BA Englisch (StuO 2014); BA Amerikanistik (StuO 2014); Modul 2: Einführung in die

Literaturwissenschaft, Wintersemester 2020/21

Datum: 24.02.2021
Punkte: /24 Name: Theodoros Pelekanidis

Note: Matrikel-Nr.: 578770

Studiengang: Bachelor, Englisch

Dozent*in Textanalyse: Kristina Graaf

Modulabschlussprüfung: Klausur

General Instructions:
Please type your answers below the respective tasks after “Your answer.” Your answers should
be concise and coherent; comprehensible bullet points may suffice.

Part A: Lecture

1. “What is literature?” Explain one possible approach to answering this question.

(3 Points)

Your answer: We could try to define literature as an effort for the representation of the
fictional world. This would apply to many known forms of literature, such as drama, poetry,
novels, etc. However, this approach is not satisfactory, as has been shown by Jonathan Culler
and Terry Eagleton, for example. The latter, to be more specific, sees behind the word
“literature” a functional rather than an ontological term. This means that literature is more
something that we understand as we do it (write, read it etc.), rather than something fixed.
We can understand this better, following the development of historiographical theory
and its influence from literary studies. According to historian Hayden White and other
theorists and philosophers of history related to postmodernism, historiographical works can
also be understood as literary texts. In his book Metahistory (1973), White showed that
historians, like novel writers, use literary tropes like metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and
irony, in order to construct their narratives. By saying this, he did not only contribute
significantly to historiography, as historians have not been aware (at least consciously) of this
connection before, but also to literary theory, by questioning the dichotomy between fiction
and reality. In this sense, literature can be any text that, at a certain time, can be understood

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as such by the social environment in which it is produced. New theories that apply better to
new conditions can, therefore, re-define what we understand as literature.

2. Explain the relevance of discrepant awareness in drama. Use the example of a play of
your choice. (3 Points)

Your answer: By discrepant awareness, we mean the unequal distribution of knowledge

between the different characters of a play, or between the characters and the audience. It is
used as a way to build suspense and further awake the interest. An excellent example of
discrepant awareness can be found, in my opinion, in Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett.
In this play, we can find a clear lack of information from the side of the audience about who
Godot is – something that the two main characters must know but never explicitly share
with us – but also an inequality of information between, for example, Vladimir and Estragon,
on the one hand, and the kid the comes to inform them that Godot is not coming, on the
other. Although the kid knows more about the situation than it allows to come forward, it
denies sharing this information with them. In this way, the tragic situation of the two
characters is enhanced, while the interest of the audience about the outcome of the play is
prolonged. In the use of discrepant awareness, we can also distinguish an ironic attitude
from the side of the writer.

3. Analyse the following advertisement for British Rail (1977) according to Roman
Jakobson’s model of communicative functions. (6 Points)

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© NRM Pictorial Collection/Science & Society Picture Library

https://www.creativereview.co.uk/british-rail-logo/

Your answer: 1. In the beginning, we have a clear example of the poetic function, as the
maker of the advertisement selects the words “gain” and “train”, which make a rhyme. In
this way, the ad can be read easily and takes the form of an easy-to-remember slogan. We
can also see the poetic function in the repetition of the phrase “Now: London to X”, always
showing a longer train describing a longer destination.
2. In the phrase “Pick up a free copy”, we have an example of the conative function, as the
Addressee is addressed directly through the use of the imperative (“Pick up”).

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3. In general, we can also distinguish the referential function, as we have a clear context
which tries to represent a certain reality: the fact (or the claim) that the new train lines of
Inter-City are faster (and implicitly, more comfortable) than the older ones and, therefore,
should be preferred and used.

Part B: Seminar

1. Analyse the following extract from a short story according to a narratological model of
your choice. Support your argumentation with quotes from the text. (6 Points)

John Updike, “Separating” (1975)

THE DAY was fair. Brilliant. All that June the weather had mocked the Maples’ internal
misery with solid sunlight — golden shafts and cascades of green in which their conversations
had wormed unseeing, their sad murmuring selves the only stain in Nature. Usually by this
time of the year they had acquired tans; but when they met their elder daughter’s plane on her
return from a year in England they were almost as pale as she, though Judith was too dazzled
by the sunny opulent jumble of her native land to notice. They did not spoil her homecoming
by telling her immediately. Wait a few days, let her recover from jet lag, had been one of their
formulations, in that string of gray dialogues — over coffee, over cocktails, over Cointreau —
that had shaped the strategy of their dissolution, while the earth performed its annual stunt of
renewal unnoticed beyond their closed windows. Richard had thought to leave at Easter; Joan
had insisted they wait until the four children were at last assembled, with all exams passed and
ceremonies attended, and the bauble of summer to console them. So he had drudged away,
in love, in dread, repairing screens, getting the mowers sharpened, rolling and patching their
new tennis court.

The court, clay, had come through its first winter pitted and windswept bare of redcoat.
Years ago the Maples had observed how often, among their friends, divorce followed a
dramatic home improvement, as if the marriage were making one last effort to live; their own
previous worst crisis had come amid the plaster dust and exposed plumbing of a kitchen
renovation. Yet, a summer ago, as canary-yellow bulldozers churned a grassy, daisy-dotted
knoll into a muddy plateau, and a crew of pigtailed young men raked and tamped clay into a
plane, this transformation did not strike them as ominous, but festive in its impudence; their
marriage could rend the earth for fun. The next spring, waking each day at dawn to a sliding
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sensation as if the bed were being tipped, Richard found the barren tennis court – its net and
tapes still rolled in the barn – an environment congruous with his mood of purposeful
desolation, and the crumbling of handfuls of clay into cracks and holes (dogs had frolicked on
the court in a thaw; rivulets had eroded trenches) an activity suitably elemental and
interminable. In his sealed heart he hoped the day would never come.

Source: Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter 7th ed., edited by Nina Baym et al., Norton, 2007, pp. 2661-2669.

Your answer: Following Franz Karl Stanzel’s narratological model, here we have an example
of an authorial narrative situation. The narrator tells us the story in third person and from an
external perspective. He knows, for example, the weather, which is described not by the
characters of the novel, but by an unknown omniscient voice. The narrator also seems to have
knowledge of the feelings and the inner thoughts of all the characters, the parents and the
daughter in this case (“but when… notice”).

However, after a second reading, we can also distinguish the existence of a figural narrative
situation. Subtly and gradually, the focus of the narration turns to the parents and their own
thoughts about their divorce. This becomes clear in the last phrase, “[i]n his sealed heart he
hoped the day would never come”, where, although the third person continues to be
dominant, the narrator reflects on the psychological condition of the father. When considering
this, we come to realize that also in previous sentences we find reflections, almost hidden
behind the omniscient voice. For example, in the phrase “Richard had… last assembled”, the
narrator reflects on the thoughts of the characters, without giving us a certain image of how
they are going to act. We have, therefore, in this extract, an interesting combination of the
authorial and the figural narrative situations.

2. Analyse the following poem. Highlight both structural and stylistic features: form, tropes
and further stylistic devices. (4 Points)

Edwin Morgan, “Glasgow Sonnet I” (1972)

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A mean wind wanders through the backcourt trash.
Hackles* on puddles rise, old mattresses *hackles: resembling hairs standing on end
puff briefly and subside. Play-fortresses
of brick and bric-a-brac spill out some ash.
Four storeys have no windows left to smash,
but in the fifth a chipped sill buttresses* *chipped sill buttresses: a cracked windowsill
mother and daughter the last mistresses sticks out

of that black block condemned to stand, not crash.

Around them the cracks deepen, the rats crawl.
The kettle whimpers on a crazy hob.
Roses of mould grow from ceiling to wall.
The man lies late since he has lost his job,
smokes on one elbow, letting his coughs fall
thinly into an air too poor to rob.

Your answer:
Metrum: there is a discernible regular rhythmic structure of 10 syllables pro verse. The form
is, then, iambic decameter.
Trope: Metaphor: “letting his coughs fall”, “air too poor to rob”.
Alliteration: wind wanders/ brick and bric-a-brac/black block
Rhyme: trash-ash-smash-crash/ mattresses-fortresses-buttresses-mistresses/crawl-wall-fall/
hob-job-rob

3. What kind of source does the following bibliographic entry stand for according to MLA
provisions? Choose the correct answer. (1 Point)

Anderson, Karen. “Work, Gender, and Power in the American West.” Pacific Historical
Review, vol. 61, no. 4, 1992, pp. 481–99.

a. monograph

b. review

c. scholarly article in a journal

d. scholarly article in an anthology

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Your answer: c. scholarly article in a journal

4. Name a database you would consult if you were doing research for a paper on the topic
of “The reception of Victorian drama by 20th-century American authors”. (1 Point)

Your answer: jstor