This is the exam I gave for English 1110 last winter. Our exam on the 6th will have the same format and directions. In fact, the directions are identical. But there will be a different essay by a different author in SECTION A (obviously), and there will be three different quotations to choose from in SECTION B (obviously). Good luck.
MEMORIAL UNIVERSITY OF NEWFOUNDLAND
(St. John’s,
Newfoundland)
ENGLISH 1110 –
Sections 09 and 10
Final
Examination Time:
2 ½ Hours
Winter
2012 Instructor:
James Langer
DIRECTIONS:
Students are required to answer TWO
questions, ONE from Section A and ONE from Section B. Responses must be
in essay form. Each essay is valued at 10% of the total mark and will be graded
on content, organization, style, and mechanics.
Section A
Read
the following essay carefully, and write a critical analysis by identifying the
author’s argument and strategies.
Co-opting Dissent
Naomi Klein
When
I was seventeen, I worked after school at an Esprit clothing store in Montreal.
It was a pleasant job, mostly folding cotton garments into little squares so sharp
that their corners could take your eye out. But for some reason, corporate
headquarters didn’t consider our T-shirt origami to be sufficiently profitable.
One day, our calmworld was turned upside down by a regional supervisor who
swooped in to indoctrinate us in the culture of the Esprit brand – and increase
our productivity in the process. “Esprit,” she told us, “is like a good
friend.”
I
was sceptical, and let it be known. Scepticism, I quickly learned, is not
considered an asset in the low-wage service sector. Two weeks later, the
supervisor fired me for being in possession of that most loathed workplace
character trait: “bad attitude.” I guess that was one of my first lessons in
why multinational corporations are not “like a good friend,” since good
friends, while they may sometimes do horrible and hurtful things, rarely fire
you.
So I was interested when, earlier
this month, the TBWA/Chiat/Day advertising agency rolled out the new “brand
identity” for Shoppers Drug Mart. (Rebranding launches are, in corporate terms,
like being born again.) It turns out that the chain is no longer Everything You
Want in a Drugstore – i.e., a place where you can buy things you need; it too
is now a “caring friend,” one that takes form as a chain of eight hundred drugstores
with a $22 million ad budget burning a hole in its pocket.
Shoppers’
new slogan is Take Care of Yourself, selected, according to campaign creator
Pat Pirisi, because it echoes “what a caring friend would say.” Get ready for
it to be said thousands of times a day by young cashiers as they hand you
plastic bags filled with razors, dental floss, and diet pills. “We believe this
is a position Shoppers can own,” Pirisi says.
Asking
clerks to adopt this particular phrase as their mantra seems a bit heartless in
this age of casual, insecure, underpaid McLabour. Service-sector workers are so
often told to take care of themselves – since no one, least of all their
mega-employers, is going to take care of them.
Yet
it’s one of the ironies of our branded age that as corporations become more
remote by cutting lasting ties with us as their employees, they are
increasingly sidling up to us as consumers, whispering sweet nothings in our
ear about friendship and community. It’s not just Shoppers: Wal-Mart ads tell stories
about clerks who, in a pinch, lend customers their own wedding gowns, and
Saturn ads are populated by car dealers who offer counselling when customers
lose their jobs. You see, according to a new marketing book, Values Added, modern marketers have to “make
your brand a cause and your cause a brand.”
Maybe
I still have a bad attitude, but this collective corporate hug feels about as
empty today as it did when I was an about-to-be-unemployed sweater folder.
Particularly when you stop to consider the cause of all
this mass-produced warmth.
Explaining
Shoppers’ new brand identity to The
Financial Times, Pirisi said, “In an age when people are becoming more
distrustful of corporations – the World Trade Organization protests will attest
to that – and at a time when the health care system isn’t what it used to be,
we realized we had to send consumers a message about partnership.”
Ever
since large corporations such as Nike, Shell and Monsanto began facing
increased scrutiny from civil society – mostly for putting short-term profits
far ahead of environmental responsibility and job security – an industry has
ballooned to help these companies respond. It seems clear, however, that many
in the corporate world remain utterly convinced that all they have is a “messaging
problem,” one that can be neatly solved by settling on the right, socially
minded brand identity.
It
turns out that’s the last thing they need. British Petroleum found this out the
hard way when it was forced to distance itself from its own outrageous
rebranding campaign, Beyond Petroleum. Understandably, many consumers
interpreted the slogan to mean the company was moving away from fossil fuels in
response to climate change. Human rights and environmental activists, after
seeing no evidence that BP was actually changing its policies, brought up
embarrassing details at the company’s annual meeting about BP’s participation
in a controversial new pipeline through sensitive areas of Tibet, as well as
its decision to drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. With the new
slogan being parodied on the Net as Beyond Preposterous, BP officials moved to
abandon the Beyond Petroleum brand, though they so far have stuck with the new
green flower logo.
As
evidence of the state of corporate confusion, I frequently find myself asked to
give presentations to individual corporations. Fearing that my words will end
up in some gooey ad campaign, I always refuse. But I can offer this advice
without much reservation: nothing will change until corporations realize that they
don’t have a communications problem. They have a reality problem.
Klein, Naomi. “Co-Opting Dissent.”Reader’s Choice: Essays for Thinking,
Reading, and Writing. 7th Edition. Eds. Kim Flachmann,
Michael
Flachmann, Alexandra MacLennan, Jamie Zeppa. Toronto: Pearson, 2011. Print.
SECTION B
Write
an essay in response to ONE of the following quotations. Feel free to agree or
disagree, but aim to focus your topic, express your perspective clearly, and
construct a well reasoned argument with supporting details.
1.
“Technology
is the knack of so arranging the world that we do not experience it.”
– Max Frisch
2.
“A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession
about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.”
– Naomi Wolf
3.
“It isn't the mountains ahead
to climb that wear you out; it's the pebble in your shoe.”
– Muhammad
Ali
