The University of British Columbia

English 470, section 005

Final Take-Home Examination

Professor Kevin McNeilly

Office: Buchanan Tower 401

Office Phone: 604.822.4466

E-Mail: mcneilly@interchange.ubc.ca

Write an essay of no more than 1500 words (four to six typed, double-spaced pages) on one of the following three topics. Please use the current MLA style for formatting and documentation. The paper must be submitted directly to me or to the main office of the English Department no later than 11:00 am on Wednesday 21 December 2005. I will be in the room – Buchanan A202 – during the scheduled exam period (8:30 to 11:00 am) to receive your papers, but you may turn them in any time before then as well. Electronic submission is not acceptable.

In his 1952 review of E. J. Pratt’s Towards the Last Spike, Northrop Frye asserts that the “real hero of the poem is a society’s will to take intelligible form; the real quest is for physical and spiritual communication within that society.” Pratt, for Frye, “is a poet unusually aware of the traditional connection between poetry and oratory. [. . .] [A]ll forms of communication are closely linked to poetry in imaginative appeal, and in this nomadic culture [of Canada] people who cannot write poetry are dependent on poets to express their inarticulate sense of the link” (The Bush Garden 11, 13).

With direct reference to the work of three writers on the course syllabus, examine the ways in which English Canadian literary texts produce community or nation.

OR

With direct reference to the work of three writers on the course syllabus, investigate the nature and depiction of audience, or of reception, or of spectatorship.

OR

With direct reference to the work of three writers on the course syllabus, discuss the persistence of alterity or of otherness – and the instability or the subversion of the kind of cultural links Frye claims to find in Pratt.