Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Jungle Book, Watership Down, Julie

Instructions:
Your take-home examination must be typed in Word. Your name must appear at the top of the
submission. The file name of your final examination must take this format: last name, first name,
course number, final exam. This take-home examination should be the equivalent of a 3-
hour examination which means you should write approximately 3,000—6,000 words. You are
encouraged to use spell check and the course books and to revise your answers. Further research is allowed but not required. Your answers must reference at least three of the five longer texts we
studied after Reading Week—Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Jungle Book, Watership
Down, Julie of the Wolves, and War Horse. Choose your texts carefully to fulfill this requirement.
You may write on the same text twice but you cannot repeat the same material/argument twice.

Section 2: Comparative thematic readings (worth 10% of your final grade)
Choose one of these essay questions and answer it in relation to two or three of the texts on our
course. Remember that you must write on at least three of the longer texts we studied after
Reading Week over the course of this examination so choose your texts carefully to fulfill that
requirement. Your answer must take the form of a short essay.

1. Compare and contrast the attitudes towards modernity in two or three of the texts we have
studied in this course.

2. How do two or three of the texts on this course depict the idea of “home”?

3. Dandelion concludes “The Story of the King’s Lettuce” with the observation that “no power on
earth can keep a rabbit out of a vegetable garden, for El-ahrairah prompts them with a thousand
tricks, the best in the world.” Discuss this quotation in relation to at least two or three texts on
this course. You can choose to focus on the transgressive boundary-crossing into the vegetable
garden or on the figure of the trickster (not necessarily rabbits) or on the mythology and
symbolism of the rabbit or on a combination of all these themes reflected in this quotation.

4. As children grow up, they need to learn how to cope with strong emotions. Explore how two or
three of the texts on this course depict strong emotions. Do the texts teach young readers
strategies for managing strong emotions?

Section 3: Key concepts
Answer ONE of the following questions in short essay format. Remember that you must write on at least three of the longer texts we studied after Reading Week over the course of this examination so choose your texts carefully to fulfill that requirement.

1. “On June 18, 1744, Newbery put an advertisement in the Penny London Morning Advertiser
announcing the publication of A Little Pretty Pocket-Book: it is, he says, ‘intended for the
Instruction and Amusement of little Master Tommy and pretty Miss Polly; with an agreeable
Letter to each from Jack the Giant-Killer; as also a Ball and Pincushion, the Use of which will
infallibly make Tommy a good Boy and Polly a good Girl.’ … By linking instruction,
amusement, and toys with the promise that ‘good’ boys and girls will be magically created by the
purchase of a book, Newbery laid the foundation for a system of beliefs that permeates children’s
book publishing to this day.” Jack Zipes et al. eds. The Norton Anthology of Children’s
Literature. New York: Norton, 2005. (1415) Demonstrate how Newbery’s beliefs regarding
children’s literature “permeates” at least two texts we have studied.

2. “I don’t write for children,” Maurice Sendak insisted in his final interview in January 2012. “I
write — and somebody says, ‘That’s for children!’” Referring to at least two different texts we
have studied, discuss Sendak’s claim that “children’s literature” is a label added to the work after
its production. If we label a text “children’s literature” are we identifying authorial intent or
imposing a strategy for reading upon the text? How do we read “children’s literature” differently
from literature for adults?

3. In his essay “On Three Ways of Writing For Children,” C. S. Lewis suggests that orally speaking
a tale to a specific child will result in a composite authorship: “In any personal relation the two
participants modify each other. You would become slightly different because you were talking to
a child and the child would become slightly different because it was being talked to by an adult.
A community, a composite personality, is created and out of that the story grows.” Discuss
Lewis’s idea in relation to at least two different texts we have studied.

4. Karen Klugman describes Disneyfication as “the application of simplified aesthetic, intellectual
or moral standards to a thing that has the potential for more complex or thought-provoking
expression.” Do you agree? Refer to at least two texts on our course in your answer.