At least I hope it is.
Monday was my last graduate school hoop. The comprehensive exam. Three hours to write responses that demonstrate I've actually mastered something. Would you like to see the two questions I had to answer?
1. Construct
an argument that examines and compares the significance of sight, the process
of spectacle, and/or the visual arts in three different texts from your list.
In your answer, you may want to discuss the irony of text invoking the visual,
questions about epistemology and how we best know our worlds, and/or any other
questions brought up by this topic.
2. Using two
works from your list, consider and compare how subjects in nineteenth- and
twentieth-century fiction confront the limits and constraints of the social
formation of identity (e.g. by class, gender, race, place, or space) and employ
other modes of expression (art, music, language) to augment or circumvent the
narratives that have been scripted for them. In your response, you may want to
address how their aesthetic choices are contextualized by the literary movement
or historical moment in which they were produced.
Yeah, so...hopeful I passed. Perfection was not reached in my responses, but I was able to at least write a few pages for each question. Thinking about it still induces a certain tightness between my shoulder blades.
