Discussion questions (week 7)

In preparation for the midterm next week, our discussion on Friday will function as a sort of mini-review. To this end, I'd like you to come to class having completed three review-centric tasks:

1. Write up a list of the terms that Heather has put on the board, and their definitions. I'd like to spend the beginning of discussion reviewing terms you're unsure about.
   
   
2. Write up a list of the themes that pertain to MSND, the sonnets, MoV, and H5. These lists should include those themes Heather has put on the board or suggested in her lectures, but don't stop there -- add to these lists any themes you find striking or persuasive but which haven't come up in class.
   
   Pay particular attention to the themes that apply to multiple texts -- again, these may or may not be themes that Heather has put on the board.
   
   
3. MOST IMPORTANTLY, write an essay question in the style of Heather's examples. You can download the essay questions Heather wrote for last year's midterm here (PDF). Notice that these questions usually
   1. Require comparison either between plays or within a single play
   2. Connect to ideas Heather has raised in lecture once or twice, but not to issues central to those lectures
   3. Ask you to connect a theme (e.g. the role of power in politics and in relationships) to a technique (e.g. closure, pairing, mirroring, etc.)
      
   
   

Discussion questions (week 3)

[Apologies if you saw a couple of questions up here earlier--for a few hours on Tuesday I had in mind a different approach to tomorrow's discussion.]

In discussion this week we will focus wholly on MSND since we will get to spend next two discussions talking exclusively about the sonnets.

1. How do events in act V mirror events from the first four acts? Compare one event in act V with an event that it seems to mirror from earlier in MSND. As your "event," you might want to use the speech about which you are writing your mini-essay.

   List what these events have in common and list, also, the ways in which these events differ. Although this is fundamentally a question about structure, think also about word use and staging: how does Shakespeare change the meaning of a word or of an idea from an earlier act to act V? (This is just a new version of the third discussion question from last week.)

2. On Tuesday, Heather suggested that the play within the play at the end of MSND served to fully reverse the tragic momentum of act I. List three more reasons the play within the play might be at the end of MSND. You might want to think in terms of politics, social class, and/or the purpose of art.

3. We should spend the last twenty minutes of discussion addressing your own questions about MSND. Come in with a question about the text, or a problem that you can't resolve -- a scene, character, idea, or conclusion that doesn't make any sense.