Finals:

nakedpersons:

1.

”…and the Doctor said, ‘Sir, perhaps your finger is broken.’”

Explain, with reference to Neil Gaiman’s first divorce, the relevance of the quote above to your childhood, when, at Grandfather’s funeral—

(10 marks)

2.

Should a poet’s work be enjambed or read in sequence, the way God intended? Examinees are encouraged to employ at least two dactylic devices and one Oxford comma in their answer.

(5 marks)

3. 

You snuck out to the garden as the pastor was praying and the heads were bowed, and you poured thinner down the open-mouthed funnel of the anthill that had been growing over the past three months, by the daffodils, under the rambutans—

(10 marks)

4.

They saw through you the other night, as you thought nobody was looking.

Give up. it’s over.

(5 marks)

5. 

Subsequently, as you lit a match to watch the sandgrains spill from heat into glass, you cried as the fumes pierced your nostrils and the tiny black shapes came rushing out from their minuscule Pompeii, their legs scrabbling, exoskeletons illuminated briefly by flashes and sparks, looking for the most part like manic constellations fleeing the night sky—

(10 marks)

6.

Love is a maimed and blinded rose. Discuss this statement, citing examples from the personal life of Franz Kafka to support your conclusion. 

(5 marks)

7.

“The fundamental transience of life might or might not render all human relationships absurdist and meaningless, with no more significance or cosmic importance than the exchanging of a water molecule for a speck of calcium carbonate, as a wave, lappingly, during contact between the shore and the sea, on a warm springtime afternoon populated by British tourists, once, on a Copenhagen coast, in Denmark, March 29th, 2014, maybe.”

Do you agree?

(20 marks)

8.

They were fossilizing even before death, the poor miserable souls, entombed into sarcophagi of clean hard cruelty, frozen into exhaustion and asphyxiation, like the soul of a twice-divorced man settling for good into the numbness of another unhappy marriage because one more time is one more failure he cannot stand to keep away from blades, do you understand please do you understand—

(10 marks)

9.

Is morality a prerequisite for art? Are you?

(5 marks)

10.

If, given that a dead quiet Saturday morning at 3.14 A.M finds you downing your fourth shot of vodka and reaching for your wife’s cellphone as she sleeps in the guest room:

i) explain why the Second Defenestration of Prague was inferior to its precedent, making sure to provide sufficient illustration of the comedic mechanics involved in the nightmare you had two hours ago every night (5 marks),

ii) calculate the 369th digit of pi as a fractal proxy for the infinite worlds contained within each human being, determining, as you do so, the amount of insignificance your stillborn daughter will never contribute to the nothingness of the world (5 marks),

iii) using the answers arrived upon in i and ii, derive the value of y (10 marks).

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BONUS QUESTIONS:

Don’t you think you should’ve learnt by now? (25 marks)

Draw the shape of your sadness. (25 marks)

If God exists, why were we never warned? (25 marks)

Please? (25 marks)


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All workings must be demonstrated. All questions must be answered. Illegibility will be penalized.