midterm prep

Regions of the United States—San Francisco:

Fall, 2008, UCSC

Preparing for the LTEL155B Midterm Exam:

(Midterm to be given in class on Wed. NOV. 9):

[Closed book; you should take approximately 30-35 minutes per section of the test; each section will be worth approx. 1/3 of the total exam.]

The midterm will consist of three parts:

A close-reading and interpretation of a poem you have read for the class [a full copy of the poem will be made available to you for use during the midterm exam];
Brief and pithy identifications of key names, titles, and significant passages from the works read and lectures;
A brief yet sustained interpretive essay on some overall themes and problems expressed in the “San Francisco literature” materials read so far in the course (up to and including Imperial San Francisco).



In order to be ready for this midterm, you should read over and prepare yourself to handle the following materials. (Our 5 Teaching Assistants—Keegan, Trey, Angie, Matt and Katie -- will help with this midterm preparation during sections or on the online blog prior to the exam; you could also form study groups to prepare for this midterm; and we will have a brief in-class review session led by Rob on Monday, Nov. 7):

A) Interpretation of a poem: be ready to discuss and interpret the language, images, tropes, and meanings in each of the following poems (only one will be chosen on the exam):
a) Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Yachts In Sun” (San Francisco Poems, p. 78).
b) Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California” (Howl & Other Poems, pp. 39-40)
c) H. Robert Braden, “San Francisco [1899],” frontispiece to Gray Brechin’s Imperial San Francisco (on page before Table of Contents).

B): Identifications: be prepared to identify, in a brief, pithy, and detailed sentence or two, or short paragraph (for example, “’The Baseball Canto’ is a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti from his collection San Francisco Poems in which he portrays the multicultural players of the San Francisco Giants baseball team to represent the mixed cultural and racial forces that make San Francisco into a kind of hybrid, progressive, or “left-coast” challenge to the mainstream domination by white Anglo Saxon culture in the United States of America”), any of the following items (only ten will actually appear on the midterm):

“Westward the course of empire takes its way...”

Gray Brechin’s concept of “the contado”

“A Walden Pond for Winos”/ Washington Square in SF

“Kaddish”

Moloch/ Mammonism

Christopher Felver, Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder

Dharma bums/ Boddhisatvas

Japhy Rhyder and Ray Smith

City Lights Bookstore in North Beach, SF

Joan Baez

Citizen Kane/ William Randolph Hearst

Hetch Hetchy Reservoir

Reclaiming San Francisco

Anne Waldman: “Well it’s beatitude, beatific, being blessed, because you actually get outside your neurotic head and have an epiphany about your own existence in the larger maelstrom.”

Trey Highton as a Dharma Bum

“The Poetic City That Was”

“Subterranean Homesick Blues”

“Franciscan” San Francisco

the concept and role of “metatourists” in “You Are Here (You Think): A San Francisco Bus Tour”

legacies of the Beat Generation as portrayed by Nancy J. Peters

21) Beatitude Anthology edited by Bob Kaufman et al

22) “angelheaded hipsters”

23) the hunchback trout

24) “[ ] creating a spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature. Several phrases and the title of Howl are taken from him.”

25) Occupy Wall Street

26 the tactic of “street subversion” according to Timothy W. Drescher




C) Essay Topics (only one of these will be given on the mid-term, but you should be prepared to write an essay on each topic just in case):

1) In a brief but coherently argued and exemplified essay, describe some recurring “theme,” image, subject matter or problem that, in your own framework of understanding, has played an important and recurring part in defining the “San Francisco literature” materials you have read, heard, and discussed so far in this course. Make sure to cite specific works, authors, and passages that help you to establish and back up your larger claims.

2) In his polemical essay “Remarks on the Poetic Transformation of San Francisco,” James Brooks makes the claim that “cities [like Paris or New York City] have had their poets whose images have changed our experience of these places. But San Francisco, home and haven to many poets, has not been fortunate in poets who delve into its urban life” (Reclaiming San Francisco, p. 127). If there are San Francisco authors and cultural workers who have “ delved deeply into the urban life” of San Francisco, what forces, myths, tropes, cultures, movements, and legacies have they found that would go into making/representing San Francisco as a deep literary or artistic city? (In order to frame your answer as a challenge to Brooks, it may prove helpful to focus your discussion on the work of one or two poets/writers whose work we have read, namely Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Brautigan, or some other poet or author you know who gives a keen sense of San Francisco.)

3) Gray Brechin subtitles his book Imperial San Francisco with the paradoxical thematic phrase “Urban Power, Earthly Ruin.” Drawing upon Brechin’s study, discuss how San Francisco became a site of urban power and literary-cultural splendor as well as explain some costs and consequences of “earthly ruin” involved in this build-up of “imperial San Francisco.” You might also discuss authors, poems, documentaries, artists, movement and writers we (or you) have read to support, challenge, and/or supplement this vision of San Francisco as “an imperial contado” that Brechin offers. For example, how do Beat Generation authors like Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti or post-Beat authors like Brautigan, or a documentary like Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder, fit in with or help to challenge Brechin’s vision and critique of San Francisco as “imperial contado” of US hegemony?