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:

 

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.)

 

  1. Roth's "The Conversion of the Jews" (p. 1494)
  2. Wolff's "In the Garden of the North American Martyrs" (p. 1722)
  3. Barth's "Night-Sea Journey" (p 138)
  4. Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names of God" (p 436)
  5. Borges's "The Library of Babel" (p. 172)
  6. Borges's "The Garden of Forking Paths" (p. 177) 
  7. Jackson's "The Lottery" (p. 865)
  8. LeGuin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (p. 1070)
  9. Disch's "The Man Who Read a Book" (p. 534)
  10. Bradbury's "The Veldt" (p. 200)
  11. Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" (p. 954)
  12. Atwood's "Happy Endings" (p. 90)
  13. Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown"
  14. O'Connor's "Good Country People" (p. 1370)
  15. O'Connor's "Revelation" (p. 1395)
  16. Gogol's "The Overcoat" (p. 748)
  17. Feng Jicai’s "The Street-Sweeping Show" (p. 636)
  18. Lu Xun’s "A Little Incident" (p. 1128)
  19. Kincaid’s "Girl" (p. 996
  20. 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

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.)

 


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.



Remember:  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!