Study Guide for World Literature, English 4, Fall 2008 Midterm

What is covered on the exam: Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Sappho’ lyrics, Euripides' Medea, Li Po’s poetry, Marie de France's "Yonec," Dante’s Inferno, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. 
The exam’s format will be sixty per cent objective/multiple choice and forty per cent writing—essay and identification.

Strategies for studying
Look at the semester's study guides, power points, and study the exams and quizzes (on file in classroom), but more than anything, look back at the texts themselves, familiarizing yourself with key passages, details, and themes. Make sure you have a full set of notes from the semester, and get any missed days' notes from your fellow students.
To study for the essays, look over the major periods of the semester (highlighted in lavender on your syllabus) and decide what the major themes and issues of those periods were as we discussed them in class. The essays will require of you a sense of the literary historical as well as the social-historical contexts of individual works; a command of the details of the works—names, places, important images, etc.; and a concise as well as precise writing style.

Objective Portions of the exam (60%) 
Terms (matching)
(study old exams, lecture notes, and text)
Characters (matching)
(choose only the major or centrally significant characters; no minor characters will be covered)
Quotations (matching)
(the ideas of the quotes as well as the literary elements discussed will be included; look in your power points for the quotes in titles or listed)
Ideas (multiple choice and true/false)
(this will cover key ideas of the texts as well as key events and their significance).

Essay and ID (40%)
In preparing for the essay and the ID, look back at your other exams to see what you need to review—argument versus statement and examples with specificity and detail. You will not get the prompts ahead of time.  You should, however, be prepared with a knowledge of the structure of the ID answer and of the essay. The essay will be a comparison essay and the ID will treat Hamlet only.
The structure of a comparative essay is as follows:
1) introduction paragraph with thesis argument,
2) body paragraph one on the first point about the first work of literature in your line of argument,
3) body paragraph two on the point of contrast between your first work and your second work in your line of argument
4) conclusion if time (it won't hurt you if you don't get to the conclusion. Just write "did not finish").
Note: it’s common for students to say the two works are exactly alike. That’s not possible. A work written by an ancient Greek writer will be quite unlike a work written by an Elizabethan English writer. Take historical and literary context seriously as you formulate your thesis. Use one work as the sort of standard and the other work to which you’ll contrast it as the variation on the standard.
 The structure of an ID answer is as follows:
Open with an argumentative statement answering the prompt. Don't answer the prompt literally. Answer it theoretically. Then use at least three specific examples to support that argumentative statement. Make sure you evaluate all the examples you give.