Midterm Expectation Sheet

What you should know for the midterm (about first half of semester): identification of characters and text passages, explanation of terms and ideas, mini essay. For advice on writing this kind of exam, also see Shannon pp. 64-71. Here are some sample questions and things to study:

Identifications: - In which text (author, title, language) does Hippolyte occur; who is he? and what is his function in this text?
- Identify the above text passage (author, title, language) and explain its meaning in the context of the whole work.

Terms and Ideas: What is Romanticism? How does it differ from Enlightenment and from Realism? Give some examples from literary texts you’ve read.

Mini-Essay: Interpret the following poem/text passage in the context of its literary period/ the whole text. State the author’s topic and describe how poetic means (images, language, rhyme, point of view, style …) are used to bring out certain aspects of the topic.

Things to study: - Calvino: issues and figures in his text “Serpents and Skulls”
- Enlightenment as a period; Voltaire’s Candide: satire, picaresque novel, educational novel, the voyage, utopia
- Romanticism as a period; Rousseau’s Confessions: autobiography as a genre, the self, descriptions of Paris, nature, love; Goethe’s Faust: the Faust tradition and theme, Goethe’s treatment, Romantic elements in Faust, the characterisation of Gretchen, other figures, the question of responsibility for the tragedy; Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience (excerpts) and Heine’s poem “The Silesian Weavers”: social criticism and poetic means in all these poems.
- Realism as a period; Flaubert’s Madame Bovary: characters and characterization, family and love relationships, the social world and social types, romantic and realist elements in the novel.