UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN

Session 2010-2011
Friday 27th May 2011
12:00 – 14:00
Games Hall, Butchart Recreation Centre

DEGREE EXAMINATION IN EL1513: Controversial Classics

Candidates may not leave the room during the first or last half-hour of
the examination.

Answer TWO questions, ONE from each section.

Do not write on the same text twice, and do not write at length on any text
which you discussed in any Level 1 essay.

This is an open-book exam – minor annotations on the texts are allowed.

You are required to enter on the first page of your script the texts, if any,
which you have brought into the examination, giving author or editor, title,
publisher, and date.

Scripts should be handed to invigilators at the end of the examination.

SECTION A

1. ‘“And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark
places of the earth.”’ Discuss the importance of time and the past in
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

2. For Chinua Achebe, Joseph Conrad was ‘a bloody racist’. To what

extent do you agree with Chinua Achebe’s condemnation of Conrad
based on your reading of Heart of Darkness.

3. How does reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart as a tragedy

alter the reader's view of pre-colonial African society?

4. How does Achebe engage with the language of the British colonial past
in Things Fall Apart?

5. How does the narrative voice of The Grass is Singing undermine

colonial values?

6. Does Moses' killing of Mary confirm or challenge racial stereotypes in

The Grass is Singing?

(Continued overleaf)
SECTION B

7. With reference to one or two texts studied on the course, explore the
extent to which art can successfully dissent from prevailing socio-
political conventions and register protest.

8. ‘A work of art functions on its own terms, exists in a realm independent

of conventional morality, and should therefore be exempt from the
strictures of moral judgement’ (Ladensen). Discuss, with reference to
one or two texts on the course.

9. ‘Epistemic closure is a moment of presumably complete knowledge of

a phenomenon. Such presumed knowledge closes off efforts at further
inquiry. The result is what we shall call “perverse anonymity”’ (Gordon).
Discuss the treatment of ‘epistemic closure’ as manifested in one or
two texts on the course.

[END OF PAPER]