English 320:  The Short Story (Spring 2002)

General Prep Sheet for the Mid-Term Examination

[Note:  If you print off this prep sheet for use off-line, remember that anything that shows up as underlined is not being singled out for special emphasis, but represents a link that you can follow-up only by going back online and clicking on it.]


The Mid-term Examination will cover all of the assignments (except for those specified as recommended only) on Part 1 of the Course Schedule.

Page references below are to our text, Kennedy & Gioia's An Introduction to Literature (8th Ed.)  When you print out a copy of this prep sheet, remember that anything underlined here is a link, which you have to click on while you're on-line, in order to access the document to which it is linked.

There are three parts to the Mid-Term.   Each is described in more detail later on in the Detailed Prep Sheet for the Mid-Term Exam..

In each answer, whether shorter or longer, you will be expected to show familiarity with certain critical concepts and, of course, with the relevant details of the work under discussion.


Here are the works you need to be familiar with for the Mid-Term Exam.

  1. Thurber's "The Owl Who Was God"
  2. the Brothers Grimm, "Godfather Death" (also available here)
  3. Sigmund Freud's explanatory parable of the rowdy in the lecture hall
  4. Freud's parabolization of the folk tale the horse of Schilda.
  5. the anecdote about the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu
  6. Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" (also pp. 573-575)
  7. Chopin's "The Storm" (pp. 112-116)
  8. John Updike's "A & P" (pp. 14-19)
  9. William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" (pp. 28-35)
  10. Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart." (pp. 36-39)
  11. James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" (pp. 40-62)
  12. Eudora Welty's "Why I Live at the P.O." (pp. 63-72)
  13. Katherine Anne Porter's "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall" (pp. 80-87)
  14. Alice Walker's story "Everyday Use" (pp. 88-94)
  15. Isaac Bashevis Singer's "Gimpel the Fool" (pp. 96-106)
  16. Jack London's "To Build a Fire" (pp. 117-128)
  17. T. Coraghessan Boyle's "Greasy Lake" (pp. 128-136)

Once you have made some provisional decisions about which stories you want to focus on for the first three sections, you will want to see whether the editors' questions following these stories might offer useful inroads for your purposes.  The same goes for the various study guides on the web that were linked to from the Course Schedule (Parts I).


The critical concepts you should try to show familiarity with on this exam are the following.  In the list below I have given links to some rather extensive discussions of some of these notions in the Glossary of Critical Concepts on our course web site.  But you should first review the introductory and concluding pointers the editors of our text provide in their sections on 

Then review the stories listed above in the light of their discussions.  

When you have decided on the questions want to focus on preparing for your longer answers, you can then go to the more detailed treatments of the relevant concepts in our web glossary.  (Don't forget, though, that a very important resource to exploit should be the discussion that develops on these stories on our class Message Board.)

   

 

 

Your job is not to define these terms in the abstract ("fill in the blank"), or to match them with definitions.  Rather you should be able to apply them appropriately.


You will write 2 short essays (at 25 points apiece) and 5 short answers (at 10 points apiece).  (There also will be a couple of optional bonus questions at the end.)  One of your longer essays will be a take-home assignment.  The other you will write in-class.

You can find a good deal of detailed information on what to expect on Part II on the Detailed Prep Sheet for the Mid-Term Exam..

You may wish to review the criteria I will be using in evaluating your essays (both in-class and take-home).  You can find a succinct statement of these here and a more detailed explanation here.

On our exams and in our essays, students are acting under Kansas State University's provisions regarding Academic Honesty and Plagiarism.  An important point in these provisions is that instructors may spell out what degree of collaboration is permitted among students on specific assignments.  For this exam, you are positively encouraged to use the class Message Board to help each other in thinking through the facts and issues that are relevant to any of the questions on this prep sheet.

Good luck!  I hope to be able to participate in an active discussion on our Message Board!