Midterm Exam

This is a weekend take-home examination. It is open-book and you may consult any sources that you choose. However, the exam questions require your own analytic effort and outside reference will not contribute to success on this examination. Rather, a successful exam will evidence thorough reading knowledge of relevant course texts and an imaginative, integrative, and argumentative bridging between texts to argue them in relation to each other.

Choose one of the two questions below.

1. Narrators without substantive social power, whether for reasons of race or gender, have populated the course readings. Their narratives employ different strategies of appeal and assertion of group and individual value towards reading audiences that may be unsympathetic or whose sympathies require energizing. Choose two appropriate texts to discuss, analyze and compare/contrast how (a) African American / Native American and (b) female narrators negotiate with readerships for sympathy and support. If you choose this question, concentrating on narrative strategies rather than subject-positions may improve your paper’s argument.

2. By the late eighteenth century, American nationalism asserts itself as a ‘natural right’ and claims for Americans – employing Jefferson’s words – a “separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them.” How does the cultural evidence of Federal period (e.g. Royall Tyler’s ‘The Contrast’) and early nineteenth-century texts (e.g. Irving, Crockett) sustain this assertion of a separate national voice, distinct from Europe? If so, what makes this literature ‘American’? Or is there an equally viable case that transatlantic narrative (e.g. Franklin, Wheatley, Paine, Equiano) better characterizes late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century American literature than national separatism? Adopt a position in this debate – it need not identify specifically with either of the above possibilities -- and defend it using 2-3 appropriate texts.

Your typed, double-spaced exam paper of approximately 1,000 words will be due at the beginning of class on Monday, March 10. Barring certified medical emergency, there will be no extension on the submission due time. Failure to submit an examination paper timely will result in a failing grade on the examination.

Feel free to consult other opinions or obtain assistance from readers and proofreaders. Plagiarism from any published source, however, will result in referral to university authorities.

This exam has been posted at the class website under a Midterm Exam discussion conference. Any questions will have a response by noon on Sunday, March 9.

The midterm examination is worth 15 percent of the final course grade.