Final Exam

Choose ONE of the following prompts and write a 3-5-page essay (typed and double-spaced) in response. You may use your book(s), notes, the internet, or any other materials you find useful. This exam is designed to take approximately 1 hour, but you can use the entire 3-hour exam period if you like. When you have completed your essay, please email it to dlupton@email.unc.edu.

1. One issue we have devoted a great deal of time to this semester is how authors rely on, and sometimes manipulate, our expectations about narrative. Choose any two plays and compare and contrast the authors’ approaches to narrative. How do they play to or against viewers’ expectations? How do their strategies help to underscore the larger point of their plays?

2. One of the things that makes plays different from prose fiction and poetry is that plays almost always use dialogue as their primary means of developing characters. Prose and poetry, with their ability to relate a character’s thoughts directly, tend to be better-suited to investigate deep psychology, but playwrights are often also interested in psychological issues. Choose any two plays and compare and contrast the authors’ approaches to portraying psychological depth. What solutions do they find for portraying characters’ inner lives? How do these solutions color the way we understand these characters?

3. Earlier this semester we read an excerpt from Aristotle’s Poetics, which is generally considered the foundational critical text for Western drama. Choose any two plays and compare and contrast how the authors approach the “rules” of drama that Aristotle laid out. Which ones do they adhere to and which ones do they violate? Why do they make these choices?