MMW 15 Chang Track Spring 2012 First Midterm Review Guide ...

MMW 15
Chang Track Spring 2012
First Midterm Review Guide
(This is meant to be a review guide, not the exam itself. Ultimately, you are accountable for all the
key materials in the readings and lectures for weeks 1-3.)
Exam will be designed for 50 minutes. Please remember to bring a blue-book for exchange
Part I: Objective Section
You need to be familiar with the historical context and significance of the following names and terms from
your readings and lectures. Be sure you are able to address the appropriate “who?” “what?” “where?” and
“when?’, and most importantly, “why?” questions associated with each one. Multiple Choice and
Matching Terms questions will be drawn from this guide.
Introduction
What Liberalism stood for
Politically
Economically
Socially
The Shock of W.W.I
Balkan nationalism
Austro-Hungarian Empire
Archduke Ferdinand
Triple Entente
Dual Alliance
Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg
Role of the free press
War as catharsis
Rupert Brooke
Wilfred Owen
War as “zero-sum game” (Hobsbawn)
Schlieffen Plan
Post-war psychological impact
A Liberal Peace?
Woodrow Wilson
The “Big Four”
Paris Peace Treaties
“Carthaginian Peace” (Keynes)
German demilitarization
War reparations
Germany’s economic collapse
Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” and “Four Points”
U.S. reasons for entering war
Buffer states against Communism
Limits of self-determination
League of Nations
“Mandate system”
Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia
Brest-Litovsk Treaty
Key Terms and Names
The Human Instinct for War
Friedrich Nietzsche
The Will to Power
Preponderance of the “herd instinct”
“Great libels on life”
“Apollonian” vs. “Dionysian” impulse
Albert Einstein’s solution to war
Sigmund Freud
The Oedipal Complex
The competitive role of libido
Eros and Death instincts
Compass of Motives
Dose of the “cultural process”
Modernity and the Divided Self
Erich Fromm
Frankfurt School
Sources of alienation in capitalism
Palliative role of material consumption
The passive consumption of leisure
“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
“The Personality Package”
Commodification of love
The “power-team marriage
Prufrock’s sense of isolation
Cultural impotence
Revolts in Modern Art
Time-space compression in modern industry
Crisis of representation
Cubism
Disruption of rational space and linear time
Picasso “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” 1907
Duchamp “Nude Descending a Staircase” 1912
Futurism
Filippo Marinetti
Balla “Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash” 1912
Boccioni “The Anatomy of a Footballer” 1912

War as “Hygiene of civilization”
Socio-political agenda of Futurism
Dadaism
Duchamp “L.H.O.O.Q.” 1919
Duchamp “The Fountain” 1917
Tristan Tzara
Iconoclastic irreverence
Readymades
Surrealism
André Breton
Psychoanalysis and dreams
Dali “Metamorphosis of Narcissus” 1937
Magritte “The Human Condition I” 1934
Revolutions in China
1919 May Fourth Movement
Call for social reforms
1911 Founding of the Chinese republic
Dr. Sun Yat-sen
Three Principles of the People
Traditional sources of ideology
The Five-Power Constitution
Chen Duxiu’s New Youth
Mao Zedong
Class struggle
Role of the petty bourgeois
Peasant associations
India’s Anti-Colonial Struggle
Massacre at Amritsar, India
Rowlatt Bills
Gandhi
The principle of Ahimsa
Economic policy of the British Raj
Svadeshi or Home-spun Movement
Satyagraha—“Truth Force”
Ahmedabad Strike
Kheda Satyagraha
Principles of non-violent civil disobedience
“Himalayan Miscalculation”
Obedience of conscience vs. convenience
Decolonization or Neocolonialism
Malnutrition
Illiteracy
Discrimination towards former “untouchables”
“No-nonsense South Korea model”
Frantz Fanon
Wretched of the Earth
Views on decolonization
Ho Chi Minh
French Indochine
Algeria
Kwame Nkrumah
Neo-colonialism vs. imperialism
Financial leverage
Purpose of military aid
First vs. Third world disparity
Part Two: Passage Identifications
Three passages from the following selection will be included on the midterm. You will choose two to
write on. In your response, you must identify the historical and political context in which each passage
occurs (e.g. speaker, subject, occasion, purpose, general time period). More importantly, you need to
explain the significance of the passage to key themes we have discussed so far (i.e. Aspirations and
challenges to liberal ideals; crisis of modernity). Evidence of independent insight on the readings is
strongly recommended. Each response should be a full paragraph in length, but no longer than a page.
Text references will not be provided on the actual midterm.
1) “Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow man and from nature. He has been
transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him
the maximum profit obtainable under existing marketing conditions. Human relations are
essentially those of alienated automatons, each basing his security on staying close to the herd, and
not being different in thought, feeling or action. While everybody tries to be as close as possible
to the rest, everybody remains utterly alone, pervaded by the deep sense of insecurity, anxiety and
guilt which always results when human separateness cannot be overcome.” (Erich Fromm “Love
and Its Disintegration”)
2) “Secondly, a revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing
embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous,
restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one
class overthrows another.” (Mao Zedong “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in
Hunan, March 1927”)
3) “The settlement of every question, whether of territory, of sovereignty, of economic arrangement,
or of political relationship upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people
immediately concerned, and not upon the basis of the material interest or advantage of any other

nation or people which may desire a different settlement for the sake of its own exterior influence
or mastery.” (Woodrow Wilson “Fourteen Points” and “Four Points”)
4) “We have had enough of the intelligent movements that have stretched beyond measure our
credulity of the benefits of science. What we want now is spontaneity. Not because it is better or
more beautiful than anything else. But because everything that issues freely from ourselves,
without the intervention of speculative ideas, represents us. We must intensify this quality of life
that readily spends itself in every quarter. Art is not the most precious manifestation of life. Art
has not the celestial and universal value that people like to attribute it. Life is more interesting.”
(Tristan Tsara “Dadaism”)
5) “And yet if they resorted to incivility it would spoil their Satyagraha, like a drop of arsenic in
milk. I realized later that they had less fully learnt the lesson of civility than I had expected.
Experience has taught me that civility is the most difficult part of Satyagraha. Civility does not
here mean the mere outward gentleness of speech cultivated for the occasion, but an inborn
gentleness and desire to do the opponent good. These should show themselves in every act of the
Satyagrahi.” (Mohandas Gandhi “An Autobiography”)
6) “It permits endemic malnutrition and hunger that is not acute, so long as these happen quietly; it
does not permit a famine both because it would be too acute and because it cannot happen
quietly…The elections, the newspapers, and the political liberties work powerfully against
dramatic deprivations and new sufferings, but easily allow the quiet continuation of an astonishing
set of persistent injustices.” (Amartya Sen “How is India Doing?”)
Please bring a bluebook for exchange