Human Relationships in Simon and Garfunkel song 'I Am a Rock'

The English 2112 Midterm
Expectations, Instructions
Prompts
Objective:
• To apply what we have learned about world literature to the writing of a formal, five-paragraph, literary analysis essay
Expectations and Instructions:
• The English 2112 midterm exam is a timed literary analysis essay in response to a prompt. You have two hours to complete the exam once you open it. (Please see the important note below.)
• You must submit your midterm exam by the due date indicated in the Week 8 module. I only accept late exams one day after the due date.
• Your exam response must be thesis-driven, meaning it must have a central argument.
• Your exam response must contain five paragraphs (an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion).
• Your exam response must involve literary analysis. Please do not submit an essay that merely summarizes the assigned reading.
• Your exam response must include textual evidence to support your claims. Parenthetical citations must be formatted according to MLA standards. A works cited page is not required.
• Your argument must be rooted in your interpretation of the assigned readings and must allude to at least two different texts that we have read in the course thus far. Please don’t feel like you have to discuss every text we’ve read. (Between two and three is probably sufficient.)
• You must work alone on the exam. This is not a collaborative assignment.
• You may use your course notes and the assigned readings on the exam.
IMPORTANT!
This exam is worth 10% of your overall grade in this course. You have two hours to complete this exam. Do not open the exam until you are ready to take it. Remember, if you open the exam, walk away, and then try to take it several hours later, it will not allow you to make changes, and you will likely receive a zero. If this were an on-campus course, would you walk into your classroom on the day of an exam, read the exam prompt, leave the room for no apparent reason for ten hours, and then expect your instructor to allow you back into the classroom to complete the exam at your leisure? Absolutely not. You would never expect that in an on-campus course, so please don’t expect that in my online course. Once you open the exam, you must complete it within two hours. If you have any questions or concerns about the exam, please email me before you open the exam, and well before the exam due date.
Possible Prompts:
Below is the list of possible prompts. Only four of these will appear on the actual exam, and you are required to respond to one of the four—your choice. You will not know which four until you open the exam, so it’s wise to consider how you would respond to each one. You are free to use any notes on the exam, as long as they are your personal notes. If your exam response too closely resembles another student’s in this course, your response may be flagged for potential cheating, which means it will come under very close scrutiny from me, and possibly an administrator at ASU. I take this very seriously, as should you, so please do not discuss these prompts with any other student, and do not share your reading notes with anyone.
1. In a poem entitled “No Man Is an Island,” John Donne writes the following: “No man is an island, / Entire of itself, / Every man is a piece of the continent, /A part of the main.” Discuss the extent to which our assigned readings support or refute this statement.
2. Several years ago, I ate dinner at Guang Zhou (a local Albany Chinese restaurant) and got this fortune in my cookie: “A good memory is fine but the ability to forget is the one true test of greatness.” Discuss the extent to which our assigned readings support or refute this statement.
3. A character from a popular contemporary television show at one point says the following: “The business of life is the acquisition of memories. In the end, that’s all there is.” Discuss the extent to which our assigned readings support or refute this statement.
4. Mark Twain wrote, ““The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.” Discuss the extent to which our assigned readings support or refute this statement.
5. The 13th century Persian poet Rumi once wrote that “lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.” Discuss the extent to which our assigned readings agree and/or disagree with this statement.
6. The speaker of the Simon and Garfunkel song “I Am a Rock” asserts (perhaps ironically and with a tinge of sadness) that it is safest for the human to remain isolated from others (“a rock feels no pain and an island never cries”). What do our assigned readings have to say about the value of human relationships? Do our texts suggest they are worth the trouble, or not?
7. The last three lines of Shakespeare’s sonnet 64 read as follows: “Time will come and take my love away. / This thought is as a death which cannot choose / but weep to have that which it fears to lose.” The medieval Japanese poet Ōtomo no Yakamochi expresses a similar sentiment with the line “Better never to have met you in my dream than to wake and reach for hands that are not there.” Discuss what our assigned readings have to say about the hazards of romantic love. Do our texts suggest that its dangers outweigh its benefits?
8. In his essay “Friendship—the Least Necessary Love,” C.S. Lewis argues that in order for true friendship to blossom, the individuals involved must “see the same truth.” Do the friendships contained in our assigned readings qualify? In other words, would Lewis label these relationships as friendships, or something else?