Prompts for the First Essaylet of the Take-Home Final Exam

For the Final Examination you will be producing two short essays, each 4-5pp. long. Each essaylet will be a close argumentative reading of your chosen text, and should demonstrate your facility with the four habits of argumentative writing. For each of the two essaylets I will offer you three prompts that will provide you with points of departure for your reading. If a prompt asks many questions, it is not demanding an answer to all of them, but providing different avenues of argument. The second set of prompts will arrive on the blog in a few days. Both essays constituting your final exam will be due at the beginning of our final scheduled class meeting.

1. ****Make and defend any strong claim you like about director David Cronenberg's film "A History of Violence," but you must substantiate that claim primarily through a close reading either of the opening sequence of the film (at the motel) or the closing sequence of the film (the wordless sequence at the lake and around the dinner table). Your essay should include a plausible case as to why the opening or closing scene is especially key or exemplary for the film as a whole for whatever it is you are illuminating through your reading of it.****

How does a history of violence shape the history that is made in its aftermath? Is the making of history always violent? Is history a kind of madness? What are the violences that suffuse the everyday rituals and familiar/familial exchanges that form the quotidian backdrop against which we need to compare the disruptions and violations we name violences? Can the substance of violence be represented without being exercised?

2. In Chapter 5 of Part One of Art Spiegelman's Maus, the living narrator-protagonist of a comic-within-the-comic accuses his Mother -- who has committed suicide -- of murdering him, while with his last word the (same?) narrator-protagonist concludes Part One by accusing his father of being a murderer as well, this time for destroying his dead Mother's diary.

In what sense might the completion of the book that is Maus come to substitute for the diary that was destroyed? In what ways do these books substitute for the lives they memorialize? In light of your answers to these questions, what is the significance of the tombstone which constitutes Maus's last image? Just what is it that is captured in the testimony that is Maus? What is captured (differently?) in the photographs that are reproduced throughout the narrative? What is lost? What is recaptured that was lost? Who survives?

****Focus on just one of these dimensions of Maus, survival, memorialization, testimony, or representation, and make a strong claim that you substantiate through a close reading of at least one of the moments in the text alluded to above and including at least one moment or element that is not included above.****