This is a sample of what the midterm will be like. THIS IS NOT THE MIDTERM.
Regions of the United States—San Francisco:
Fall, 2008, UCSC
Preparing for the LTEL155B Midterm Exam:
(Midterm to be given in class on TUES. NOV. 4)):
[Closed book; you should take approximately 30-35 minutes per section; each section will be worth 1/3 of the total exam.]
The midterm will consist of three parts:
A) 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];
B) Brief and pithy identifications of key names, titles, and significant passages from the works read and lectures;
C) 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 but not including Dharma Bums).
In order to be ready for this midterm, you should read over and prepare yourself to handle the following materials. (Teaching Assistants—Jonathan, Stephanie, Eireene, and Jessica-- will help with this midterm preparation during sections held the week prior to the exam; you can also form study or discussion groups for this midterm; and we will have a brief in-class review session on Thursday, October 30):
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, “The Dog” (in San Francisco Poems, pp. 37-40).
b) Allen Ginsberg, “America” (from Howl & Other Poems, pp. 39-43)
c) Richard Brautigan, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” (from The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, p. 1).
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 domination of white Anglo Saxon culture in America”), any of the following items (only ten will actually appear on the midterm):
1) “Westward the course of empire takes its way...”
2) Gray Brechin’s concept of “the contado”
3) “A Walden Pond for Winos”/ Washington Square in SF
4) Tony Bennet, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco”
5) Moloch
6) “I was certainly surprised to be named Poet Laureate of this far-out city on the left side of the world.”
7) “Such was life in the Golden Gate:/ Gold dusted all that we drank and ate, / And I was one of the children told, ‘We all must eat our peck of gold.’”
8) North Beach
9) “Coming Into the Watershed”
10) Citizen Kane/ William Randolph Hearst
11) Hetch Hetchy Reservoir
12) Alcatraz Is Not an Island
13) “The Day They Busted the Grateful Dead”
14) Turtle Island
15) beatitude/ the Beats
16) “...our beautiful but lethal Golden Gate Bridge”
17) City Lights Bookstore in North Beach, SF
18) “Franciscan” San Francisco
19) The concept and role of “metatourists” in “You Are Here (You Think): A San Francisco Bus Tour”
20) legacies of the Beat Generation as portrayed by Nancy J. Peters
21)
22) “angelheaded hipsters”
23) Timothy W. Drescher’s concept of “street subversion”
24) “[ ] creating a spontaneous bop prosody and original classic literature. Several phrase and the title of Howl are taken from him.”
25) “Subterranean Homesick Blues”
C) Essay Topics (only one or two 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 essay “Remarks on the Poetic Transformation of San Francisco,” James Brooks makes the claim that while “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 the making of 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 whose work we have read extensively, namely Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Brautigan, or Snyder.)
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 the costs and consequences of “earthly ruin” involved in this build-up of “imperial San Francisco.” Taking another angle on this topic, you can 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 “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 Alcatraz Is Not an Island, fit in with or challenge Brechin’s vision and critique of “the imperial SF contado”?
