The final exam (worth 20% of your grade for the course) will be on Thursday, April 30, 8-11am.
You will have the full 3 hours to take the exam, though the exam is designed to require 2 hours. (If you would like to arrive at 8:30 or at 9, to get a later start, you may. But if you do arrive late, you will not be allowed to work after the 11am exam completion time.)
You may write your responses on your laptop or by hand.
In the first part, you will respond to 4 (of 6) prompts on the exam, based on the second half of the course. Each will require a response of 300-500 words, in the form of a 2-3 paragraph response, akin to your weekly blog posts but more formal and perhaps more carefully planned and proofread than blogposts sometimes are. They will, of course, also be more carefully directed (thanks to the prompts) than are your weekly blogposts. Each will be worth 20% of the exam grade. (This part of the exam is structured the same way as the midterm exam, which most of you completed in 75 minutes.)
In the second (cumulative) part, you will write one longer response (choosing from 2 prompts) that will be worth the final 20% of the grade. This response will engage with material from the entire course. You will be expected to discuss larger themes of the course (rather than very specific moments in a given particular text from the first half).
The purpose of the exam is two-fold:
1. To give you the opportunity/incentive to review the readings and discussions of the first half of the semester and make connections among them before we move in a slightly different direction in the second half.
2. To allow you the chance to demonstrate, in a written setting rather than the usual oral setting of classroom discussion, your facility with the materials we have been engaging with. You are currently doing this with your final project, but that focuses on a single extended argument on a single topic. In the final exam, you’ll be working not with one extended argument but instead will be calling on different elements of the critical and literary texts we’ve been discussing as you address a range of issues in the 5 essays.
As you prepare, I encourage you to keep the course’s focus on literary texts’ engagement with the Arthurian court and its varied depictions at the forefront of your attention, and to return to your notes from class to help highlight that focus in each text. I also encourage you to list the texts from the class (see below) in chronological order, which is not exactly the order in which we read them. Doing that will help prevent you from thinking, even implicitly, the texts we read later were more recent than ones we read earlier. (That’s true in some cases, but not others). I also encourage you to group them according to the language (Old English, Anglo-Norman, Middle English, Latin) in which they were originally written, since we read most of the texts in translation. This will encourage you to consider the texts both culturally and chronologically.
The in-class writing prompts for the semester are available here.
**An extra credit opportunity exists to earn up to 5 extra points on your final exam grade by posting to the blog a question you would like to see on the exam itself. The question could be for either Part 1 or Part 2 of the final. To get full credit, you need to indicate which section of the exam it would best suit. These are due Friday, April 26 at midnight.**
Following are the texts that will be covered in Part 1:
Béroul, The Romance of Tristran
Thomas of Britain, Romance of Tristran
Saga of the Mantle
King Artus: A Hebrew Arthurian Romance of 1279
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Alliterative Morte Arthure
The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle
Ramon Lull, The Book of the Order of Chivalry
Caxton’s Preface to Malory
Thomas Malory, Sankgreal
Thomas Malory, Lancelot and Guenevere
Thomas Malory, Death of Arthur
Add the following, for Part 2:
Gildas, De Excidio excerpt
Nennius, Historia Britonnum excerpt
Gigantic Origins
Geoffrey of Monmouth, History of the Kings of Britain, “Brutus” and “Arthur”
Marie de France, Lanval
Excerpt from Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love excerpt
Chrétien de Troyes, Knight of the Cart (Lancelot)
Chrétien de Troyes, Knight with the Lion (Yvain)
Roman de Silence