The Literature Exam From Hell

Ah, yes, Reading Week comes for my students next week, and the veritable panic is gathering as the Final Exam looms horribly real. With that in mind, here, challenged to all of you, The English Exam From Hell. See how well you do.

FINAL EXAMINATION: LITERATURE IN ENGLISH

Time: 3 hours
Instructions: Answer all questions as instructed. Failure on more than two questions will result in the removal of English from your vocabulary and ritual public stoning. Write in grammatical English. Good luck. And remember: try to have fun with this!

1. Prove that Shakespeare wrote every damned one of the plays we say he's written. Be specific. (Oxfordians, face it, you knew you were of the Devil's party, so consider yourself appropriately fucked.)

2. Discuss and comment on the literary function of the clap in no less than five texts.

3. Name that poem by, you know, that guy, that poet-guy, that one who used words so nicely. You know the poem I'm talking about, that one with the heart and the kisses. The one I said reminded me of hamburger.

4. Write the missing conclusion to Beckett's play in which Godot finally arrives and kicks the crap out of Vladimir and Estragon. Write it, though, in the style of Sir Philip Sidney doing his very first play.

5. Translate Milton's "Lycidas" into modern ebonics. No shizzle, no nizzle, please.

6. Answer Yeats' question without waffling or metaphysical twaddle: how can we ever know the dancer from the dance?

7. Discuss and comment on the literary influence of John Dryden upon Toni Morrison. Assess the extent to which Morrison's novels can be read as mock-heroic satires.

8. What the hell was Ezra Pound's problem?

9. John Donne, John Skelton, John Webster, John Suckling, John Bunyan, John Wilmot, John Clare, and John Gay are trapped in the Andes without food or drink. Identify which writer would be the first to end up on the dinner plate, and explain why. (Extra credit: Who would carve the carcass, and who would say Grace? And what would the prayer be?)

10. Why wasn't Alexander Pope sent to the gallows? Was George II afraid of the image of a Pope on a rope?

11. Write out the word "epistle" fifty times without giggling. Then explain the marvelous machinations of "onomatopoeia."

12. Right now, experience your own "shewing," a la Juliana of Norwich. Now, tell us, is it true that all manner of thing shall be well? Using details from your shewing, explain why or why not.

13. Rewrite the content of your previous answer in the metrics of Dr. Seuss.

14. Assess the extent to which Ulysses would have been a very different book if Joyce had begun it as he originally planned: "Stately, plump Buckwheat came from the stairhead..."

15. Justify Margaret Atwood. Use of the word "patriarchy" will result in immediate failure.

16. Explain how the typographical error in The Waste Land has permanently altered Western literature. (For those not aware of this, the Thunder said "DUH," not "DA.")

17. Prove that Whitman's "Song of Myself" and Ginsburg's "Howl" are actually different poems.

18. Assess the extent to which Moby Dick can be intrepeted as either (a) an allegorical love story about Nathanial Hawthorne, or (b) a prototype for the contemporary television sit-com.

19. Discuss the lexical history of the word "asshat," citing specific references to the word's usage in contemporary verse and fiction.

and

20. Discuss your current state of despair and exhaustion in no less than nine Spenserian stanzas. References to having "Redcrosse buns" will most certainly not be tolerated.

BONUS QUESTION

21. Charles Bukowski, Dylan Thomas, Christopher Marlowe, Lord Byron, Thomas de Quincey, and Robert Lowell have all been drinking together in a bar in literary heaven. After much debate and countless imbibements, all are soused and have passed out in their seats. Shortly afterward, Oscar Wilde walks into the bar and spies his colleagues besotten and prostrate. Now here is the vital, vital question: who does he sodomize first and why? And does he make his victim wear his ass as a hat?

END OF EXAMINATION

Submit your answers, along with a pound of your flesh and ten thousand dollars American, to your instructor. Now go home and prepare for your stoning.

ADDENDUM: Now do you see why they don't let Doctor J make up his own exams? Well, not usually, anyway. ;-)