Hamlet Essay Revision / The Final

Turn in your Hamlet essay revisions to Mrs. Minor's desk in lower south. Mrs. Minor will be showing up Wednesday morning to pick up any Hamlet essay revisions on her desk, so if you're planning on turning them in, please do so before then.

Remember that you need to include a copy of your un-revised essay with your revised essay. Also, you can only increase your essay score by one letter grade.

Study for the final! 45 something multiple choice questions based on the readings and authors we've had this year (Brave New World, Great Expectations, Oedipus Rex, Heart of Darkness, Hamlet, Mr. Green, Roschild's Fiddle, Cathedral), with an in class essay on one of those prompts you got handed in class. It's not your choice, it's Mrs. Minor's choice.

Just for fun, all the prompts are copied below. Preparing is acceptable and encouraged.

1; Choose a work a literature written before 1950. Write an essay in which you present arguments for and against the work's relevance for a person in 2009. Your own position should emerge in the course of youe essay. You may refer to works of literature written after 1950 for the purpose of contrast or comparison.

2; Critic Roland Barthes has said, "Literature is the question minus the answer." Choose a novel or play and, considering Barthes' observation, write an essay in which you analyze a central question the work raises and the extent to which it offers an answers. Explain how the author's treatment of this question affects your understanding of the work as a whole.

3; In some works of literature, a character who appears briefly, or does not appear at all, is a significant presence. Choose a novel or play of literary merit and write an essay in which you show such a character functions in the work. You may wish to discuss how the character affects action, theme, or the development of other characters. Avoid plot summary.

4; In his essay, "Walking," Henry David Thoreau offers the following assessment of literature;

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in Hamlet and The Iliad in all scriptures and mythologies, not learned in schools, that delights us.

From the works that you have studied in school, choose a novel, play or epic pem that you may initially have thought was conventional and tame but that you now value for its "uncivilized free and wild thinking." Write an essay in which you explain what constitutes its "uncivilized free and wild thinking" and how that thinking is central to the value of the work as a whole. Support your ideas with specific references to the work you choose.

5; The eighteenth-century British novelist, Sterne wrote,

No body, but he who has felt it, can concieve what a plaguing thing it is to have a man's mind torn asunder by two projects of equal strenght, both obstinately pulling in a contrary direction at the same time.

From a novel or play, choose a character (not necessarily the protagonist) whose mind is pulling in conflicting directions by two compelling desires, ambitions, obligations, or influences. Then, in a well-organized essay, identify each of the two conflicting forces and explain how this conflict within one character illuminates the meaning of the work as a whole. You may use one of the novels or plays listed below or another novel or play of similar literary quality.

6; A critic has said that one important measure of a superior work of literature is its ability to produce in the reader a healthy confusion of pleasure and disquietude. Select a literary work that produces this "healthy confusion." Write an essay in which you explain the sources of the "pleasure and disquietude" experienced by the readers of the work.