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MY ODE TO THE DECADE THAT'S ENDING:

Just another exceptional decade that makes you grateful for America

--Robert Oscar López

“I saw a decade end.. and the world could change in the blink of an eye. And if anything, there's your sign."

Such were the energetic words of the band Jesus Jones in 1990, contemplating on the end of the 1980s and the dawn of a new decade. The Cold War had ended; the Berlin Wall had fallen. The US had overthrown Manuel Noriega with an effortless flourish and it seemed that in the post-Soviet era, everything -- even social justice--was going to be smoother and less stressful.

The president back then was named George Bush. We didn't concern ourselves about the "HW" versus the "W" because there was only one George Bush we cared about, and he was doing a fairly good job.

So here we are again, but the mood is different. I doubt anyone in the US could do a remake of Jesus Jones' hit for 2009 and still include the line, "Right here, right now, there is no other place I'd rather be." Unlike the end of the 1980s, the end of the 2000s has very little warm nostalgia for the decade just passed, and small hope for the one about to arrive.

Whether you are looking forward or backward, things feel bleak for us as 2009 draws to a close and we see "a decade end" again.

But I will dissent from the majority opinion and say there is no other place I'd rather be at the start of 2010 -- right here, right now. Despite all the tribulations of the Bush Era, I look back on the 2000s as a glorious time. And despite all the acrimony of the Age of Obama, I think good things are in store for me and my country.

Where were you on December 31, 1999? I was in Buffalo, New York, in the first year of my doctoral program in English at SUNY. I was still recovering from the malignant tumor that had derailed my life in the mid-1990s, forcing me both to abandon my career in business and lose any hope (or so it seemed) of a military career. Disabled from multiple surgeries and therefore unable to continue my job at MTV Networks or get into the Army, I was lost about what to do with myself. So I signed up for some writing classes and ended up staying for a PhD in English.

More specifically, on December 31, 1999, I was standing next to a Korean immigrant whom I'd met and fallen in love with only a few weeks earlier. We kissed as the fireworks over the Niagara Mohawk Building exploded over our heads and I whispered in her ear, "I want to marry you." It came in the heat of the moment -- as does much truth. The day turned to January 1, 2000, and we flew to Los Angeles together for a secret 10-day vacation, staying in my friend Charles' apartment close to Crenshaw and Stocker Street in what was, apparently, a ghetto of South Central LA (because I’m a New Yorker, LA ghettoes always look like suburbs to me.) Within a year we'd be married.

My wife and I got married the day before I turned 30, at Buffalo City Hall. We only told my grandmother and father about it. They were going to come to see the "ceremony" (in a cramped back office that smelled of cigarettes), but my dad went to Buffalo City Court instead, which was where he and my mother had gotten divorced back in 1973. City Court and City Hall were far enough apart that our wedding vows were read, and we were shuffled out of the office, in the time it took for my father and grandmother to walk over to where we actually were. After getting married in City Hall, my new wife and I had lunch at Le Metro downtown, and then I drove back to school so I wouldn't miss my afternoon Latin class. The subject of the day was, by coincidence, Ovid's "Art of Love." With a grin I showed the other Latin students my new gold ring (which we bought for $160 at the mall) and said, "I am now a MARRIED Classics student." They cheered me on. I was proud that my wife’s small diamond wing and my gold band actually cost equal amounts at the Walden Galleria in exurb-fabulous Cheektowaga, New York.

Two days after we got married, George W. Bush was sworn in as the 43rd president.

The 2000s began a disconnect between my personal life, which was full of growth and exponentially increasing happiness, and the popular narrative everyone else told about what was going on in America. Imagine the irony that on the day I eloped, people were protesting against the ballot recounts in Florida and plotting ways to undermine the incoming President, whom they saw as illegitimate because of the Supreme Court decision.

Though I was a lifelong Republican, I was suspicious of Bush's "compassionate conservatism" and feared he would combine the worst corporate whoring of the Republicans with the worst social welfare excesses of the Democrats. Wow, if only I'd been wrong. But I was happy during the spring of 2001, because I was in love, so I began the shut out the loud mill of liberal complaints that surrounded me in graduate school. While the news shows reported on people throwing eggs at Bush's inaugural limousine, I happily did my Greek homework.

There is a tendency these days to say that everything changed on September 11, 2001, but that's not what my diaries reveal. The economy was recovering from the dotcom bust a few years earlier, and liberals were still angry about the Clinton impeachment and the Florida election fiasco. The Left was angry, bitter, and constantly cantankerous, even before the wars began. They hated Bush from Day One and poisoned otherwise pleasant conversations with conspiracy theories and venting against Republicans. It would be impossible for me to forget how divisive politics was in the spring of 2001, because it was in April that I had my first serious run-in with a liberal professor as a literary scholar. The only African American professor in my department decided he hated my essay on Christianity in the slave narratives, and the tension between us degenerated into accusations and his withdrawal from my oral exam committee. I almost had to leave the program.

The day before Easter 2001, I was visiting a sister in Cazenovia, New York, and wandered into an open Catholic church (I was still Catholic then.) I had been fasting for Lent. I'll never know if it was the fasting that made me delirious, or if I had a true vision. But something happened to me as I kneeled alone in the empty chapel, staring up at a statue of Jesus. A clear message came: "Your country and God will be asking different things of you; be strong. And keep studying Greek." I wish the message were deeper -- but I can't lie. That was the vague, and only, thing I picked up in my sole epiphany in life.

Soon afterwards, I passed my oral exams and started on the dissertation, which I would finish in little more than a year. My wife and I were living in a small apartment on Anderson Street in downtown Buffalo. It was cramped, and we were very poor. Under pressure from our family, we had a church ceremony and reception at the American Legion-VFW hall close to our apartment, where we hung white gauze over the Bingo board, hired a flaky DJ, and shelled out $14 a person for a reception of baked ziti and steamed potatoes. Perhaps stunned by the underwhelming chic of an American wedding, my father-in-law had an aneurysm on our wedding day and my wife had to accompany him to the emergency room, in her wedding dress, at a local hospital named after Buffalo native Millard Fillmore.

My father-in-law survived with brain damage in 2001 but was never the same; he died in 2008. So too, during the same decade, we lost my wife’s last remaining grandmother, my stepmother, my uncle Remo, and all my remaining grandparents.

When I think back at how the decade began, I am struck by the simplicity of our life back then. We were poor and struggling and constantly beset by struggles, but my wife and I were somehow happy together through it all. I was thankful to be loved, when I knew many people who were lonely.

I had only barely survived and regained my footing when the fall 2001 semester began at SUNY Buffalo. I was working as the editor in chief of the Graduate Quill, a graduate monthly journal. I was in the offices of the Quill on September 11--in fact I'd come to work early that day and greeted the secretary at half past nine, only to hear about a plane crash in New York City. In my first month as editor, I had to put out a special issue called “Aftermath.” You can probably guess the focus.

After September 11, I spent a few years ridden by angst over the hopelessness of the human condition. My appetite was for redemption and forgiveness. Teaching a crop of bright-eyed idealistic freshman three times a week, I absorbed idealistic instincts and joined forces with antiwar liberal groups. I disagreed with them on just about everything, but like so many Americans I did not want to be alone during what felt like chaotic, menacing times. The liberals back then had the most emotionally supportive rallies, so my choice of political camps was perhaps a little selfish. My wife and I participated as a couple in countless peace demonstrations, which brought us to Boston, New York, and Washington for rallies and the like.

My conservative views were never truly replaced by liberal ones, but I found, like so many other people around me, a sense of togetherness and community in the protest movements after 9/11. The Left may never fully realize how much their hatred of Bush gave them a sense of purpose and brought them together in a special bond of love, as hostile and angry as it might have seemed. Leftists came as close as they will ever come to utopia, in their pacifist poetry readings, antiwar conferences, and rallies against the Bush Administration. I saw people skip meals and scrape together change to buy each other bus tickets. Folks crashed on each other's couches and held hands while mounted policemen threatened them. In their vile loathing of Bush, they found a sense of mission; it was sublime. I was there for the togetherness, but I didn't share their political views. As a half-outsider, I could read them with detachment.

And in a very real material sense, the Bush years gave many Bush-haters the grounds for their own prosperity. For all the canards that Bush "gutted" social spending, I saw countless peers thrive in jobs in the non-profit sector during the 2000s (at least, until the crash of 2008). By some measurements the number of Hispanics with college degrees doubled; the black unemployment rate sank to historic lows. The country enjoyed the twin miracles of low unemployment and low inflation. Low interest rates spurred the boom on homeownership; one cannot understand the real estate crash without at least admitting there was a boom for much of the 2000s, and many got rich from it. The stock market soared and as a result, college endowments became flush with money to hire new professors. Many of my colleagues from grad school got tenure-track jobs, at rates that looked quite prosperous compared to the dry seasons of the 1990s. In 1999, I had been told by my mentors that almost nobody would get a tenure-track job with a PhD anymore. Somehow, even with all the evils thrown at Bush, the academy grew enough for a healthy portion of our cohort to land such jobs.

On October 1, 2002, I defended my dissertation and became Dr. Robert Oscar Lopez. I had to tune out the controversy over Colin Powell's testimony before the United Nations. I had to block out the debates about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction -- I had to find a job.

The country's mood was panicked and warmongering, but the academic market treated me well in 2002. I went to the trade fair in December 2002, and ended up getting my first tenure-track job at Rutgers Camden in New Jersey. By February 7, 2003, I had my offer in hand and I accepted it. My wife was happy that our careers were moving forward and our sacrifices were beginning to pay off.

"But now that you know where you'll be working next year," my wife said in February, "let's rejoin with the peace movement."

We went to rallies against the Iraq War in New York on February 15, 2003, and Washington on March 15, 2003, partly because we had doubts about weapons of mass destruction, and partly because of the utopian togetherness that the Left had cultivated in its tireless fight against Bush and Cheney. The movement failed, technically, since of course the US invaded Iraq anyway. But when I read my journals from 2003, I cannot say that those were bleak, depressing times -- especially now that I have had the chance to speak with Iraq War veterans and I know that, regardless of WMDs, the War accomplished great things and was justified on the basis of eliminating Saddam Hussein alone. At home, ironically, there was an ineffable sense of camaraderie in 2003 among those who dissented -- and the true economic crisis had not hit yet, so anger at the government was still based mostly on principle rather than a direct experience with loss. The nasty discourse and partisanship of which we hear so much yielded unexpected moments of unity and brotherhood, on all sides.

My wife and I struggled for the years after 2003, and we fought viciously at times, like any married couple. Her liberalism and my conservatism were often the root of our arguments. But much of the decade can still be marked by what she and I accomplished through the sheer force of our love. Both of us could count on no support from our parents. As an international student, she qualified for no teaching assistantships or grants. As a conservative, I was ideologically opposed to receiving anything I didn’t earn, so when SUNY Buffalo suddenly awarded me a “minority fellowship” in 1999, I insisted on teaching classes for free so I would be doing the same labor as white colleagues who had the usual instructional stipends, with the result that I did as much work as the Caucasians, but could not be part of the TA union and had to pay for my own health insurance out of a stipend that got taxed at a higher rate.

The Bush Era was not a time of laziness or fiscal carelessness for me and my wife, so it is impossible for me to reflect on it without a degree of satisfaction. I would change nothing about my family’s choices over the last decade. In just a few short years, with the meltdown of the mortgage market, the Bush Era would make very clear to us just how important it was not to take anything free from people who claimed to be helping. Nothing is ever free. Even after I moved from grad school to the tenure track, we only had one full-time income (mine), but we still managed to get my wife through her own PhD in Comparative Literature, and I completed the extra MA in Classics at night school.

The struggle to make ends meet was indisputably worth the hassle and fatigue. I got more and more things published as the years went on, and met many wonderful students I'll never forget.

My wife and I used to take trips when we didn't have kids yet. We drove across the South in the summer of 2004, and went to France and Italy in the summer of 2005. We traveled lightly and had to watch our money -- we were so cheap we had to forego the Venetian gondola and instead pay 10 euros to ride on the vaporetto with other Italian commuters. I remember arriving in Rome in 2005, just after the Pope had died, and seeing the Vatican mobbed. Pilgrims came from all over to pay their respects. As we traveled through France and Italy, my wife and I could feel the racial tension in Europe, though we had no idea that riots would tear up France only a few months after we left, and right-wing Sarkozy would win the election shortly thereafter.

What I learned in Europe in 2005 was that the Left's fascination with the continent was unfounded. Fluent in French and Italian, I could chat with everyday Europeans freely. It seemed to me a bogus cliche that Bush had "destroyed" our image in Europe. The regular people of Europe seemed not to think about America all that often, and while they found Bush rather gauche, they viewed his policies with the same duality through which they saw everything American. They derided Bushism but wasted no time throwing out the socialist leaders who frustrated them at home, only to replace them with mildly Bushist characters of their own. And Europeans appeared addicted to Americanism, even when they argued with us. McDonald’s was packed in Paris.

The Americans I came across in Europe in 2005 (and later in 2007, when I returned) were the only people on the continent who were consumed in anti-Bush hatred. My wife and I met scores of them: lost, self-hating Americans who often pretended to be Canadian. A few had been so angry about Bush's re-election that they moved to Europe out of spite. How long they planned to stay in Europe, struggling against their own Americanism and trying to fit in with a continent that I doubt wanted them there, I do not know. After listening to them whine about Bush for a few minutes, I invariably chastised them for their own treason, and busied myself with more pleasurable chats with the Europeans themselves.

Halfway through the decade, I found myself transformed by seeing Europe for the first time. I returned to American shores knowing, beyond any doubt, that I was American, I could be nothing else, and whatever Bush represented, it was an indelible part of me too, which I ought to make peace with. I started wanting us to win in Iraq. I grew tired of American leftism. And there begins the second half of the decade -- my journey back to the Right, where I'd begun and where I'd always belonged.
I taught in New Jersey until 2005, when I moved my wife back to Buffalo so she could finish her PhD. It was easier being closer to the library. My new job was at a small Jesuit college down the street from where I'd grown up. The first week that I taught there, two things happened. My wife and I conceived our child, and Hurricane Katrina struck. What a strange convergence of events!

Hurricane Katrina was a turning point for me, because it was the aftermath of that storm that finally made me realize that the Left's hatred of Bush had exceeded all bounds of reason. And shamelessness. It was truly shameless to contort history so that Bush could be blamed for a hurricane. Even more shameless was the overt exploitation of people's suffering to demolish a president who had won a fair election the year before. Once I saw the demonization of Bush for what it was, I finally questioned everything the Left put forward with certainty. Maybe the Iraq War was justified. Maybe Bush was not to blame for failing to stop 9/11. Maybe the economy was not as horrible as it seemed. Maybe nothing was as it seemed, through liberal eyes. And from that point on, I drifted farther to the Right.
Hurricane Katrina liberated me from the addictive hatred of Bush that has led so many other Americans to summarize the 2000s as a horrible decade. Once you're cured of Bush-hating, you can see the years for what they were; they were an aggregate of individuals who had a range of choices to make, and many occasions for gratitude if they could only see beyond the sensationalist headlines.
Quite fittingly, my daughter was born in 2006, just as this liberation from political resentment had taken hold.

In 2006, 2007, and 2008, the defining element of my life was my daughter. I watched politics from a distance. My wife finished her PhD in 2007, at the same time that I finished my MA in Classics and received first place in a screenplay competition. With every day my daughter grew and developed her own delightful personality. And at so many points, I found myself walking with my daughter and thinking to myself, "I am so glad my child is American." Half the things that she can choose to be, if only she is willing to work as hard as her parents have, would be unavailable to her in other countries.

So then came 2008 -- a year of tremendous changes. My wife and I moved to Los Angeles, I gave up my side dreams of becoming a novelist, I converted to the Southern Baptist faith, and I signed up for the Army. After ten years of proving that I was cancer-free, and after losing 70 pounds (dropping from 250 to 180), I at last passed the physical at MEPS and became a reservist, soon destined for the battle roster and Obama's Afghanistan surge. I had heard that when someone moves to California, the purpose is to forget the earlier life and become someone new. So it was for me.

As 2009 draws to a close, I can't help but notice the dreariness with which this decade transition is being marked, compared to 1989 and 1999. But I have to differ from everyone's pessimism. The mere fact that I can remember the Bush Era and bring the personal milestones and fulfillments to the forefront testifies to the complexity of the decade that just past. One thing about the 2000s was that the lack of unifying cultural phenomena (we had no Beatles or Gone with the Wind) was balanced by the wealth of opportunities for individuals to make good on the nation's opportunities on a local scale. It was a decade of personal fulfillment and chosen subcultures. It was greater than its politics. And its politics were not all bad. Ten years ago, I was in an English doctoral program because I had had cancer and couldn't get into the Army. Look at me now -- my cancer is gone, my wife and I are PhDs, I have a beautiful daughter, I have taught two thousand students, and I will have the honor of serving in uniform in Afghanistan. The decade to come will be complex too, and in 2019, no single narrative will summarize what awaits us now. The only thing I know I will say ten years from now is:

“Right here, right now, there's no other place I'd rather be.”

God bless America.

MY GRADING RUBRIC

EXAM QUESTIONS FOR ENGLISH 495 (EPIC)

1. THE JOURNEY FOR VIRGIL IS A POLITICAL ONE. IT IS BASED ON IMPERIALISM AND EMPIRE BUILDING. ON THE OTHER HAND, MELVILLE IS MOVING AWAY FROM EMPIRE IN MOBY DICK, ONE COULD ARGUE, BY GOING BACK INTO THE "WILD" NATURAL WORLD TO ACCOMPLISH HIS JOURNEY. WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS OF EACH JOURNEY? WHICH OF THESE TWO WRITERS SEEMS MORE ABLE TO CRITIQUE HIS/HER OWN SOCIETY? WHICH WOULD YOU CHARACTERIZE AS MORE PATRIOTIC?

2. IS THE CHARACTER AHAB IN HERMAN MELVILLE'S MOBY DICK THE METAPHOR FOR AUTHORSHIP, OR IS THE WHALE ITSELF THE METAPHOR FOR ART? ONE COULD ARGUE THAT AHAD IS THE AUTHOR, HUNTING THE WHALE THE WAY AN AUTHOR SEARCHES OBSESSIVELY FOR THE SUBLIME MOMENT OF CREATING HIS IDEAL TEXT. ANOTHER INTERPRETATION IS THAT MOBY DICK IS THE POTENTIAL OF AUTHORSHIP -- SOMETHING AT ONCE BEAUTIFUL BUT TERRIBLE -- BEING HUNTED BY THE DESTRUCTIVE, CENSOR-LIKE FORCE OF AHAB'S TYRANNICAL NATURE.

3. IS DANTE TRYING TO CREATE A SELF-POLICING GUIDE FOR CATHOLICS TO FOLLOW IN ORDER TO FIND PARADISE OR IS HE TRYING TO TEVEAL THE DOUBLE STANDARDS OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH BY PLACING CLERGY IN THE DEEPER CIRCLES OF HELL? IS DANTE TRYING TO REINFORCE THE RULES AND CODES OF RELIGION OR IS HE DRIVING HOME THE IMPORTANCE OF THOSE RULES BY PUNISHING THOSE WHO FAIL TO FOLLOW THEM?

4. IT IS WELL KNOWN THAT VIRGIL ADAPTED HOMERIC EPIC WHEN COMPOSING THE AENEID. WHICH OF THE TWO AUTHORS, HOMER OR VIRGIL, COULD BE CHARACTERIZED AS MORE POSITIVE ABOUT THE NOTION OF CONQUEST AND NATIONAL GREATNESS?

5. DANTE HAS A SPECIFIC SYSTEM FOR UNDERSTANDING MOPRALITY AS IS EXEMPLIFIED BY HIS STRATIFICATION OF PUNISHMENTS AND DIFFERENT LEVELS OF SIN. COMPARE DANTE'S VISION OF MORALITY WITH THAT OF MELVILLE'S IN MOBY DICK, FOCUSING ON THE EFFECT QUEEQUEG HAS ON THE ISHMAEL AND THE CREW OF THE PEQUOD. BE MINDFUL OF THE FACT THAT QUEEQUEG WAS PAGAN.

6. "YOUR ARTS ARE TO BE THESE:

TO PACIFY, TO IMPOSE THE RULE OF LAW,

TO SPARE THE CONQUERED,

TO BATTLE DOWN THE PROUD."

IN THE AENEID, VIRGIL WROTE THESE LINES TO INSTRUCT HIS ROMAN READERS ON THEIR TRUE CALLING -- OR AT LEAST THE TEXT IMPLIES AS MUCH, SINCE ANCHISES SAYS THE LINES WHILE HE IS SHOWING AENEAS ALL THE SOULS THAT WILL BE REINCARNATED AS ROMANS. DO THE ACTIONS OF AENEAS TOWARD DIDO CONTRADICT OR SUPPORT THIS VISION OF ROMAN IDENTITY AND PURPOSE?

7. ALTHOUGH AUGUSTUS WANTED VIRGIL TO WRITE AN EPIC IN ORDER TO ELEVATE THE ROMAN CULTURE THERE ARE POINTS IN THE AENEID THAT SEEM TO UNDERMINE ROMAN EXCEPTIONALISM. HOW DOES VIRGIL PRESENT LEADERSHIP AND HOW DOES LOVE INTERFERE WITH HIS LEADERSHIP SKILLS? IN WHAT WAYS DOES VIRGIL ADDRESS AENEAS' STRUGGLES TO BALANCE POLITICAL OBLIGATION AND ROMANTIC DESIRE?

8. DISCUSS BOCCACCIO AND DANTE AND THEIR DIFFERING REACTIONS AND/OR ATTITUDES ABOUT THE SINS OF LUST, ADULTERY, AND DECEPTION. HOW DO THE DIFFERENCES REFLECT THE DISTINCT READERSHIPS AND STANDING OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN THE LATE MEDIEVAL PERIOD VERSUS THE EARLY RENAISSANCE?

9. DANTE ATTACKS PEOPLE FROM ALL WALKS OF LIFE. HE EVEN PLACES VARIOUS POPES IN HIS VERSION OF HELL. WHY IS IT THAT DANTE HAS VERY LITTLE NEGATIVE TO SAY ABOUT VIRGIL THOUGH? WHAT IS IT ABOUT VIRGIL'S WORKS AND LIFE THAT CAUSED DANTE TO HONOR HIM SO SINGULARLY IN THE DIVINE COMEDY? WHAT IS THE SIGNIFICANCE OF DANTE ALLOWING VIRGIL TO COMMUNE WITH OTHERS THAT HAVE REACHED PARADISE, SUCH AS BEATRICE, AND YET KEEPING VIRIGL IN LIMBO?

10. BOTH POPE'S DUNCIAD AND VIRGIL'S AENEID ARE CONSIDERED ADAPTATIONS. THEY DIFFER, HOWEVER, IN THAT POPE'S WORK IS MORE EXPLICITLY A SATIRE. DISCUSS THE NARRATIVE VOICE IN EACH WORK TO EXPLAIN THE EFFECTS OF "SATIRE" VS. "COMEDY."

11.

EXAM QUESTIONS FOR ENGLISH 487 (LATINO LIT)

1.COMIC RELIEF--TO BE SEEN ON EXAM COPY

2. Whitman begins Song of Myself with the following sentence: "I celebrate myself--and what I assume you shall assume--For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you." Later he states, "Whoever degrades another degrades me. And whatever is done or said returns at last to me, and whatever I do and say I also return". Since Whitman identifies with all other people, good or bad, what would he predict regarding the effects on society of violence taking place either between individuals or groups. Taking into account tha tthere area several descriptions of war, massacre, and the hunting of slaves, in which Whitman praises the bravery and endurance of the victims and claims he ahs experienced his events due to his intrinsic connection to all opf humanuity. In this bigger picture, does this opportunity for the higher nature of the victims to be expressed excuse or balance out the violence being done to them? Does W seem to blatantly abhor violence or does he accept it as an inevitable part of human nature? Mention some examples from the poetry.

3. What groups of people does Marti want to exclude from his vision of a collective America? Why does he want to get rid of them and how does he want to? Please offer an opinion as to whether gender is merely one manifestation of many possible grounds for identity, or whether in fact all of Marti's classifications of "us" and "them" refer in some ways to a basic gender binary. Address Marti's specific preoccupation with the proper gender identity of men.

4. Gualinto experiences violence in his childhood and adolescence. But unlike his uncle, he experiences this violence at the hands of other Mexicans. How do you suppose this influences him in his decision to join the US Army Intelligence corps and do you think it would be different if he knew he killed his father? Discuss the role of secrecy, speculation, and distrust in the way life experiences may have led Gualinto to his final choice,.

5. Dario has been credited as the father of Latin American Modernism. But it is important to point out that Modernism differs in Spanish and in English. Dario himself seems to take some pleasure in weaving his own self-referential theory of literary influence when he wrotes an essay, a putative homage, to Jose Marti. Which of these two writers do you believe best embodies Modernism in the Spanish sense? Which best embodies Modernism in the English sense?

6. In life, people have often wondered whether bourgeois life is heroic or simply boring. Using Lispector, form an answer to this question: Is bourgeois life heroic boredom or domestic torture? How might the answer to this question relate to the social conditions in postwar Brazil? You may refer to "Love" -- specifically, the seemingly torturous response of the narrator to the blind man -- and one other story.

7. Violence in Borges' Self and the Other is not necessarily a physical act alone. It is rather, a form of psychological tribulation stemming from the loss of selfhood and the realization that identity is elusive or at least changeable over time. Death plays a particularly important role in the poetry because of the fact that the forward march of time brings people inevitably to the finality of death and the loss of the body. Is it fair to argue that time itself is violent in this collection of poems? To answer your question, please refer to "Camden 1892," "Matthew 25" and one other poem.

8. GG Marquez, best known for magical realism, accedes to the idea that "magical realism is appropriate to a culture where technology hasn't yet dominated the life of a man and where mankind still has the capacity to grant the unknowable as real." How does Marqez invoke magical realism in Innocent Erendida and does the story expemplify the common themes of the genre such as terror, social disparities and political injustice? Is magical realism a cure or a cause for those things?

9. How is the penis a tool of aggresive antagonism or violence in Before Night Falls? Please pay special attention to the difference between phallus and penis.

10. In "Pentachrome" (poem number 9), what does Julia de Burgos mean when she says "and rape Julia de Burgos"? Who is she referring to, and what are the social implications of this statement when considering Puerto Rico's political history?

11. Based on her experiences as a Hispanic/Lesbian writer Anzaldua makes several assumptions about oppressed writers. Provide an example of two of her assumptions. Is it fair to accuse her of being essentialist for accepting these assumptions?

12. Neruda describes lovemaking as strenuous work for men. How does he portray this, and what is it about this that is so simultaneously appealing/apalling to the reader?

ENGLISH 495 -- EPIC -- FINAL EXAM QUESTIONS

1. "The journey" for Virgil is political, and based on imperialism and empire building. Melville is moving away from empire building and going back to the wilderness to accomplish his journey. What are the implications of the difference between the two of them? How do the things that they want to impart to the reader differ?