Final Exam Paper: Introducing the World (due by Friday, May 5th)

Hum 2323

Final Exam Paper: Introducing the World

Knowing what cannot be known—

    what a lofty aim!

Not knowing what needs to be known—

    what a terrible result! (Tao te Ching, Verse 71)

For your Final Exam assignment, I want you to write an ‘introduction’ to the class for the next students who plan to sign up for the course. Remember what swam through your head when you enrolled in this course last fall: what did “global literature” mean to you? Was it a class you sort-of looked forward to, or did you dread it? Or both at once? Now that you’ve completed the course, I want you to reflect upon what you’ve learned this semester about Global Literature: what were the main themes and ideas of the course; what books and characters were you introduced to; what will you most take away from our Global Literature survey? (in other words, what might you actually remember in 5 weeks?)

REMEMBER, you’re writing this to someone who knows nothing about the books in class, so don’t assume you’re writing to me. Introduce some of the key ideas and books to students who have yet to experience them, and might be very skeptical that any of this is information worth learning. You DO NOT have to talk about every book or every idea we encountered, but try to AT LEAST QUOTE FROM TWO BOOKS to illustrate some key concepts or ideas you took away from the course.  Don’t worry about evaluating the course or saying whether or not it was bad or good; instead, just focus on the material and help a potential student understand what they’re going to encounter intellectually, and what might help them keep an open mind when confronted with such diverse and wide-ranging material.

Since this is a Final Exam, you need to write more than one paragraph. There’s no page limit, but try to really be useful to a fellow student by exploring, even briefly, the material in question. The more vague your response, the less you’re going to show them about the realities of taking Global Literature (and the less credit I can give you). This is worth 15 pts (out of 100) so it should help your grade rather than hurt it, as long as you can show me something of what you learned his semester.

The paper is due NO LATER THAN FRIDAY, MAY 5^th by 5pm! No late papers will be accepted since I have to start grading immediately!