English 320:  The Short Story   |   Spring 2005

Prep Sheet for the Final Exam

Time and place

The exam will take place in our regular classroom (Eisenhower 012).  The day and hour depends on which section you are enrolled in.

• The 1:30 MWF section takes the final on Friday, May 13, beginning at 11:50.  (You'll have until 1:40 to complete the exam.)
• The 2:30 MWF section takes the final on Tuesday, May 10, beginning at 4:10.  (You'll have until 6:00 p.m. to complete the exam.)
• Some of you will have conflicts of various kinds.  I can accommodate some switching and trade-offs. 
  • But you need to arrange this in advance with me by e-mail.  (Send a message to lyman@ksu.edu with "Request to switch final session" in the Subject line of the message header.) 
  • If there are not enough seats for everyone who shows up at one of the sessions, those of you from the other section will have to sit on the floor.  Be sure to bring some stiff surface with you to do your writing on, in case this unfortunate result should befall.

The opportunity afforded by the Final Exam

Since the primary purpose of the previous exam was instructional rather than certificatory, I will enter as your grade upon it the grade you achieve on the 100-point portion of the Final Exam (provided that is higher, as surely it will be!)

This means that no matter how difficult a time you had on the previous exam, you have not dug yourself into a hole with your score upon it.

Note, also, that the Final Exam will require somewhat fewer items to be written upon, and yet will afford the entire 2-hour span of standard final exam time to complete, should you need it.

Format

During the scheduled exam session, you will write 5 short-answer questions (as on the previous exam), and 5 very brief answers (as on the mop-up part of the previous exam).  (This will mean that on the brief answer portion you'll be writing on some of the stories you've written on for the short-answer section.)  You'll be expected to write on each story covered by the exam.  But you won't write twice on the story on which you write your more extensive essay.

The 5 short-answers and the brief-answer items will be closed-book.  The choice of topics will be somewhat narrower than it was on Exam 1, so to be safely prepared you should undertake to be up on all the concepts you saw offered there. 

Short-answer questions will require around 7 to 10 sentences to do a complete job of.  The very-brief-answer items could take as little as a single well-crafted phrase.

Students will also write a final short-essay (as in the writing we did earlier in-class). 

On special application, I can arrange to accept that essay as late as the last day of Final Exam week (under my office door [ECS-127] by 7 pm).  But I recommend getting it off your back well before that!

This is an opportunity to improve your score on the earlier essay, even beyond the score you achieved on the revision, if you did that. 

• First, in any case, I will be multiplying the higher of those two scores by 2.  (If you didn't do a revision, then the highest score there is your original draft.)  This merely means that it's scored on a 100-points-possible basis instead of a 50-point-possible basis (as I'd originally imagined, on the supposition that we'd have written 2 separate essays by now).
• The optional final essay will be scored as worth 100 points.  It is not an extra-credit offer, but an opportunity to achieve a higher score than your best score on the first essay.  That is:  if you do better on it than on (say) the revision of the in-class draft, then your score will be that of the final essay.  If you don't do as well, or do the same, then you'll get the score on the earlier assignment (figured on that 100-point basis).

• For the topics you may choose among, see Essay Topics for the Final Exam.

You will have the entire 2-hour session of the scheduled final exam period to complete the exam. 

Stories covered

The exam will cover the following 9 short stories and 2 works of short fiction that aren't short stories.  (Study guides, when available, are pointed to by links.)

1. Chinua Achebe, "Dead Men's Path" (pp. 46-48; author bio, pp. 41-2; author's comment, pp. 48-9) (sg1; alternatively sg2)
2. Bidpai, "the Camel and His Friends" (pp. 17-18; author bio, p. 17)
3. Gabriel Garcia Márquez, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" (pp. 704-09; author bio, 699-700).
4. Shirley Jackson, "The Lottery" ( pp. 865-871; author bio, p. 864) (sg1, sg2, sg3, sg4:  these constitute a coherent series rather than alternatives)
5. Ring Lardner, "Haircut"  (This story is not in our anthology, but rather on our website under the section labeled "Primary Readings".  You can print it off from this link.) (sg)
6. Franz Kafka, "A Hunger Artist" (pp. 954-60; author bio, pp. 952; authorial perspective on himself [possibly relevant to the portrait of the protagonist of "A Hunger Artist", pp. 993-94) (sg1 [brief], sg2 [more probing, systematic])
7. Nathan's parable to David (sg)
8. Octavio Paz, "My Life with the Wave" (pp. 1438-41; author bio, pp. 1437-38)
9. Isaac Bashevis Singer, "Gimpel the Fool" (pp. 1523-33; author bio, pp. 1522-23; author's comment, 1533-34) (sg)
10. Katherine Anne Porter, "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" (pp. 1477-83; author bio, pp. 1476-77) (sg)

In re-reading a story for which there is no study guide designed for that particular story, you would do well to rehearse carrying through the agendas of curiosity laid out in the General Study Guide.

Concepts covered

You'll want to be sure you're on top of the following concepts, and of the agendas of curiosity that we're invited to undertake in light of our discoveries about how a given particular story is designed in respect of them.  These are the same concepts that were the focus of Exam 1.  A key resource for preparing for the final will be the comments on your returned exam!  Be sure to exploit them.  Also:  note that there is a special Message Board devoted to critical concepts.  If you are unclear about some point, take your puzzlement to your classmates there.  I'll also peek in from time to time over the weekend, from out of town.

1. character (several distinct senses) and characterization
2. static vs dynamic characterization
3. flat vs. round characterization
4. dramatic question
5. dramatic situation & conflict (various types)
6. exposition, precipitating incident, rising action (complication), climax, dénouement (falling action)
7. epiphany
8. initiation story
9. foil systems, foil relationships, etc.
10. "narrative p.o.v.":  participant vs. non-participant narration (and the sub-varieties of each). 
    1. dramatic monologue (special case of participant narration)
    2. point of view of a story vs. p.o.v. of a person or of a fictional character
    3. "objective p.o.v.," "omniscient p.o.v," "reliable p.o.v." (distinctions among)
       • See the feedback memo on the question on "reliable vs. unreliable" narration from Exam 1.
11. dramatic irony
12. tone:  in connection with this, it would be a good idea to review Oliver Sack's essay "The President's Speech". 
13. allegory
    • See the feedback memo on the question on allegory on Exam 1.

In addition to the articles in our online-glossary (linked to above), you should review what our editors clarify in their discussion of "The Elements of Short Fiction" (pp. 1863-1875 [i.e., excluding their discussion of "Style"]).  This will be especially helpful with the elements of plot in Item F, above, since there is no article in our online glossary on these.

Also helpful, as reinforcement, or as a brief reminder, would be the Glossary our editors provide on pp. 1911-1924.  In particular, the entry there on "Allegory" might be helpful.

Finally, you'll want to be clear on what distinguishes what we're calling "short stories" in our class from traditional short fiction.  Here are 4 brief passages in our text that point you to the key distinctions:

• "The Essential Qualities of the Short Story" (p. 1848) 
• Paragraph 2 on p. 3
• "Significant Features of the Early Short Story" (p. 1846)
• "Plot vs Characterization in Modern Stories" (pp. 1856-1858), especially (for now) the opening paragraph.
• See also the feedback memo on the question over short stories vs. traditional short fiction on Exam 1.

For examples of questions you can expect to encounter in the short-answer and brief-answer sections of the exam, consult your returned copy of Exam 1. 

Notice that these questions typically have two distinct parts.  You must take care to address both parts, and to be appropriately specific in developing what you have to say in connection with each.

On the previous exam I was fairly lenient with answers that failed to address the second sub-task (the "follow-up" question, the "pay-off" question).  On the Final Exam it will be much more expensive to ignore the second question, or to "beg the question" on it by saying something vague and indefinite by merely claiming that what you've said so far "serves the overall theme of the story."  You must say something specific about what exactly you take at least part of the story's theme to be!)

See the feedback memo on the nature and importance of the follow-up question in this species of exam question.

For additional examples, with commentary, you can review Part 2 of the Prep Sheet for Exam 1.