| Welcome to Mtsuenglish. We hope you enjoy your visit. If this is your first visit here, please read the rules in the News & Announcements section. You're currently viewing our forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free. Join our community! If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features: |
| Sample Quals/Comps Questions | |
|---|---|
| Tweet Topic Started: Feb 9 2010, 10:36 AM (106 Views) | |
| Shiloh | Feb 9 2010, 10:36 AM Post #1 |
|
Administrator
|
I got these from Debbie Flannigan this morning. Thanks, Debbie! Sample Questions: M.A. Comprehensive/PhD Qualifying Exam Part I (Comprehensive) is meant to demonstrate broad knowledge of authors, genres, and periods. Part II (Close Reading) is meant to demonstrate an ability to analyze texts in depth, place them in context, and engage secondary source material. For fuller discussion of the exam, see the link to "Exam Policy" at the English department graduate website: http://www.mtsu.edu/graduate_english/index.shtml Part I Sample Question 1: Scholars apply labels to periods or movements as a way of making sense of the sweep of literary history. Official as such judgments may sound, however, the careers and works of individual authors often problematize facile assessments. With reference to four authors, analyze some of the complexities of periodization. Discuss two authors who fit neatly into their given periods or movements, as well as two whose works and careers expose the provisional, even arbitrary nature of literary-historical boundaries. Sample Question 2: Nature, whether hostile or benevolent, universal or particular, static or dynamic, plays an important role in numerous texts across literary periods and genres. Trace the treatment of nature by three or four writers on both sides of the Atlantic and discuss the ways in which each writer's conception of nature critically reflects particular epistemologies (ways of knowing the world) or ideologies, as well as the ways it functions as a literary component of the text or as a characteristic marker of a literary genre, mode, or style. Cover at least one writer in each major genre (poetry, fiction, and drama). Part II Sample Question: Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart has been read as a response to Western literary (and other) representations of colonized subjects. Indeed, Achebe's novel has often been understood as an answer to Heart of Darkness, whose author, Joseph Conrad, Achebe called a "bloody racist" in his famous essay "An Image of Africa." Write an essay in which you argue that Achebe's novel does (or does not) succeed in providing an alternative to the kind of representations of Africa he excoriates. If you wish to propose a compromise position, feel free to do so. |
![]() |
|
| 1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous) | |
| « Previous Topic · Study Carrels · Next Topic » |






1:16 PM Jul 11