Comps Sample Answer-- Changing Relations question

Modern British and American Literature

Comprehensive Exam

Sample answer

1-14-11

1)   “All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature. Let us agree to place one of these changes about the year 1910.”

Virginia Woolf

Explore Woolf’s famous declaration about the changing nature of human relations during the early twentieth century by providing examples from several works of modernist literature reflective of this shift.  Choose characters, relationships among characters, and ideas that explore in some depth one or two of the pairs mentioned (masters and servants, husbands and wives, or parents and children).

I.               Introduction

II.             Example #1 (Wallace Stevens’ Sunday Morning shows a changed relation between “man and God”

III.           Example #2 (A Raisin in the Sun shows changing family relations within the Younger’s family unit, and also the relationship or position of African Americans within the larger American society)

IV.            Example #3 (William Butler Yeats’ Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop also shows changed relation between woman and man and the catholic church and Irish people)

V.              Example #4 (O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock subverts the patriarchic order of early 2oth Century Ireland, with ‘two mothers being better’)

VI.            Example #5 (Dreiser’s Sister Carrie is ostensibly a ‘rags to riches’ story, but in many ways it deconstructs the rags to riches story, so that Carrie is not happier after she is rich, in fact she is fairly isolated by the end of the story. So a meta-narrative of the American Dream is discredited somewhat.)

VII.           Example #6 (Richard Wright’s Native Son presents a warning to white society in the microcosm of Bigger Thomas’s world about a violent outburst coming if African American’s are allowed to continue in a second class status.)

VIII.        Example #7 (E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India challenges the relationship between masters (the English) and servants (the Indians)… prefigures the coming revolt against British dominance of India.)

IX.            Example #8 (Kate Chopin’s novel is an early example of a woman challenging the social order that keeps women and particularly sexuality suppressed.)

X.              Conclusion