2. The Gilded Age

Instructions: Write your answers in English. Aim for quality, not quantity. Even if graders will tolerate occasional grammatical and/or spelling errors, your answers should be legible, clear, well structured, and argumentative. Write in separate paragraphs and pay attention to topic sentences and transitions. You don't have to title your essays. Also, avoid section and sub-section titles throughout the essays. The exam will be graded on a 100-point scale, with each question scoring a maximum of 50 points. Manage your time wisely and accordingly. Question 1. Violence has been an omnipresent force shaping US history and literature. In his seminal study Gunfighter Nation, Richard Slotkin concedes that the United States is not the only violent nation in the world, however what is distinctly 'American' is not necessarily the amount or kind of violence that characterizes our history but the mythic significance we have assigned to the kinds of violence we have actually experienced, the forms of symbolic violence we imagine or invent, and the political uses to which we put that symbolism. What role has literature played in constructing and perpetuating America's violent mythologies? How have writers in the US endorsed or repudiated this mythic violence in its different forms (colonial, imperial, racial, domestic, sex xual, class-based, etc.)? How have different writers conceptualized violence throughout US history? Write an essay that explores these questions. You are welcome to focus on a specific kind of violence, as laid out in the previous paragraph. Structure your essay in three parts: an introduction (stating your thesis statement), a body of analysis, and a conclusion. In your analysis, discuss three literary texts where violence is an important theme: one from the 18m century or earlier, one from the 19t century, and one from the 20th or 21st centuries. At least one of your primary texts should be a poem. Question 2. In The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860, Annette Kolodny writes: "By the time European women began to arrive on the Atlantic shores of what is now the United States, the New World had long been given over to the fantasies of men." Write an cssay that discusses one of these male fantasies as projected onto US culture and history as well as how specific women writers have provided critical counterpoints to these fantasies. Your essay should have a clear thesis statement at the outsct and compare and contrast two literary texts, one published before 1900 and the other after.

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2. The Gilded Age

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