English 320: The Short Story (Spring 2003)
General Prep Sheet for the Final Exam
[Note: If you print off this prep sheet
for use off-line, remember that anything that shows up as underlined is
not being singled out for special emphasis, but represents a link that
you can follow-up only by going back online and clicking on it.]
The Final Exam will cover all of the assignments (except for those specified
as recommended only) on Part 3 of the Course Schedule.
Students in both sections may attend either of the two final
exam sessions scheduled for Baker's sections of the course. (Both will
take place in our regularly-scheduled classroom -- Eisenhower 012.) The
dates and times are:
- Monday, 12 May, 4:10 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
- Thursday, 15 May, 11:50 a.m. - 1:40 p.m.
In calculating your total points for the course, I will
multiply by 2 higher of the two scores you achieved on the two exams
(mid-term and final). |
Page references below are to our text, Gioia and Gwynn's The Longman
Anthology of Short Fiction. When you print out a copy of
this prep sheet, remember that anything underlined here is a link, which
you have to click on while you're on-line, in order to access the document
to which it is linked.
There are three parts to the Final Exam. Part A is an out-of-class
essay (worth 25 points). It is described in more detail in Final
Exam: Out-of-Class Essay Portion -- Topic
Options, Criteria, Format. Parts B and C will be taken in-class,
on a closed book basis. For these, be sure to see the Detailed
Prep Sheet for the In-Class Portion of the Final Exam.
In each answer, whether shorter or longer, you will be expected to show
familiarity with certain critical concepts and, of course, with the relevant
details of the work under discussion.
Here are the works you need to be familiar with for the Final Exam.
(This time there are only 20, in contrast to the 30 you were responsible for on
the Mid-Term.)
- Roth's
"The Conversion of the Jews" (p. 1494)
- Wolff's
"In the Garden of the North American Martyrs" (p. 1722)
- Barth's
"Night-Sea Journey" (p 138)
- Clarke's
"The Nine Billion Names of God" (p 436)
- Borges's
"The Library of Babel" (p. 172)
- Borges's
"The Garden of Forking Paths" (p. 177)
- Jackson's "The
Lottery" (p. 865)
- LeGuin's
"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (p. 1070)
- Disch's
"The Man Who Read a Book" (p. 534)
- Bradbury's
"The Veldt" (p. 200)
- Kafka's
"A Hunger Artist" (p. 954)
- Atwood's
"Happy Endings" (p. 90)
- Hawthorne's
"Young Goodman Brown"
- O'Connor's
"Good Country People" (p. 1370)
- O'Connor's
"Revelation" (p. 1395)
- Gogol's
"The Overcoat" (p. 748)
- Feng
Jicai’s "The Street-Sweeping Show" (p. 636)
- Lu
Xun’s "A Little Incident" (p. 1128)
- Kincaid’s
"Girl" (p. 996
- Kafka’s “Before the Law” (p. 953)
Recall that, for many of these stories, there is a study guide that might
be worth your attention. You can locate these by consulting the Course
Schedule (Part 3). Unless you've already printed these
off, you'll need to be online to access them.
Once you have made some provisional decisions about which stories you want
to focus on for the first three sections, you will want to see whether
the editors' questions following these stories might offer useful inroads
for your purposes. The same goes for the various study guides on
the web that were linked to from the Course Schedule (Parts I).
The critical concepts you should try to show familiarity with on this
exam are the following. In the list below I have given links to some
rather extensive discussions of some of these notions in the Glossary of
Critical Concepts on our course web site. But you should first
review the introductory and concluding pointers the editors of our text
provide in their sections on
-
"Origins of the Short Story" (pp. 9-38)
-
"Significant Features of the Early Short Story" (p. 1846)
-
"Poe's Theory of the Short Story" (pp. 1846-1847)
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"The Essential Qualities of the Short Story" (p. 1848)
-
"Plot" (pp. 1863-1968);
-
"Characterization" (pp. 1868-1871)
-
"Point of View" (pp. 1871-1873)
-
"Setting" (pp. 1873-1874)
-
"Theme" (pp. 1874-1875)
Then review the stories listed above
in the light of their discussions.
When you have decided on the questions want to focus on preparing for
your longer answers, you can then go to the more detailed treatments of
the relevant concepts in our web glossary. (Don't forget, though,
that a very important resource to exploit should be the discussion that
develops on these stories on our class Message Board.)
-
the distinction between chronicle and plot
-
elements of plot
-
structural features
-
exposition
-
precipitating incident
-
complication / rising action
-
suspense
-
foreshadowing
-
crisis
-
climax
-
falling action: conclusion / resolution / dénouement
-
similarities and between traditional fables and tales on the one hand and
a "short story" (in the modern sense) on the other. Among the notions
that we might need to have recourse to in articulating the distinguishing
features of these genres are:
-
primacy of focus
-
on incident ==> tales
-
on moral or prudential wisdom ==> fables, parables.
-
Features tending to distinguish fables from parables include:
-
plot: fanciful vs. plausibly realistic.
-
Often the plot of a short stories is often organized around an epiphany.
-
the situation examined in a short story confronts us with an initiation
story.
-
main characaters: anthropomorphized animals or natural beings/forces
vs. human beings
-
conveyance of moral: explicit statement vs. suggestive implication
-
kinds of parables, in turn
-
Illustrative example
-
Allegorical translation
-
on character, and especially on complexity of character (short story)
-
details of psychological and social repression
-
[How is psychological repression distinct from social (e.g., political)
repression? What elements do the two have in common? How can
they reinforce each other?]
-
the unconscious (as a noun concept)
-
narrative means
-
allegory vs. realism: which predominates in the short story?
-
summary vs. scene: which has come to predominate in the short story?
-
the possibilities at stake in an author's choice of point
of view in narrating a story. What are the different options,
what "games" do they make possible, and what readers have to be alert to
in tuning into these games and carrying out the reader's role in the playing
of them? (In particular, when should we be on the lookout for innocent
or unreliable narrators, or for an unreliable central consciousness?)
-
participant narrator (also known as first-person narrator)
-
narrator a minor character
-
marginal participant in the action
-
an observer of the action on the scene (sharing the time and place with
the action) but not participating in the action
-
narrator a major character or central participant (even protagonist)
-
non-participant narrator. Here there is a continuous range of possibilities,
within which the following categories may claim our attention.
-
omniscient narrator (Note that interior monologue and stream of consciousness
are special possibilities of "omniscience" that in practice, especially
in short stories, will almost always be limited to selective omniscient
windows).
-
broadly omniscient narrator (seeing into the thoughts and feelings of any
and all of the characters)
-
selectively omniscient narrator (whose telling is also sometimes referred
to as "limited omniscient" narration)
-
narrator affording an inside view of one major character
-
narrator affording direct access to the inner experience of a single minor
character
-
objective narrator (abstaining from giving direct information on the interior
life of any characters, and presenting only externally observable details
of their behavior)
-
concepts important for articulating choices authors make regarding characterization
-
ways in which setting (cultural-historical it may be, or physical) can
enter into the situations that engage our interest, by
-
helping to form character, or
-
setting up a predicament under which character can display itself, or
-
functioning symbolically to illuminate action or character.
-
ways in which what we mean "theme" (characteristic of a short story or
novel) differs from what we mean by "moral" (in connection with
traditional genres of short fiction, such as fable, parable, folk tale,
novella/nouvelle).
Your job is not to define these terms in the abstract ("fill in the
blank"), or to match them with definitions. Rather you should be
able to apply them appropriately.
-
You will encounter questions that incorporate one or more of these terms.
Obviously you cannot frame a suitable answer to the question without understanding
the concepts involved, and recognizing what features of the particular
story you're discussing fall under it.
-
In general, too, you will not be asked just to identify some feature of
the story that falls under a particular concept, but to explain something
of the significance of this feature in the overall working of the story.
This shows your awareness of the point of being acquainted
with the concept.
-
For example: while you should indeed be able to identify the climactic
moment of each story [a what question], and to explain what
about it makes it function that way, you should be ready to say something
about so what? You might spell out some particular
implication at stake in this dramatically emphasized moment that supports
(say how) the larger theme, or reason for being, of the story as a whole.
-
For any story you would want to be able to describe story's point of view.
But you would also want to be able to say something specific about how
the author's choice of that point of view contributes something important
to the overall effect or theme of the story. (You might do this be
imagining some apparently close equivalent point of view and then figuring
out what would happen if were chosen instead.)
-
For any character -- but certainly for any character crucial in the main
action of the plot -- we want to reflect on whether that character changes
in some important way in the course of the action. But we want to
use what we come to notice, under this curiosity, to take us further into
the heart of the story: how are these facts about the character important
in shaping the particular kind of experience the author evidently wants
to invite us to "try on," or in raising the issues the story evidently
is designed to invite us to think about?
-
In a bonus section, I will also present you with a statement or two that
exhibit a conceptual confusion involving one or more notions. You
should be able to explain, briefly but accurately, what is nonsensical
about the formulation given.
There are three parts
to the Exam.
Part A is an out-of-class essay (worth 25 points). It
is described in more detail in Final
Exam: Out-of-Class Essay Portion -- Topic Options, Criteria, Format.Parts B and C will be taken in-class, on a closed book basis.
For these, be sure to see the Detailed Prep
Sheet for the In-Class Portion of the Final Exam.
You may wish to review the criteria I will be using in evaluating your
essays (both in-class and take-home). You can find a succinct statement
of these here and a more detailed explanation
here. |
On our exams and in our essays, students are acting under Kansas State
University's provisions regarding Academic Honesty
and Plagiarism. An important point in these provisions is that
instructors may spell out what degree of collaboration is permitted among
students on specific assignments. For
this exam, you are positively encouraged to use the class Message Board
to help each other in thinking through the facts and issues that are relevant
to any of the questions on this prep sheet.
Good luck! I hope to be able to see an active discussion
on our Message Board!