English 2120 Wednesday, March 6

Instructor Newmark

In-Class 1

In this in-class writing exercise, you will be answering both short-answer and essay questions. Be sure to plan your time out before you begin, so that you do have time to finish the entire project with room at the end to carefully proof-read. Answer all question in your blue book.

SECTION I. (30 points)

In this short-answer section, please pick THREE of the following five questions. Write a substantial paragraph for each in your blue book with each answer numbered.

1. Please write a paragraph in which you explain what the “subaltern” is. How many different groups that we have studies can be labeled “subaltern”? Which groups are they? Why is this label useful?

2. Discuss the difference between cultural relativism and ethnocentrism in the context of a discourse on Nativism (briefly, of course). How do these term apply to each other?

3. How does “fiction” figure in an examination of Las Casas’s text?

4. Who is, as far as the narrative is concerned, the “foil” of Deerslayer in The Deerslayer? Explain carefully why you have picked the character you have picked and what insights into the text emerge due to examining this figure in such a way.

5. In essence, what do you think “The Woman Who Rode Away” is contrived to convey to the reader? What are Lawrence’s two primary fascinations here? What motivates this piece of fiction?

SECTION II. (70 points)

In this essay section, please pick one of the following three questions and write a well organized, carefully structured academic essay (including text citation) in your blue book.

1. Using any two text of your choice, please examine the ways in which Native peoples are charactized by authors who are members of the culturally dominant group. To what end are these depicitions used? What kind of image do the two texts you have picked deploy? Is the image the same? Whose interests does this image (these images, perhaps) serve? Is this empowering or disempowering? For whom?

2. In The Deerslayer, Cooper is very careful to stress that Deerslayer is a man literate in the language of Nature. How does this literacy enable him to emerge as a heroic figure, a figure whose heroism is well suited to America in particluar? What do you learn from the passages in which Deerslayer and Hetty discuss reading, and reading the Bible in particular? Isn’t ignorance of “traditional” literature at odds with “white gifts”? How does Cooper work around this?

3. What is “The Woman Who Rode Away” about? Please set up a series of binaries in your essay and examine the ways in which Lawrence manipulates them, inverts them, reinforces societal stereotypes by way of them, or make other assertions by his use of them. What kind of “Indians” does Lawrence offer? What kind of “woman”? Why the sacrifice?