Juni 1998 (årspensum 1998)

1. Analyse the sequence of William Shakespeare's Sonnets (127, 128, 129, 130, 138, 144, 147) and discuss gender positionings in the texts. Your analysis must give attention to the use of colour imagery, religious imagery and imagery of violence and disease. (You may choose to concentrate your analysis on some of the seven sonnets and refer more briefly to the rest.)

2. Outline and discuss images of women in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "The Blessed Damozel" and Ecce Ancilla Domini! (The Annunciation).

3. Analyse 'madness' in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper".

4. Discuss the role of 'the Irish question' and the demand of the past/the dead in James Joyce's "The Dead".

5. Outline and discuss attitudes to tradition in T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and Virginia Woolf's "Modern Fiction".

6. Discuss representations of generational belonging, race, and sanity/insanity in Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and/or Norman Mailer's "The White Negro". Your analysis must account for the connections established between these themes in the text(s).

Juni 1999 (årspensum 1999)

1. Victorians and Romantics: Outline and discuss the reception of Wordsworth by John Stuart Mill ("What is Poetry", Autobiography) and Matthew Arnold ("Wordsworth").

2. Analyse and discuss images of women in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem "The Blessed Damozel" and his painting Ecce Ancilla Domini! (The Annunciation).

3. Analyse aspects of sensing (particularly seeing) and telling in Emily Dickinson's poems Nos. 311, 328, 348 and 381. Your analysis may be related to a discussion of what constitutes a secret.

4. How may T.S.Eliot's "The Waste Land" be described as one of the central texts of modernism? Your essay may include a discussion of the concept of the city as it appears in the poem.

5. In "Freud's Masterplot" Peter Brooks claims that

All narrative may be in essence obituary in that [...] the retrospective knowledge that it seeks, the knowledge that comes after, stands on the far side of the end, in human terms on the far side of death. [Brooks 1984:95]

Discuss this claim with special reference to Woolf's Mrs Dalloway.

6. Relate the first chapter, "The Stowaway", in Julian Barnes' A History of the World in 10½ Chapters to the concept of the death of the grand narratives.

Juni 2000 (årspensum 2000)

1. Analyse and discuss differences and similarities of topography in Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Adonais" and Wystan Hugh Auden, "In Memory of William Butler Yeats".

2. Discuss covering, uncovering and recovering as themes and narrative techniques in Edgar Allan Poe, "The Purloined Letter".

3. Analyse and compare the organisation and function of space in George Bernard Shaw, Mrs Warren's Profession and Samuel Beckett, Happy Days.

4. Discuss aspects of story-telling in Zora Neal Hurston, The Eatonville Anthology. Your essay may include a characterization of the story-teller, an analysis of the use of hyperbole and litotes, the use of closure and non-closure, as well as a discussion of the use of colloquial, Black American speech.

5. Analyse and compare the function of the Tereus-Procne-Philomela myth in T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land" and Emma Tennant, "Philomela".

6. Discuss the concept of metafiction and relate it to the extract from Peter Ackroyd, Dickens.

Juni 2001 (årspensum 2001)

1. Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress". Analyse the intertwined representations of "world" and "time" in this poem and discuss whether these can fruitfully be seen as an expression of 'Orientalism', as defined by Edward Said.

2. Analyse and discuss conceptions of the role of poetry and the poet in (the extracts from) William Wordsworth's "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads, Thomas Love Peacock's The Four Ages of Poetry, and Percy Bysshe Shelley's A Defence of Poetry.

3. Consider possible allegorical meanings in V.S. Naipaul's story "Man-man". Your essay must pay particular attention to the strategies for construction of self used by the protagonist.

4. Analyse the dramatic representation of the themes of destiny, leadership and honour in Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman.

5. Discuss why confessionality was a central mode of expression for American women poets from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. You may choose to include analyses of some confessional poems from the period.

6. In an interview Craig Raine has pointed out that

[...] I'm not interested in ingratiating myself with the reader as an entirely sensitive, right-minded, liberal poet who could figure in the New Statesman and not shame anybody. I'm not interested in writing poems which end with thumping statements; I'm interested in making objects. I think poems are machines in the sense that Baudelaire called Delacroix's paintings machines; they have to work as artistic objects. (John Haffenden, Viewpoints. London, 1981, p. 185.)

Taking your point of departure in the above quotation, analyse and discuss "The Onion, Memory" and "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home" as machines and objects.

7. Analyse Frank Moorhouse's "Francois and the Fishbone Incident" in terms of genre and periodicity. You may consider whether the text is expressive of a postmodern poetics and if so, how.

Juni 2002 (årspensum 2002)

1. Analyse Washington Irving's "Rip van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", focussing on the themes of rationality vs superstition and on the role of time, change and modernity.

2 Discuss the use of visual descriptions in Wallace Stevens' poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" and William Gibson's short story "Thirteen Views of a Cardboard City", concentrating on the differences and potential use of intertextuality.

3. Analyse John Ashbery's poem "As You Came from the Holy Land" as a textual pilgrimage. Your analysis must include a comparison with Walter Raleigh's "Pilgrim to Pilgrim" and a discussion of this text as Ashbery's intertext.

4. Analyse Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart as a postcolonial writing back to, for instance, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. You may draw on Achebe's essay "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness for illumination of such issues as (anti)racist representation.

5. Analyse the dramatic representation of the themes of pride, dignity, and family values and morals in Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun.

6. Based on an analysis of the painting, discuss to what extent Mark Tansey's "Derrida Queries de Man" illustrates and comments on Conan Doyle's "The Final Problem". You may include a comparison with Sidney Paget's frontispiece illustration to "The Final Problem".

Juni 2003 (årspensum 2003)

1. Analyse and compare the female personae in Emily Brontë's "Remembrance" and "No Coward Soul Is Mine" and Christina Rossetti's "A Birthday".

2. What picture is given of Victorian society in Ford Madox Brown's Work and what conception of the role of art may be deduced from the painting?

3. Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Final Problem": With the author's complicity in Sherlock Holmes' death in mind, describe the relationship between the author and his Holmes- character and also the relationship between the author and his reading public.

4. Discuss how dialogue is used in Edith Wharton's "Souls Belated" and Anita Desai's "Scholar and Gypsy" to convey information to the reader about (the failure of) love and marriage.

5. Consider Wallace Stevens' poem "The Man on the Dump" as a summary of modernist thought regarding such themes as 'waste' and 'truth'.

6. Analyse the dramatic presentation of the human condition in Samuel Beckett's Endgame. Your analysis must include a discussion of the play's dialogue and scenography.