Preparing for exams

My exams are in six weeks. I haven't finished reading yet, but I'm getting there. The paralysis that occured in conjunction with the dissertation proposal set me behind schedule. I got a good response from the Advisor on my last proposal draft, but it requires one more revision before the exams. I actually wrote a whole proposal without mentioning any primary texts. I'm that good. I knew that wouldn't fly, but I am reluctant to assign primary texts to my chapters yet--I'll get to that in another post.

All advice I have received about preparing for exams has included writing my own questions. Not necessarily answering them, but coming up with smart questions and listing works I might address in an answer. Good advice. But there are a few questions that I need to answer before I get into the exams--major concepts that I need to articulate, works that I need to connect explicitly, big ideas that I will need to have worked out so that I can answer other questions.

So here I am assigning myself essays. On the blog. Public accountability. My lists are 20th c. American lit, Southern lit and culture, and religion and modern culture.

I need to narrate a kind of history of the study of Southern literature, connected with the history of "Southern identity" (C. Vann Woodward), with a focus on what scholars in the field are doing now and how that is different from the idea of Southern literature when it began to be established as a field. What is The South? What is Southern literature? What do the Agrarians have to do with it anymore?

I've got a lot of theorists of religion and modern culture on my third list: Marx, Freud, Jung, Durkheim, Eliade, James, Girard, Nietzsche. I need to write an expository essay that addresses the major ideas of all of these guys and then finds connections and disagreements among them.

The poetry on my lists appear in chronological clumps: 1920s-30s, 1950s-60s, late 1970s. And somehow Rita Dove ends up in the 80s all by herself. They're actually clumped more by the dates of specific collections than by the author "schools" they are usually classified in. So some poets end up in a different "clump" that one might expect. Why the clumps? What features do the poems share? What are the differences between the clumps? Are poets responding to one another? What major formal changes are happening?

I need to write something about African American religion that mixes Christianity with African religion. That shows up a lot in my primary texts, and I've never done much more than recognize and acknowledge that it's there. I should write something about that--I'm fairly certain that such a question will be on my exam--and anything I write about that topic will be useful in my dissertation later. It's something I need to work out.

So, there. Four essays. My paying-the-bills job responsibilities will be over next week (as will the paycheck!) until July so I can devote myself fully to obsessing over exams.