Comprehensive Study Notes: English Literature Final Exam Review - From Romanticism to Contemporary Poetry

Departmental Information: English Summer Sessions

Advisor Hannah, an English undergraduate major advisor, provided a plug for summer registration.
Summer sessions offer opportunities to fulfill major requirements and explore specific interests.
Course offerings for the upcoming summer include: - Materials covering Jane Austen. - Race and Roots in Oakland. - Popular fiction. - Creative writing. - Speculative fiction.
Featured Course: The African historical novel taught by Professor Bakari. - This specific course fulfills the Historical Studies breadth requirement for the College of Letters and Science (L&S).
Registration is currently ongoing with spots still available.

Final Exam Logistics and Administrative Details

Exam Date: Tuesday, May $12$ .
Materials Required: Students should bring two blue books (or green books) to the exam.
Review Session: An optional review session will be held on Monday at the usual class time and location.
DSP Accommodations: Students requiring DSP exam accommodations who have not yet registered for proctoring must email the professor at their provided address.
Exam Copy Policy: All documents, including the exam copy and blue books (including scrap notes), must be turned in at the end of the session.

Final Exam Structure

The exam is divided into three parts intended to be completed over a $3$ -hour period. It is recommended to spend $1$ \,hour on parts one and two, and $1$ \,hour on each of the two essays in part three.

Part 1: Short Answers - Format: Respondents must use $3$ to $5$ sentences per prompt. - Example Prompt: "In theater, what does it mean to break the fourth wall? Describe two ways in which Clifford Odets' Waiting for Lefty does this." - Number of prompts: There will be $4$ or $5$ options, and students will choose a subset (the exact number to be confirmed during the review session).
Part 2: Passage Identification - Materials: Passages will be drawn from literary works discussed in lecture or listed on the syllabus (including poems). - Selection: Students choose $3$ passages out of $5$ options provided. - Scoring Structure (per passage): - A ( $2$ \,points): Provide the full title of the text and the author's full name. - B ( $3$ \,points): Provide a few lines of context ( $1$ to $2$ sentences). - C ( $5$ \,points): Perform a close reading analysis ( $3$ to $5$ sentences). - Rule: If a student responds to more than the required number of prompts, the lowest-scoring responses will be graded; extra credit is not awarded for excessive answers.
Part 3: Essays - Format: Two standard five-paragraph essays. - Scoring Criteria: Points awarded for specificity regarding texts, sharpness of argument, and ability to draw on concepts from lecture. - Requirements: - Outlines are strongly encouraged and should be written in the blue book on pages headed "scrap paper." - One text can be used in both essays only if different aspects of the text are analyzed. - Citations: Give the full title once, then use abbreviations. - Plot: Do not retell the plot; assume the graders have read the texts. - Detail: Use as much detail as possible to provide concise responses. - Sample Prompt: Several texts deal with traumatic history (e.g., slavery, war, the Holocaust). Discuss three texts focusing on how each uses memory and fiction to engage or reimagine history, and what they reveal about the relationship between literature and history.

Contemporary Poetry: Frannie Choi and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Frannie Choi: - Background: Korean American poet; parents were immigrants; currently lives in Western Massachusetts and teaches at Bennington College in Vermont. - Honors: Named the Poet Laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts in $2024$ . - Comparison to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Both share concerns about empire and use poetic form to highlight silenced histories.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: - Famous Work: Dictee ( $1982$ ), a book of experimental poetry. - Style: Fragmented quality; meaning is unstable. Highlights family history fleeing Korea due to Japanese imperialism to Manchuria in Northeast China. - The "Korean Spirit" (Maum): Described as intact and burned into "ever-present memoryless" memory.
Postmodernism vs. Contemporaneity: - Thomas Pynchon and Cha use fragmentation and lists (flattened, disorienting effects, disconnect between signifier and signified). - Frannie Choi's lists (boats, mosque, taxi driver, mother, planes, pipelines, dogs) provide an anchor through the repetition of the word "apocalypse." - Choi's work moves away from postmodern cynicism toward earnestness and intimacy, inviting the reader to "feel at home in the apocalypse."

Historical Recap of Literary Movements

Romanticism: Represented by Walt Whitman. Features a unifying, transcendent voice and landscape/nature significance (the sublime: terror and beauty).
Realism: Represents a skeptical worldview. - Benito Cereno (Melville): Exposed the limits of Delano's naive progressive worldview; emphasized difficulty in finding objective truth. - The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde): Lord Henry and Dorian attempt to live life as art, but realism re-emerges in the "heightened reality of ugliness" in the dockyard scene.
Modernism: Transitioned through James Joyce. Marked by crises of representation, liberalism, and reason (Pericles Lewis). - Visual Connections: Stein and Cubism; Woolf's To the Lighthouse (balancing color/streams of consciousness) compared to Vanessa Bell's painting. - Sub-movements: - Symbolism: Yeats (occult, innovative rhyme/meter). - Defamiliarization: Williams (everyday objects). - Imagism: Pound (Chinese-based image writing). - Black Modernism: Hughes and McKay (syncopation, jazz, blues, response to Cubist primitivism). - Proletarian Modernism: Olson and Odets (breaking the fourth wall). - Sensory Aesthetic: Nathaniel West (visual/violent qualities of film; distinction between aestheticized politics of fascism and politicized art of communism).
Post-WWII and Postmodernism: - Nabokov (Pnin): Shift from extremes to aesthetic bliss (kindness, curiosity, tenderness, ecstasy). - O'Hara and Brooks: Coming to terms with displacement; city place-making through quotidian objects. - Postmodernism: Heightened fragmentation and the questioning of grand historical narratives (Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and the character Oedipa).

Deep Dive: Samuel Coleridge and Kathy Park Hong

Samuel Coleridge ( $1772$ - $1834$ ): - Kubla Khan: Written in $1797$ , published in $1816$ . - Origin: Based on an opium-induced dream (taken for dysentery). - Content: 13th-century Mongol ruler who founded the Yuan dynasty in China and the summer capital Xanadu (Shangdu). - Form: Regular iambic framework, alliteration, assonance, and "incantatory elevation." - Themes: Orientalism (flattening the non-West into exotic settings like Abyssinia in Africa) and romantic self-creation.
Kathy Park Hong: - Contemporary poet at UC Berkeley; author of Engine Empire ( $2012$ ). - Epigraph: James Joyce's The Dead (snow falling through the universe). - Structure of Engine Empire: - Part 1: 19th-century American West; focus on gold rush violence and settler colonialism (resonances with Cormac McCarthy). - Part 2: 21st-century mainland China (near future); a boom town in Shangdu (site of Xanadu). Includes "A Tête-à-Tête," which talks back to Coleridge, treating him as a writing tutor for a daughter in a landscape of golf courses and hyper-development. - Part 3: Distant future; digital dystopia and surveillance. Features a "Fable of the Last Untouched Town" where a laborer hallucinates after swallowing radioactive ice (pocketted like Coleridge's opium). - Comparison: Hong expands the Western canon and carries forward the drive for self-creation while using contemporary perspectives to see the world anew.

Final Course Reflections

The Continuity of Literature: Literature is an "ongoing dialogue" where contemporary writers (Hong, Choi) respond to ancestors (Coleridge, Joyce).
The Mantra of Modernity: Marx and Engels' observation that "all that is solid melts into air."
Purpose: While the world becomes more unstable, it also becomes more inclusive, allowing for more voices. Literature serves as a "solid ground" and a refuge to help individuals navigate war, violence, AI advancements, and the question of what it means to be human.