7/28/2019 Possible Exam Topics

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Higher Institute of Human Sciences, Tunis Academic Year 2012-2013

2nd

Semester Exam (Main/ Re-sit/ Remedial)

Licence Fondamentale d’Anglais 1st

/2nd

/3rd year

Module: Literature Subject: Fiction

Duration: 2 hours 

Choose ONE of the following topics

I) Comment on this statement with reference to Toni Morrison’s Beloved .

“ Beloved  presents a new way of conceiving of history, one that refuses and refutes master 

versions of history. Such master versions value certainty and exactitude and claim authority

through collapsing the multiplicity of voices available at any historical moment into an

artificial [narrative]. In contrast,  Beloved  offers several versions of [hi]story, which exist

simultaneously, yet complementarily and which depend on “the contributions of many tellers

(narrators), and listeners (readers).”1 

II)

In  Beloved , “identity and its recognition, depend on the body having been marked with a

special sign, which looks suspiciously like a linguistic signifier. Signing or marking the body

signifies its passage into writing, its becoming a literary body, and generally also a narrative

 body.”2 

Discuss 

1  Sale, Maggie. “Call and Response as Critical Method: African-American Oral Traditions and  Beloved .”

 African American Review 26 (1992) 42-43. 

2Peter Brooks.  Body Works: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1993) 3.

7/28/2019 Possible Exam Topics

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/possible-exam-topics 2/2

Higher Institute of Human Sciences, Tunis Academic Year 2012-2013

2nd

Semester Exam (Main/ Re-sit/ Remedial)

Licence Fondamentale d’Anglais 1st

/2nd

/3rd year

Module: Literature Subject: Fiction

Duration: 2 hours

Choose ONE of the following topics

I) Comment on this statement with reference to Toni Morrison’s Beloved .

“Though Beloved is a novel that certainly, in both structure and language, reproduces some of 

the conventions of the oral tradition, it is also a novel . To ignore this fact is to subsequently

ignore Morrison‟s ability to invoke both oral and written traditions throughout the book, to

 produce a written text that is somehow, at the same time, an oral text, as contra-logical as

such a phrase may seem.”1 

II) Discuss this statement with reference to Toni Morrison’s Beloved. 

“Morrison employs the conventions of narrative to show how external „authorities‟ fail to

explain human tragedy; they merely “keep alive the idea” that it can be explained. In their 

repudiation of the conventional authority they usually wield and their refusal to explain, her 

texts immerse the reader in perplexing experience.”2 

1  Anita Durkin, “Object Written, Written Object: Slavery, Scarring, and Complications of Authorship in

 Beloved.”Toni Morrison’s “Beloved 

.”

Ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase, 2009) 176.2 Catherine Rainwater. “Worthy Messengers: Narrative Voices in Toni Morrison‟s Novels.” Texas Studies in

 Literature and Language, 33. 1 (1991) 111.