Survey of American Literature (LITA2103)
English - ENG
Semester: First Semester
Level: 200
Year: 2016
REPUBLIC OF CAMEROON THE UNIVERSITY OF BAMENDA
Peace — Work — Fatherland P.O. BOX 39 Bambili
School/Faculty:
Arts
Department:
English
Academic Year
2015/2016
Semester
First
Course Code: LITT 203
Course Title:
Survey of American Literature
Lecturer(s)
Jua, Nyah, Mbungang
Date:
05 April 2016
Hall:__________________________ Time:_______________________________________________
Instructions:
WATCH your language. Be sure to state your argument/thesis clearly and then defend it as cogently as possible
I- Answer any two questions from this section.
1. What definition does Edgar Allan Poe give for “totality of effect?” How is he able to achieve this in “The Fall of the
House of Usher.”
2. Discuss the significance of setting and the use of symbols/imagery in any two of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales
3. Define American Gothicism and Transcendentalism. Show how the characteristics of Gothicism and
transcendentalism are portrayed in Henry Longfellow’s “My Lost Youth”, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature and Walt
Whitman’s “Song of Myself.”
4. Write short notes on any four of the following literary currents in American Literature:
• Puritanism
• Gothicism
• Romanticism
• Transcendentalism
• Realism
5. Define the following: Harlem Renaissance, the Lost Generation. Name two writers belonging to each of these literary'
currents.
6. In "The Waste Land," death and life are the same. Discuss.
7. “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” by Ernest Hemingway reveals men with private moral codes that differ
from society’s codes. To what extent are the men admirable or deluded?
II- Read the following poem and then answer the questions that follow it:
Yet Do I Marvel
I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must someday die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
(incomplete)
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