Languages 271 Final Exam

The final exam in this course will consist of two essays on questions that are synthetic in nature. Your goal in writing these essays should be twofold: 1) to argue coherently for an interpretive thesis that demonstrates that you have thoughtfully engaged the themes presented in this course, and 2) to demonstrate that you have a knowledge of the works we have dealt with in the class as well as a command of the terms with which we have discussed them. Elaborate studying should not be necessary, but you should review your notes as well as review details concerning the characters and plots of the novels and the play we have read and the films we've watched. Does this make you nervous? Then click here for some advice about writing an essay exam.

A Checklist of Works

First week

• François Truffaut, "The Wild Child" (1970)
• Ingmar Bergman, "Scenes from a Marriage" (1973)
• Ettore Scola, "We All Loved Each Other So Much" (1974)
• Logan Pearsall Smith, "Language and Thought" (1912)
• William James, "The Self" (1892)
• Peter L. Berger & Brigitte Berger, "The Experience of Society" (1972)
• Peter L. Berger & Brigitte Berger, "Becoming a Member of Society-- Socialization" (1972)
• Laurence Perrine, "Escape and Interpretation" (1959)
• Arthur C. Clarke, "The Songs of Distant Earth" (1958)
• H.E. Bates, "A German Idyll" (1920s)

Second week

• Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857)
• Erich Auerbach, excerpt on Madame Bovary from Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946)
• Franz Kafka, The Trial (1925; mostly written 1914-1915)
• J.P. Stern, "The Law of the Trial" (1976)
• Alain Resnais, "Mon Oncle d'Amérique" (1980)

Third week

• James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-1916)
• Joseph Strick, "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" (1977)
• Eugène Ionesco, Rhinoceros (1960)
• Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (extract)
• Tom O'Horgan, "Rhinoceros" (1974)

Fourth week

• George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872)
• George Eliot, "Oh, May I Join the Choir Invisible" (1874)
• François Truffaut, "Small Change" (1976)
• Michael Apted, "35 Up" (1991) (extracts)
• Ingmar Bergman, "Wild Strawberries" (1957)

A Checklist of Important Terms and Concepts

General Ideas

• The paradoxical duality of human existence: at once both individual and social, inner and outer, subjective and objective
• Modern Europe
• Modernity (broadly characterized by 1) industrialization; 2) progress of science and technology; 3) individualism; 4) capitalism; 5) social reform movements; 6) urbanization; 7) secularization; 8) mass literacy and media; 9) representative democracy)
• Self
• Society
• Postmodernism
• Language as a constituent of human reality

Self

• Characteristics of consciousness and self-consciousness (James)
• Material self (James)
• Social self (James)
• Spiritual self (James)
• Hierarchy of selves (James)
• Potential (or ideal) social self (James)
• Conflicts and choices among aspects of the self (James)
• Depth psychology (includes notion of the unconscious)
• Evolutionary psychology (e.g. Dr. Henri Laborit in "Mon Oncle d'Amérique")

Society

• Society as experience (Berger)
• Microworld & macroworld (Berger)
• Big surprises vs. routine events (Berger)
• Social structures (Berger)
• Individuals as representatives of institutions (Berger)
• Socialization
• Institutions -- e.g. family, school, etc.
• Class
• Modern problem of legitimation: conflict between traditional religious legitimation and secular legitimation inspired by the Enlightenment

Views of the relation of society and the self

• Antagonistic: society "against" the self (Week 2), or the self "against" society (Week 3)
• Dialectical: society ==> self ==> society ==> ... or society "in" the self (Week 4)

Literature

• Literature of escape (Perrine)
• Literature of interpretation (Perrine)
• Symbols and criteria for their identification
• Narrative point of view (omniscient, limited omniscient, first-person, objective)
• Literature vs. film as narrative media
• Moral imagination
• Modern "consecration of the writer" to whom "spiritual authority" is attributed as exemplified by James Joyce