOT cover. What have you learned this semester that you don't have the opportunity to display on the final? What would you have liked to have been asked, but weren't?
Deadline: Friday (5/6), 11am.
8 comments:
I'm a little miffed by Part III's choices. We're essentially offered the three possible ultimates of the discussion: The Enlightenment is confined to a few writers but was supremely influential; the Enlightenment was a humongous movement in Europe; the Enlightenment was not a large nor important movement.
The kind of understanding I have acquired over the course of this term has more to do with the application of Enlightenment to the world as opposed to Europe. I was originally interested to read texts by non-Europeans that may be considered part of the Enlightenment; I thought I was originally being too narrow-minded about where this movement was taking place.
However, I came away from "The Story Of The Stone" and Celebi's "Book of Travels" not to be like Voltaire or Kant or Montesquieu or the other European writers I normally associate with the Enlightenment. I found those texts to be quite enjoyable, and similar in some ways to European counterparts (ie the travel narratives), but I didn't see the movement, at least from what we read, toward egalité and freedom in Japan or the Middle East the way it was in France and Germany. Those changes arguably haven't really happened in the East even today, when we consider the oppressive nature of the theocratic governments in Saudi Arabia and Iran, or the way pre-war zaibatsu politics still play a huge role in Japan.
My point is simply that, while they're strong arguments, I don't think these answer options reflect the way this course directed our learning, since a great deal of it was comparative-culture and the options reflect only Europe.
I was asked everything I really needed to be. The first question was good because it shows how a student's analytical skills have improved from the midterm. The second question was appropreiate because we just went over "Candide" in class. I really enjoyed the third question because it allowed a student to use any piece we covered this semester for support for whatever their responce to the question may be.
It seems to me that the exam was centred around travel, race and colonialism. I thought that the early texts on gender and the family, such as Fantomina, Amijima and Story of the Stone were left out. Those texts presented interesting stories about human relations that weren't necessarily hugely intellectual. I suppose that using these texts would be beneficial if you were answering Part 3 with option c though, but as Enlightenment-era texts I think that they can still be read in the context of the changing values of the time. After all, Haywood's writing was as risque as people's attitudeswould allow. I think that the non-linearity of sexual emancipation is a good counterexample to the linear narrative of progress.
I hated the last question. The fact that we had to pick one of the three possible choices and then use almost all of the readings that we have gone through in order to support our claims. I don't think that there is a single choice that you can argue for that all of the books support, after all that is probably why there is disagreement in the interpretation of what the Enlightenment Era really accomplished. I found it kind of difficult to get my answer to meet all of the requirements that we had to do. Maybe if we had still had the question, but been allowed to use evidence that we thought really would make a strong argument to what we are arguing. Instead of having to find some small hint of what we believe in the novel, we could focus on one or two sources that really would help. I did not like all of the requirements that we had to do for the last question. I guess that's just me, but the rest of the questions were find. Overall I really did enjoy this class.
The first question of the exam was a bit more time consuming than I thought. It had so many different possible ways that one could approach the questions. I end up writing a lot of information for this section trying to make sure that I had the specific information needed to answer the question completely. I agree that this test seems to leave out some of the other text that we have read this semester. I would have liked to incorporate more of the text, but it was directly centered around travels.
I enjoyed the first part of the final exam the most because I liked comparing Burney and Cowper's depictions of Omai. I thought the letter and poem were interesting and would have liked to read more of their works. I wished the final exam covered less works about travel and more about relationships beause I personally find those works to be more enjoyable.
Gulliver's Travels is such a rich text that I'm surprised it was not explicitly addressed on the final.
I know we were able to pick one of the travel narratives during Part I, but I'm still surprised there wasn't more about those.
And we grouped all the travel narratives together - whether they were false or accurate. I think it would have been interesting to compare two fictional travel narratives together, for example, Swift's Gulliver's Travelers and Diderot's Tahiti.
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