Spring 2016 /
***Early Final ONLY***
The final will be part Scantron and part essay. The exam will cover all of the works that we have read this semester. It is all-inclusive—anything presented in the texts or in class, including all background information on authors and time periods, is “fair game.” As usual, our focus is language. However, you should be prepared to answer occasional questions about plot, events, etc. You should also be able to identify important quotations. Below is a list of works that might appear on the final. The exam will ask you to make connections between/among texts based on content, rhetorical strategies, purpose, audience, etc. In addition, you should be prepared to encounter and answer questions about works that you have not seen before.
Major Works:
Persepolis—Marjane Satrapi
The Things They Carried—Tim O’Brien
Narrative of the Live of Frederick Douglass—Frederick Douglass
Short Works:
“MagnaSoles Mock Press Release”—The Onion
“Letter to the Honorable Ed Foreman”—Lee
“A Modest Proposal”—Swift
“Meditation upon a Broomstick”—Swift (with reference to Boyle’s Meditations)
“English is a Crazy Language”— Lederer
Stephen Colbert’s White House Dinner Speech
Michigan Beaver Dam letters
Political cartoons (you do not need to know anything about individual cartoons, just how to analyze them)
“Marji: Popular Commix Heroine Breathing Life into the Writing of History”—Costantino
Reading Lolita in Tehran (excerpts)—Nafisi
“Persepolis Dumbs Down Iran, Reveals Even Less”—Saba
“Persepolis Reduces Iran to Black and White”—Derakhshan
“The Quiet Revolution in Iran”—Longman
The Caged Virgin (excerpt)—Ali
“Truth, Can You Handle It?”— Hesse
“The Backfire Effect”— McRaney
“First Inaugural Address”—FDR
Darrow’s closing argument in defense of Leopold and Loeb
The Melian Dialogue— Thucydides
“Address to a Joint Session of Congress”—George W. Bush
“The Hero We Create: 9/11 & The Reinvention of Batman”—Feblowitz
“On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”—Thoreau
“God’s Justice and Ours”—Antonin Scalia
“A Hanging”—George Orwell
“Letter From Birmingham Jail”—Martin Luther King, Jr.
“The Ballot or the Bullet”—Malcolm X
Rhetorical Terms: You should review your rhetorical terms, humor terms, and logical fallacies. Know the definitions, and be able to identify the devices and their effects.
Study Tips: Be prepared to identify and comment intelligently on each work’s purpose, audience, argument(s), evidence, tone, dominant rhetorical strategies, images, and quotations. You should also be able to compare readings in terms of language use, purpose, etc. with supporting examples (without having the works in front of you). Obviously I do not expect you to be able to quote from memory, but you should be able to recall specifics. Your arguments should not be based on generalizations or just passages we discussed in class. This has been a problem for some of you in the past. Make sure you don’t make the same mistakes on this exam. I expect to see original thinking that is supported by specific evidence from the texts.
The essay questions will offer you the opportunity to bring in works from first semester, so you might glance back at those and think about how they might be connected to works from this semester.
Format: Various—multiple choice, matching, and essay questions.
How to Prepare: Look back over your annotations, notes from class, graded discussion questions, etc. Many of the texts from this semester are short enough to reread (so do so!), and you should review the annotations and charts of the ones that are too long to reread. I would spread out all of the works in one place, and start thinking about possible connections of all types. Some people have had success making one huge chart for the final exam, with everything in one place.
In many ways, this final exam will resemble the regular unit tests. Keep that in mind as you study. Some of you went in underprepared for recent unit tests. Make sure that you have really studied for this exam. It will not be an easy, content-based test that you can pass if you have only a vague recollection of the texts.
*Note: Yes, of course you are responsible for readings and information discussed on days that you were absent!
New Terms from this Semester:
WitSatire
Sarcasm
Slapstick
Scatological
Black Humor / Parody
Dramatic Irony
Verbal Irony
Situational Irony
Bawdy humor
Innuendo / Malapropism
Pun
Double Entendre
Absurdism
Caricature / straw man
slippery slope
ad populum
red herring
ad hominem
false analogy / slanting
either/or
hasty generalization
post hoc ergo propter hoc
circular reasoning