Dr. Stapleton    ENG L309   Spenser Exam   28 November 2016

You should approach your assignment in the same way that I suggested you interpret your midterm.  Examine The Faerie Queene 12.1-14 (pp. 920-22 in your book) and relate details from the stanzas to the rest of the text in a meaningful way. 

Frequently, those who study FQ tend not to read the last canto very carefully and tend to discount its effects and poetics.  Your job is to explain why this is a mistake, using those fourteen stanzas as evidence. You can talk about whatever you like: lines that seem to reticulate to other parts of the poem or that “say” the text as a whole; people who don’t seem important; events that appear to be gratuitous; how the sounds and metrics accentuate or enhance Spenser’s narrative via mimesis (i.e., Aristotle’s word and concept μίμηση).

Your Spenser exam is due by 9 a.m. on Monday 12 December. I do not return finals or write comments on them.

Carpaccio, St. George and the Dragon (1502), Scuola di San Giorgio, Venice