Fall 2020 — Delahoyde
Washington State University
MEDIEVAL/RENAISSANCE FINAL EXAM
Your last significant obligations to this course will be an exam and an essay, similar to the midterm. Exam questions and answers will concern only the works covered from after the midterm exam through the end of the semester: remind yourself by reviewing the syllabus, but that means the end of Dante’s Inferno on through to the end of all Renaissance materials thereafter. Here is the plan for the last exam.
I. IDENTIFICATIONS. [Total 20 points = 10 questions, 2 points each.]
On the designated day for this last exam — Friday, December 4th, by 1:10pm — you will receive from me an e-mail containing identification questions similar to those on the midterm exam. Attached will be a Word document with the same questions, so that you can type the answers in whichever mode is safest and preferable to you. These questions will be primarily but perhaps not exclusively identification based: maybe identify the punishment for the treacherous to masters, or who painted the Mona Lisa, or identify the originator of the “Petrarchan” sonnet — that kind of question, only a bit more difficult.
II. QUOTATIONS. [Total 40 points = 8 questions, 5 points each.]
The same e-mail/document will contain bigger questions, mostly (but not all) quotation-based: combinations of identification and, more importantly, significance questions based on literary quotations, art images, musical tracks, or any other relevant class materials selected for their representativeness of our discussions on key points ever since the previous exam. You should plan to e-mail your completed exam back to me by 2:00pm. You may work in coordinated cooperation with another member of the class, in which case only one of you should e-mail back to me with other name designated.
III. ESSAY. [Total 40 points.]
Plan to submit this essay first on Friday, December 4th, by 1:00pm, as a separate Word document to a designated folder on Blackboard in Discussions. The essay should be an original and virtuoso piece of brilliance, with a unified perspective and fine critical thinking, manifested in impressive eloquence, with facile reference to concepts and specifics from the class materials, and amounting to three (3) or more pages, double-spaced.
WWDYP?
Which world do you prefer? Are you attracted more by the medieval or the early modern arts and humanities? Are you more a medievalist or are you an early modern scholar? Where do you feel more grounded and at home, and why?
Answer this question with a basis in the arts and humanities as represented by some of the works we have examined this semester. Inclusion of mini-reports on “Humanism” or other canned and spurious concepts, detached from any of your own authentic relationships with the class materials, will fail. Once again, this class, soon to be history, was not a history class.
BIG DAY: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 4th, 1:10-2:00pm.