It was horrible. I mean it. A corpus (well, that's the unseen texts given for the written exam) with only one text in it, by Alphonse Daudet, « La légende de l'homme à la cervelle d'or » (The legend of the man with the golden brain) in Lettres de mon moulin (Letters from my windmill), that, by the way, automagically appeared in the French Wikipédia the same day, a few hours later. Objet d'étude (subject revealed on the day out of five possible ones): "convaincre, persuader, délibérer" (literally: "convince, persuade, deliberate") - be careful: these terms are not synonyms, at least our teacher says so, no blasphemy. Everyone was expecting something about the biographic genre (another objet d'étude), but it didn't come out. An obscure question (marked out of four, with twenty total marks), that, according to my examiner for the oral, confused more or less everybody, teachers included: it was about summarising the moral of the text, and linking it to the appropriate genres (I picked the tale and apologue, but the moral was unclear and ranged, depending on the student, from the exploitation of the writer to the condition of workers, I worked around it saying precisely it did have several different meanings and that it was up to the reader to choose...). We had the choice (marked out of sixteen) between an annoying commentaire (comment about one of the texts of the corpus, often about a precise part of it, which usually seems to have been chosen using the papers as the target for a game of darts) about an empty part of an empty text, an evasive dissertation (from a question or a quote, explain a\ why it's true and b\ why it's wrong and c\ what it is actually without contradicting yourself (tricky)) the point of which I totally forgot, and a "freestyle" invention (writing something asked, 80% of the time a letter, 80% of the time something where you argue about something aka. a disguised dissertation) where you had to write a letter arguing about something. I chose the invention. And I got 18/20, and was very happy about it.

The oral. Even more terrifying than the written exam, and even more annoying because out of all the texts you revise (25-30), only one (yes, that's only one ladies and gentlemen) is the good one. I got a poem by Baudelaire, "À une passante" (To a passerby) in "Tableaux parisiens" (Parisian scenes) in Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil). The penultimate text I had studied in the year (you're very happy because you revised anything anyway). Question: the title of the sequence (that the examiner, who was (really) sympathetic and nice, chose thinking it would help me, while it didn't help me much), that is, "En quoi Baudelaire se fait-il le peintre de la modernité dans ce poème ?" (In which ways Baudelaire is playing the role of the painter of modernity in this poem?)

Oh, my... I reused the old trick la forme et le fond, naming part one "The aesthetics of shock" and two "A modern thematic". I filled part one with everything that didn't went in part two. But nobody noticed. At the entretien (discourse : you're being asked tricky questions and you have to answer in a lively manner while carefully preparing your answer, yes there is an opposition in terms here), however, it went bad (thought I then). I hesitated, the examiner went from a text to a completely different other and I didn't follow, she asked me about lectures personnelles (personal reading : what you've read by yourself but which, by a spectacular coincidence, reveals to fit the objects d'étude well) I didn't remember anything about, was strange enough to go on about the text at the written exam, and gave me (without being aware of it) a golden (haha, very funny) opportunity to conclude by speaking about one of the texts. Sadly enough, it was the one prepared by the next candidate (in the same room... so, don't say a word!). And I got 18/20, and was very happy about it.

Those two 18 don't surprise me, neither do they rejoice me very much, but they do support my method, parler pour ne rien dire (speaking without eventually saying anything - sorry, the text is in French). It doesn"t matter if you're not interested in the texts that you present, it doesn't matter if you haven't got anything interesting to say, don't try to be interesting, just fill. Pedantically. Keeping a straight face. And, what's really important : do not do anything about literature. Never, ever. Nobody's asking you anything about it.

A nice exam, so, a ridiculous but funny nevertheless masquerade that glorifies those who act properly until the end. It only served one purpose : allowing me to complete the french Wikipedia with entries created (or improved), sometimes hastily, while in the hell of revision...

And it also gave me a funny idea I laughed about with my friends and relations, and that I now share with you (in French, sorry). The question is : what would the EAF look like for mathematicians? what would a maths test look like for people studying literature? My attempts to answer this (under the Creative Commons Contrat Paternité-ShareAlike 2.0 France license (aka. CC-BY-SA)) :

I hope you'll enjoy it. Remember : La plus perdue de toutes les journées est celle où l'on a pas ri. (Nicolas de Chamfort), that's (more or less), "The most useless day is the one where you didn't laugh".