The exam will consist of two essays. One of the essays will be mandatory. For the other essay, you will be given three possibilities to choose from. These essays will run from three pages upward to ten (it all depends on how much you want to write!). Success will depend on you providing support for your assertions drawn from lectures, discussions, and readings.

One of the questions will be chosen from the following:

1) What is "women's writing?" How does women's writing tend to differ from men's writing? (The essay by Ann Snitow will be useful here, as well as Legates's Making Waves.) How does The Color Purple represent the tradition of women's writing?

2) Writing can be a revolutionary act, an act of resistance and empowerment, especially when one is not supposed to write. How does Alice Walker make her writing in The Color Purple into a revolutionary act? How does she use things like form (use of epistolary--meaning that Celie mostly tells her story to God), language (especially in dialogue), and causation (that things seem to happen as if by "magic") to carry out that revolutionary act?

3) Discuss the powers that Walker depicts female characters as having in The Color Purple. What are the forms of power that the women characters have, especially Celie, Shug, Sofia, and Nettie? How does Celie come to gather within herself all the varieties of power Walker depicts the group of women characters as having by the end of the story in The Color Purple?

4) Two criticisms of The Color Purple arise over and over again: that Walker downplays the limitations that racism apply to African-American women, and that Alice Walker is unduly harsh in her criticisms of African-American men. After reading The Color Purple, do you feel these criticisms are valid? Why or why not?

The Mandatory Essay will be the following:

5) Alice Walker is often represented as a feminist, and more specifically, as a womanist, writer. What does this mean? (The essays by Elsa Barkley Brown, Bonnie Thornton Dill, and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham will be helpful here.) Define feminist and womanist, and explain how the two differ as terms and movements. How is The Color Purple a feminist novel? How is it a womanist novel?