Response to Course Material

These past few weeks have gone by a little too quickly. We have spent most of our class time doing various forms of practice for the AP exam. While I missed the Blitzkrieg activities, I found the other ones quite useful. Perhaps the most helpful activity for me was the quick annotation and analysis of poetry and prose. This is pretty much exactly what we will have to do to prepare for the essays on the exam. The same skills also carry over to the multiple choice section, where analysis is certainly required, although it is a bit more predetermined which direction we go. We have also started reading Fifth Business, and have had one discussion. I did not find the discussion extremely useful because we were limited by the amount of the book everyone had covered. How can we connections and draw conclusions when we are limited to the first few pages? What is there to draw a connection with? I hope that after everyone has read, we will have deeper ideas to discuss. We have also done a practice closed prompt, which I thought went well, but I will never truly know because peer grading is like that.

Open Prompt 2004

Often a great work of literature will provoke the reader by raising questions related to the material that prompt discussion and possibly new composition. This could not be more true in the case of Shakespeare's Hamlet, where the roles of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in relation to the play as a whole were enough to inspire Tom Stoppard to develop an entirely new play revolving around these two characters. In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Stoppard raises a the central question of whether we are in control or can be aware of our own fate. He poses and attempts to answer it using  existentialist dialogue that reflects major thematic material in Hamlet. Rosencrantz's and Guildnestern's search for meaning drives the action of the play and is one of the most important aspects of the work as a whole.

From the very onset of the play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern question their origin. They find themselves on a journey and struggle to remember the reason for it. The way their deductions follow, it is clear that the cause of their journey is really their conception, because their purpose from the audience's point of view is to serve as friends of Prince Hamlet who forward the plot of Shakespeare's work. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's function as a plot device in one play and as free-thinking beings within their own narrative is what creates the existential quandary Stoppard uses to explore how "fated" the two characters are. For example it does not seem to bother them that they are instantly transported to Denmark, or when the Tragedians show them a miniature version of  Hamlet concluding with their own deaths. While the play is written a certain way, the subjects of it cannot know how little free will they have. Thus the plot can exist as an elaborate conceit for our own experiences in life, which may seem random as they occur and scripted in retrospect.

However, Stoppard really explores the question of whether Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are aware of their inevitable end once they board the ship bound for England with Prince Hamlet. At this point, Guildenstern becomes very distraught because he realizes that no matter what he and Rosencrantz do at this point, they are stuck on the boat and will go wherever it takes them, despite their ability to move about the cabin creating an illusion of control. At this "point of no return," Rosencrantz and Guildenstern still have no control over their fate, but they seem much more aware of it. When they act out their meeting with the King of England and read the duplicate note calling for their own deaths, they face death as if it is simply a stage direction, not a surprise.

Stoppard's meditation on Hamlet seems to come to two conclusions about our relationship with fate. First is that we have fixed paths that have a beginning and an end, possibly both at the same point, the way that the pattern of the brother usurping the throne recurs cyclically during the Tragedian performance. The second is that we can be aware that our fate is beyond our control, but only when we can see the result of our actions in sight and thus when it is too late to change. We can read the script we follow, but never edit its contents.

Open Prompt Student Responses

"Literature is the question minus the answer"

Student N:
This student used Voltaire's novella Candide to tackle this rather specific but at the same time dangerously open-ended prompt. The student is able to effectively discuss the central question in Candide, which he/she defines as "is this the best of all possible worlds?" While the language is not very advanced and contains numerous repeated phrases, especially in the first few paragraphs, the structure is well-organized. Appearing to focus too heavily on plot, the writer actually spends the beginning of the essay establishing a context, in this case Candide's quest to answer his question, which will then allow for clearer exploration of the prompt. The student writes a great deal developing and explaining the meaning of the central question and its ambiguous resolution. The strength of this final portion of the essay is undoubtedly what earned it a near-perfect 8.

Student J:
After a solid but brief introduction in which the student poses that the central question in Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin is "what does it mean to be free?," the student uses a variety of examples from the novel to expand on this in the context of slavery and "civilization." However, the student's development is rather general and civilization could be restated as "social expectation," although the student is clearly thinking of the exact words Twain gives Huck at the end of the novel. This is not an ideal approach to begin with, because while a teacher grading the essay may notice subtle nods towards events in novels that suggest understanding, these are by nature unsubstantiated and less impressive than a developed point. The student also does not give a very thorough explanation of how the different events he/she brings up involving Jim and Huck really contribute to answering the central question, thus earning a 6.

Student U:
While not a wholly terrible essay, it is simply too short to really answer the prompt adequately. Ultimately, the student has a solid central question, but it comes far too late relative to the overall length of the essay. Had the preceding content been simply an introduction to a more developed explanation of how the village in Things Fall Apart changes or stays the same, this would have been a much stronger response. Unfortunately, possibly due to time constraints or poor preparation, the student failed to do this. The result is unfocused, unresolved, and unfocused writing that confounds  the reader.