Cultural Heritage II
Fourth Exam (Essay Portion)
Answer all of the following questions according to the instructions for each section. The typed exam is due in class at the time of the final in-class exam. (Late submissions are penalized one letter grade for not submitting in class and an additional letter grade for each day beyond that.)
The overall exam should include at least 1,000 words (four double-spaced pages) but no more than 1,200 words in fulfillment of part of the requirements for writing-intensive General Education courses. (There is a one letter grade minimum deduction for falling short of 1,000 words.)
Print the exam and staple the pages together (unstapled papers will be penalized 1%). Make sure your name is on the first page of the exam. Choose your topics to avoid covering the same material twice (duplicate coverage will result in partial credit for the essay). Please note the honor code regarding plagiarism and using the work of others.
Describe the important causes of one of the following major events from an interdisciplinary perspective (i.e., economics, politics, technology, religion). Which cause(s) do you think was most important or essential (without which, the event could not have happened)?
1. The Origins and Development of the Cold War
2. Decolonization
3. World War One
4. Collapse of the
Part II. Major Ideas in Dialogue, 300-350 words.
Select one of the
following clusters of famous individuals.
Giving roughly equal treatment to each of them (a paragraph each), describe their views on the topic with which they are
listed. Be sure to indicate how they are
similar as well as how they are different (possibly in a third paragraph, but
approaches will vary). Be sure not to duplicate
topics covered elsewhere in the exam. You
may need to do a little extra reading and research for some of these figures.
Part III. Visual/Textual Analysis, 200-250 words.
Explain how one of
the following works or texts relates to the time (historical context) in which
it was created or written. Give
attention to other artists and writers as appropriate, but be sure to keep your
focus on the work or text you have selected.
Do not repeat themes covered elsewhere in this exam.
I say to you, Allah knows that it
had never occurred to us to strike the towers. But after it became unbearable
and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American/Israeli coalition
against our people in
The events that affected my soul in a direct way started in 1982 when
I couldn't forget those moving scenes, blood and severed limbs, women and
children sprawled everywhere. Houses destroyed along with their occupants and
high rises demolished over their residents, rockets raining down on our home
without mercy.
The situation was like a crocodile meeting a helpless child, powerless except
for his screams. Does the crocodile understand a conversation that doesn't
include a weapon? And the whole world saw and heard but it didn't respond.
In those difficult moments many hard-to-describe ideas bubbled in my soul, but
in the end they produced an intense feeling of rejection of tyranny, and gave
birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.
What sphinx of cement and aluminum
bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi- nation? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob tainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun- ned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni- bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! 3. If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
4.
But a person who has not violated any taboo may yet be permanently or temporarily taboo because he is in a state which arouses the quality of arousing forbidden desires in others and of awakening a conflict of amibivalence in them... The king or chief arouses envy on account of his priveleges: everyone, perhaps, would like to be a king. Dead men, new-born babies and women menstruating or in labour stimulate desires by their special helplessness; a man who has just reached maturity stimulates tham by the promise of new enjoyments. For that reason all of these persons and all of these states are taboo, since temptation must be resisted.
5.
Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907); available in Presentation #15.