Dear Students,
Again, my sincerest apologies for offering Classics and Contemporary American Culture this semester. When I pitched this class to the English department chair, I believed Harris would win and we’d spend the semester making interesting literary connections to her sober policy choices. I didn’t foresee that the canon itself would leer at our nation’s pathetic descent into discount fascism.
God knows how many more years of this nightmare we’ll have to endure, but this class is mercifully at an end. Here are the answers to the final exam. Feel free to grade yourselves, and then take full advantage of the open bar at my desk during final office hours this week.
1. Compare the characters at the end of Our Town to ourselves on January 19, 2025. Is Emily right when she says that the living didn’t know how good they had it?
No.
2. Where is Dorian Gray’s portrait, now that it has left the attic?
Giving a presser on the new, Qatari-Royal-Family-gifted Air Force One.
3. Who in Trump’s Cabinet best represents the detestable Summoner from The Canterbury Tales?
Trick question: it’s all of them. Corrupt from skin to soul, they’re dimwitted, easily bribed, and they repeat incomprehensible drivel ad nauseam.
4. Why are we living in Franz Kafka’s The Trial?
Pennsylvania, the Electoral College, and Joe Biden’s refusal to step down earlier.
5. Who’s the equivalent of Jane Eyre’s madwoman in the attic?
Melania.
6. Who’s the equivalent of Jane Eyre?
Ivanka.
7. Which of Shakespeare’s tragedies most clearly evokes our current situation?
All of them, performed simultaneously in the round by amateur actors with fake British accents who’ve forgotten one-third of their lines. Stage effects include fog machines, strobe lights, and anything else that might cause seizures or heart attacks. Also, the exits are locked.
8. Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” accurately describes which part of our government?
ICE, obviously
9. In the Iliad, Troy is the setting for an endless war with unconscionable casualties. What modern countries are most similar to Troy?
Ukraine, Palestine, and we’ll see about Greenland.
10. Of the books we read this semester, which are most likely to be incinerated in the White House’s festive book-burning celebrations?
Beloved, The Satanic Verses, and the Bible, which has been very mean to him, very unfair, and frankly, no one’s seen anything like it.
11. Who is The Monster at the End of This Book?
It certainly isn’t Grover. Maybe it’s the absence of Elmo under the tree in December? Oh no, fuck—it’s Stephen Miller.
12. Since they can’t have dolls, what classic books should you give children to prepare them for their new reality?
The Hunger Games, Bridge to Terabithia, or any of the Little House books, where a beloved character dies of something that’s easily preventable with modern medicine.
13. Speaking of children, what are women no longer allowed to have?
A room of their own.
14. And what else?
The Vagina Monologues. The monologues will continue, but all vagina-related content will be performed by penises.
15. Which title least represents the congressional response to constitutional overreach?
The Sound and the Fury.
16. Which novel was so painfully on the nose about a crazed leader pursuing doomed, maniacal revenge that it led to three separate mental breakdowns during group discussion?
Moby-Dick.
17. What book should we blame for the persistent delusion that the deserving poor will be lifted out of poverty by the benevolent rich?
Ragged Dick.
18. What’s a great new nickname for the president?
“Ragged Dick.”