but my comp exam was pretty easy for me.

It’s a three part exam. In parts A and B you choose between three prompts and in part C you are explicating/explaining the rhetorical devices in some passage.

First let me just say that part C is a total cakewalk for me. No problem. I do that sort of analyzing to death in my sleep. So that was really easy and low stress for me.

I don’t remember all of the choices in parts A and B (Cause the four I didn’t pick were very very not happening for me for one reason or another.) but the two I do remember weren’t so bad.

For A I picked a question about earthly Paradise and how the perception of it has changed in terms of Nature, wilderness, and humans’ place in it looking at a Classical, a Midieval, and a Renaissance text.

Texts I referenced: The Bible, Inanna (both waaaaaaaaay Classical), The Inferno, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A pretty rough summary of my overall points: I talked about how man has been given Paradise over and over and we always ruin it for ourselves because we have this attitude that we are supposed to “conquer” everything we come into contact with and by doing so we destroy Paradise. I went from how God gave humans and specifically the Jews several chances and we have always screwed that up. In The Inferno Dante already believes that we have so ruined our chance for earthly Paradise that we have to instead bide our time on earth trying to live up to nearly impossible standards of behavior so that we have a chance at a heavenly Paradise. In Midsummer mankind has shifted to thinking of Nature as somewhere that strange and mysterious beings live and Paradise involves satisfying earthly lust and impulses and desires. I know I talked about how we have changed from thinking that Nature is pure to thinking that Nature is a negative space harboring strange and evil forces. Once we thought wilderness symbolized purity from being tainted by humans and later it became a scary place. I don’t remember all of the details though… I got like 6 pages out of this. This was the hardest one to write for me.

Part B the question asked me to pick between a bunch of dichotomies (I picked vice and vices) and I used Utopia (Renaissance that isn’t Shakespeare), Les Liasons Dangeurese (18th Century), and Taming of the Shrew (uhhh, you can guess the genre). For Utopia I talked about how More is not taking a stance on what is the appropriate behavior between conformity and independence other than to be pointing out that extremes become a problem. LLD I talked about the difference between public appearance of vice and virtue and how virtue is pointless because even the virtuous characters in the novel are brought down by vice. It seems as though there is no point at all in any attempt at being good. In the play I talked about how Kate may be a virago with all the horrid vices a woman can have, but she can be taught to moderate them at appropriate times in order to be more approriately socialized by a husband who seems to appreciate her attitude and demeanor. Her husband wanted the woman with spunk–not a milksop, so her vices can be virtues in the eyes of someone to whom they are positive instead of a negative. I had like 10 pages on this one.

I know I am not remembering everything, but this is just a vague sort of summation. I think I passed. 🙂