Study guide for ENGL 275 final exam, fall 2015

[Included are the instructions that will appear on the final exam, so you know what to
expect, as well as a sample essay question]
Part I: Short answers (25 points5 points per answer)
Choose five of the seven questions below and answer each of them in two or three
sentences (more only if absolutely necessary). Please focus your responses on the
question at hand. Try not to spend more than 30 minutes on this section.
Note: Part I will only concern the readings that came after Althusser on the
course syllabusthat is, the material that was not covered in the midterm quiz.
Terms and concepts to study for this section of the exam:
The people vs. the power bloc
Semiotic guerrilla warfare
Imaginary resolution to real contradictions
Taste
Cultural capital
Relevance vs. aesthetics
Textual poaching
Fan cultures
Interpretive communities
The romance novels separate, gendered spheres
Hustlers lower body class transgressions
The fantasy structure of K/S stories
Chinese gold farmers and the racial logic of neoliberalism
The differences between 50s Elvis and 70s Elvis, and the impersonations of them
Affect
Metonymy
Structures of feeling
Part II: Paired passages: One compare and contrast essay (25 points)
Choose one of the two sets of paired passages below and write a short (around three
paragraphs or so) essay comparing and contrasting the passages treatment of the key
concept in question. Your essay should refer to the passages and focus its argument on the
issue posed by the question. Try not to spend more than 40 minutes on this section.
Part III: Paired passages: Two connect and relate essays (50 points25 points each)
Choose two of the three sets of paired passages below and, for each pair, write a short
(around three paragraphs or so) essay in response to the issue posed by the accompanying
question. Your essays should refer to the passages and focus its argument on the issue
posed by the question. Try not to spend more than 80 minutes on this section (40 minutes
per essay).
Note: Parts II and III will draw on material from the entire course. All passages
will be taken directly from the assigned reading.

Sample paired passages question (this would appear in part II of the exam):
Compare and contrast the understandings of mass-communicated culture offered by
Adorno & Horkheimer and Williams in the passages below.
[C]ulture now impresses the same stamp on everything. Films, radio, and magazines make up a
system which is uniform as a whole and in every part.
The need which might resist central control has already been suppressed by the control of the
individual consciousness. [Radio] turns all participants into listeners and authoritatively
subjects them to broadcast programs which are all exactly the same.
The inherent tendency of radio is to make the speakers word, the false commandment, absolute.
A recommendation becomes an order.
-- Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, from The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as
Mass Deception
It is supposed, for instance, that it is an objection to listening to [radio] that the listener cannot
answer the speakers back. But the situation is that of almost any reader; printing, after all, was the
first great impersonal medium. We fail to realize, in this case, that much of what we call
communication is, necessarily, no more than transmission
Any governing body will seek to implant the right ideas in the minds of those whom it governs,
but the minds of men are shaped by their whole experience, and the most skillful transmission
of material which this experience does not confirm will fail to communicate. Communication is
not only transmission; it is also reception and response.
[A] culture is not only a body of intellectual and imaginative work; it is also a whole way of
life.
-- Raymond Williams, from the Conclusion to Culture and Society, 1780-1950