HON 230: Midterm Exam

The following exam requires you to write 2 short (1-paragraph) responses and 1 essay (approximately 3 pages). We ask you to spend 1 to 1.5 hours on the exam, and to type your responses.

In Part II (25 points x 2), your grade will depend on the extent to which you can (a) pick out and discuss important elements (words, phrases, images, allusions, stylistic features, etc.); (b) link these specific elements in the passage to a larger idea in the text; and (c) substantiate those links by referring briefly to other moments/elements in the text beyond the passage under discussion.

In Part II (50 points), your grade will depend on the presence of an organizing idea (thesis); the specificity of the evidence you present in support; and the appropriateness of your evidence (you might think of these last two as: “how persuasive am I?”).

We won’t be grading your sentence mechanics or style, but it never hurts to make a good impression!

Part 1: Quotation Short Reponses

Please choose one of the following 2 quotations from Marie, and one of the following two quotations from Roy, and write a one-paragraph response to each (so, two in total, one from each text we have read).

Marie, Lays

1. “Beloved,” she said, “I admonish, order, and beg you not to reveal this secret to anyone! I shall tell you the long and the short of it: you would lose me forever if this love were to become known. You would never be able to see me or possess me ... arise! You can stay no longer. Go from here and I shall remain, but I shall tell you one thing: whenever you wish to speak with me, you will not be able to think of a place where a man may enjoy his live without reproach or wickedness, that I shall not be there with you to do your bidding. No man save you will see me or hear my voice.” When he heard this, Lanval was well pleased and, kissing her, he arose. The damsels who had led him to the tent dressed him in rich garments, and in his new clothes there was no more handsome young man on earth. (“Lanval” p. 75)

2. They reached the castle and attacked it, but it was strong and they could not take it. Guigemar besieged the town and would not leave until it was captured. His friends and followers increased in number so much that he starved all those inside. He captured and destroyed the castle and killed the lord within. With great joy he took away his beloved. Now his tribulations were over. (“Guigemar” 55-6)

Roy, God of Small Things

1.  Perhaps Ammu, Estha, and she were the worst transgressors. But it wasn’t just them. It was the others too. They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, jam jam, and jelly jelly.

       It was a time when uncles became fathers, mothers lovers, and cousins died and had funerals.

       It was a time when the unthinkable became thinkable and the impossible really happened. (p. 31)

2. Chacko told the twins that, though the hated to admit it, they were all Anglophiles. They were a family of Anglophiles. Pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away. He explained to them that history was like an old house at night. With the lamps lit. And ancestors whispering inside.

       “To understand history,” Chacko said, “we have to go inside and listen to what they’re saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the wall. And smell the smells.” (p. 51)

Part II: Essay Question

Write one essay of approximately 3 pages in response to one of the following questions:

1. In Marie’s “Guigemar,” the knight who refuses to love is wounded and cursed. He is told he will find no cure until he is healed “by a woman who will suffer for your love more pain and anguish than any other woman has ever known, and you will suffer likewise for her, so much so that all those who are in love … will marvel at it” (44). The curse seems to take account of us—the readers (or perhaps those of us who have known love!) who will “marvel” at the depth and intensity of love’s suffering.

Looking at one Marie “lay” and Roy’s The God of Small Things, make an argument that something is to be gained by either experiencing (the characters) or witnessing (readers) the pain associated with love in these stories. What “truth” or “truths” do we learn from the anguish? Be specific! Much of your success will depend on you presenting an idea about love and suffering that is grounded concrete details in the stories, not true in some universal sense beyond the texts.

2.  Arundhati Roy opens her 1997 novel, The God of Small Things, with an epigraph attributed to John Berger: “Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one.”  Discuss how her novel enacts this statement, and what kinds of worries Roy betrays about history and literature by rejecting the idea of a single story.  After you discuss Roy’s novel in these terms, present Blindness as an additional literary example that appears to conform to Berger’s statement.  Discuss your examples in terms of their content, but also the literary aspects of the texts as well.

3. Compare and contrast the two sexual transgressions represented at the end of Roy’s GoST: the sexual union between Estha and Rahel, and the sexual union between Ammu and Velutha.  Can one be read as reparative, while the other destructive? How? What kind of cultural critique can be gleaned from such a reading (that is, how do the norms violated in the union represent larger cultural boundaries maintained by assumptions, values, or institutions)? Then, choose a transgressive (however you define it) relationship from either Saramago or Marie (whether explicitly sexual or ambiguously erotic) and describe its significance: does it reinforce either a destructive or reparative effect you find in Roy? Does it add a third interpretive view of sexual coupling? Taken together, can we conclude anything about the relationship of erotic desire and social order?