Your essay should encompass/address the following issues/questions:

You shoud not answer each question individually but instead write your own critical essay touching upon the issues addressed by the questions.

1. How far can the human body be pushed before total collapse?
   
   
2. With a richness and vividness beyond anyone's personal experience, these stories offer us an education in human types, in human motives and feelings, in human longings, fulfillments, and despairs. If some calamity were suddenly to deprive us of the recollection of every fictional character and event that we now have stored in our heads, we would suffer not only a great reduction in our knowledge of the human condition and the world, but also a vast diminishment of our sense of self, since everyone's self develops to a great extent through negotiations we begin conducting with fictional characters in childhood and continue conducting all the remainder of our lives.
   
   That story-telling is a universal feature of all human cultures implies that fiction's supplements to first-hand experiences constitute an indispensable component of the education we all require about the means and ends of human life.
   
   
3. What can the mind endure before succumbing to what seems like inevitable termination?
   
   
4. How have the authors wrestled with issues of bravery, friendship, physical endurance, the code of the environment, and the will to live.
   
   
5. What would you have done if put in the same position ?
   
   
6. What is it that compels certain individuals to willingly seek out the most inhospitable climates on earth?
   
   
7. What is it that drives individuals to risk their lives in an attempt to leave footprints where few or none have gone before?
   
   
8. In literary study, students in English encounter gripping, detailed, and concrete accounts of individuals who face choices about the right thing to do. Because these accounts mirror the circumstances and choices that readers themselves face in everyday life, they can learn from them how to see themselves more objectively, more comparatively. What have you learned about yourself from reading this account? How can you see yourself mroe objectively and more comparatively?
   
   
9. All of our views and attitudes are influenced by the stories we imaginatively ingest. Many of them are learned straight from stories. We have here the opportunity to study them in contexts that place a premium on thoughtfulness, analysis and evaluation.
   
   The workings of thought, the responses of the heart, and the exertions of judgment -- when combined with the rich data of the stories themselves--yield a kind of knowledge and exercise that can inform, deepen and sensitize our existential maturity. What then have you learned from these stories that has effected your views or attitudes?
   
   
10. We hold our existential views more as attitudes than as arguments, but they are nevertheless the foundation of our approach to life. Existential views consist of such basic beliefs as whether the universe is open or shut to human effort; our basic confidence or lack of confidence about the existence of God or Truth; out belief in the importance or unimportance of reason and reasonableness; our sense that life is more tragic than hopeful or more hopeful than tragic; our sense that human beings either can or cannot achieve their important goals on their own, and so on. How have these stories effected your existential views of life?
    
    
11. Sensitivity consists of two abilities. One is the ability to regulate conduct according to some principle of the right thing, however that may be construed by the individual. The other is to deliberate about moral and ethical issues both in one's own head and in dialogue with other people.
    
    In Survival Literature you will encounter gripping, detailed, and concrete accounts of individuals who face choices about the right thing to do. Because these accounts mirror the circumstances and choices that we face in everyday life, we can learn from them how to see ourselves more objectively, more comparatively.
    
    Issues of private conscience and public policy, relations between spouses and among family members, issues of conduct under stress, questions of religion and morality and principle, ways of spending money and seeking entertainment, attitudes about sexual conduct and power relations between the genders: all of these issues, crucial to the quality and texture of everyday life for all of us, are given the kind of representation in Survival Literature that invites readers both to identify with and simultaneously to distance themselves from what is represented.
    
    As we identify with literary figures we gain a sense of what ethical choices exist in the world and what choices other people both similar to themselves and different from them make.
    
    As we distance ourselves from literary representations, we gain an ability to make comparisons that clarify the choices of our own lives. In addition, literary study makes us participants in literary characters' ethical deliberations. We track the actual thought processes traced by literary characters who are working to discover the criteria for ethical and moral decisions. This kind of practice does not ensure that readers will always deliberate better about moral and ethical problems in their real lives, but without practice real-life improvement cannot occur.
    
    In real life, other people's moral and ethical deliberations are either obscured from view--we simply have insufficiently direct access to other people's minds--or the deliberations that people make visible and public are so entangled with personal interest, emotional smog, or ideological formulas that the real process of deliberation becomes impossible to track.
    
    Sharing the troubles and destinies of fictional characters gives us the direct access to other minds and lets us observe others' deliberations while practicing our own--all without the pressure of immediate self-interest. All of us require negotiations with stories on the road to development of a self that is capable of making ethical and moral choices.
    
    
12. Cognitive skills that support the critical reading of texts, the precise use of language, and the creation of sound arguments are not the exclusive property of the discipline of English, of course, but arguably such cognitive skills as analyzing, synthesizing, speaking, listening, writing, reading, evaluating, and appreciating are more consistently and comprehensively addressed by disciplinary studies in English than anywhere else.
    
    Cognitive skills developed in the course of literary studies spread yeast-like into other areas of intellectual activity. We want to develop an expert's sensitivity to the argumentative, affective, expressive, aesthetic, and rhetorical practices of both spoken and written language. Such training constitutes a powerful form of intellectual development that is generally useful and transportable to a vast number of activities in a complex and literate culture.
    
    Learning to think the thoughts, construct the arguments, and use the vocabulary of literary characters constitutes a vast exercise of cognitive complexity unobtainable in any other way to the degree that it is obtained through literary experience.