Part I: Please choose TWO of the following critical statements. For each statement, write a cogent short essay in which you assess its implications for literary and critical studies. (60%)

Statement 1:
“Madness and Civilization (1961) is a study of the prehistory and early history of psychiatry. The model of structuralist ethnology is noticeable in the means of analyzing discourse and in the methodical distantiation from one's own culture. The subtitle already lays claim to a critique of reason: The History of Madness in the Age of Reason. Foucault wants to show how the phenomenon of madness has been constituted as a mental illness since the end of the eighteenth century. With this goal in mind, he reconstructs the history of the rise of the discourse in which psychiatrists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries talk about madness. What makes his book more than a wide-range study of cultural history by a historian of science is a philosophical interest in madness as a phenomenon complementary to reason. A reason that has become monological holds madness at arm's length from itself so as safely to gain mastery of it as an object cleansed of rational subjectivity."

Statement 2:
"At the forefront of such cultural revolution stand those whom Gramci terms the 'organic' intellectuals: those writers, political leaders and theoreticians who are themselves products of the rising social class rather than remnants of the old. Brought to unwonted prominence by the upheavals of history, tied to the progressive class by personal as well as ideological bonds, this 'organic' intelligentsia will do more than reflect the interests of those for whom it speaks: it will prove an active force in the very framing of such interests, shaping them into a 'world view' by deep differences of style, origin and status, the organic intellectuals become a focus in which the new class may find its fragmentary impulses united, a medium in which it achieves self-consciousness."

Statement 3:
"There are countless forms of narrative in the world. First of all, there is a prodigious variety of genres, each of which branches out into a variety of media, as if all substances could be relied upon to accommodate man's stories. Among the vehicles of narrative are articulated language, whether oral or written, pictures, still or moving, gestures, and an ordered mixture of all those substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fables, tales, short stories, epics, history, tragedy, drame [suspense drama], comedy, pantomime, paintings (in Santa Ursula by Carpaccio, for instance), stained-glass windows, movies, local news, conversation. Moreover, in this infinite variety of forms, it is present at all times, in all places, in all societies; indeed narrative starts with the very history of mankind; there is not, there has never been anywhere, any people without narrative; all classes, all human groups, have their stories, and very often those stories are enjoyed by men of different and even opposite cultural backgrounds: narrative remains largely unconcerned with good or bad literature. Like life itself, it is there, international, transhistorical, transcultural."

Part II: The following passages are taken out of the beginning of Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925). It is told by Nick Carraway, who serves as the narrator in the story about Gatsby, our protagonist. Please read through these passages and tell us how he characterizes himself according to his own reflections. Discuss also how this characterization might help us read the rest of the story and whether or not he has successfully built up his credential as the main narrator of the story. (40%)

Passage 1:
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had."
He didn't say any more but we've always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence I'm inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon—for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.

Passage 2:
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on.