Exam I: Study Guide

Note: Your most important guide for the exam will be your class notes on the stories we discussed.

Exam Format:

1. Multiple choice/matching (Probably 10 questions for each.)
2. Identification: title, author, and significance of the passage or quotation. (Choose 4 out of 6-7 choices)
3. Essay. Write one essay; you'll be given a choice of topics. Sample questions are below.

I. Works to be Covered (Note: Although the page numbers are not listed, this list also includes the assigned background information.) Stories and poems not discussed are not listed, although you are welcome to use them in writing your exam essay.

A. Stories (Know titles, authors, and significant details, such as the main characters' names. Your class notes will be your best guide.)

• Walker, "Everyday Use" 
• Faulkner, "A Rose for Emily"
• London, "To Build a Fire"
• Gilman, "The Yellow Wall Paper"
• Chopin, "The Story of an Hour"
• Appachana, "The Prophecy" (485-497)
• Steinbeck, "The Chrysanthemums" (253-261)
• Joyce, "Araby" (612-617)
• Hawthorne, "Young Goodman Brown" (584-594)
• Faulkner, "Barn Burning"
• Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher" (391-405)
• Poe on Poe (405-407)
• LeGuin, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" (278-279)
• Jackson, "The Lottery" (262-269)
• O'Connor, "A Good Man is Hard to Find"
• O'Connor on O'Connor, 459-465
• Achebe, "Dead Men's Path" (475-478)
• Silko, "The Man to Send Rain Clouds" (693)

B. Poems

• Rich, "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" (707)
• Jarrell, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" (1195)
• Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est" (742); also, review your knowledge about Owen from the group discussions: versions of "Dulce et Decorum Est," the context of the poem ("To Jessie Pope"), and the other poems we discussed, including "Anthem for Doomed Youth" (1220) and "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young" and Lovelace's"To Lucasta" (741)
• McDowell, "At Home with Dollface" (740)
• Hardy, "The Ruined Maid" (764)
• Toomer, "Reapers" (797)
• Haiku  (798-801)
• Plath, "Metaphors" (820)
• Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" (1117)
• Hughes, "Dream Deferred" (1124)
• Sor Juana, "A Simple Gift Made Rich by Affection" (1044)

C. Criticism: Be familiar with the ideas; you need not learn specific points, since we'll work with these later in the semester. Historical Criticism, 2212-2213 and 2216-2218; Gender Criticism (2231-2234);Mythological Criticism 2223-2227;Critics on O'Connor, 465-472

II. Themes and Concepts (This list will not include all that we've discussed)

• The Gothic
• Naturalism
• Race, ethnicity, and racism
• Responses to war
• Traditions and cultural conflicts; generational conflicts
• Setting and the ways in which it operates in a story
• Characters and how character is revealed
• Ideas of time and the past
• Human beings and their relationship to nature, both external (environment) and internal (passions, impulses)
• The author's use of style; how sounds, denotation and connotation, varied sentence structures, and other features create an effect.
• Symbolism and allegory; contextual and universal symbols (the journey, water)
• Romantic Idea of the artist: sensitive nature, separation of body and spirit, and so on.
• Initiation: movement from innocence to experience; loss of idealism
• Gender expectations and gender roles; women's lives
• Colonialism ("Dead Men's Path") and the clashes between dominant and oppressed cultures

IV. Sample Essay Questions
1. Stories in which the main character goes on a journey (loosely defined) frequently use the journey as a symbol of intellectual, moral, or emotional growth toward enlightenment. Choosing any two or three stories from those we have read this semester, develop a thesis and write an essay in which you explore this idea.
2. Several stories and poems have included views of marriage and the family. How are these venerable institutions seen by the poets and writers who discuss them? Choose two or three examples and develop a thesis that answers this question. Examples might include "At Home with Dollface," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "Happy Endings," "Barn Burning," "The Yellow Wallpaper," "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers," "A Good Man is Hard to Find," and "The Chrysanthemums," but you can choose other stories.
3. Compare the following two poems in terms of theme, style, and other features.

III. Literary Terms (Fiction)

• Allegory: A complete narrative that may also be applied to a parallel set of external situations that may be political, moral, religious, or philosophical; a complete and self-contained narrative signifying another set of conditions.(allegory: symbol::movie:still picture).
• Character: The verbal representation of a human being, with all the good and bad traits of being human.  Character is revealed through authorial comments, interactions with other characters, dramatic statements and thoughts, and statements by other characters.
• Conflict: The essence of plot; the opposition between two forces.  Examples: man vs. man, man vs. nature, man vs. himself  where "man" is understood to mean "human beings."
• Contextual or authorial symbol: A symbol specific to a particular work that gathers its meaning from the context of the work.
• Cultural or universal symbol: A symbol recognized and shared as a result of common social and cultural heritage.
• Dramatic or objective point of view: Third person point of view in which no authorial commentary reveals characters' thoughts.
• Epiphany: Literally, a “manifestation”; for Christian thinkers like Flannery O'Connor, a particular manifestation of God's presence in the created world. For James Joyce: “a sudden sense of radiance and revelation that one may feel while perceiving a commonplace object.” In literature, epiphany “has become the standard term for the description . . . of the sudden flare into revelation of an ordinary object or scene.”.
• First person point of view: Narration from the perspective of "I" or "We."  Narrators may be involved with the action or may simply observe it; they may also be reliable or unreliable.
• Flat character: A character that is static and does not grow.  One  purpose of flat characters is to highlight the development of round characters.  Flat characters may be one of several special types, such as stereotypes or stock characters.
• Initiation: Type of story or theme in which a character moves from innocence to experience.
• Irony: The discrepancy between what is perceived and what is revealed; language and situations that seem to reverse normal expectations.
• Naturalism: A turn-of-the-century  literary movement in which heredity and environment determine human fate.
• Omniscient point of view: Point of view in which an authorial voice reveals all the characters' thoughts; may include commentary by the author.
• Point of view: The voice of the story; the story from the perspective of the person doing the speaking. Examples: first person, second person, third person omniscient, third person limited omniscient, third person dramatic or objective.
• Protagonist: The main character of a story; the character around whom the conflict is centered.
• Round characters: According to E. M. Forster, round characters "are dynamic--capable of surprising the reader in a convincing way." Round characters recognize, change with, and adjust to circumstances.
• Second person point of view: Story told from the perspective of "you" (uncommon). 
• Setting: A work's natural, manufactured, political, cultural, and temporal environment, including everything that the characters know and own.
• Stereotype: Flat characters that exhibit no attributes except those of their class.
• Stock character: Flat characters who represent a class or group.  Examples: the braggart soldier, the shrewish wife, the hypocritical Puritan, and so forth.
• Structure: The way in which a plot is assembled: chronologically, through dreams, speeches, fragments, etc.
• Style: The manipulation of language to create certain effects.
• Symbolism: Objects, incidents, speeches, and characters that have meanings beyond themselves.
• Theme: The major or central idea of a work.
• Third person limited omniscient point of view: Point of view in which one third-person character's thoughts are revealed but the other characters' thoughts are not.
• Tone: The ways in which the author conveys attitudes about the story material and toward the reader.

Literary Terms (Poetry)

• Stanza: a group of poetic lines corresponding to paragraphs in prose
• Quatrain: a four-line stanza
• End-stopped lines: lines that end in a full pause.
• Caesura: a short but definite pause in a line, often marked by punctuation.
• Enjambment: a line having no end punctuation but running over to the next line.
• Understatement (litotes): Deliberate underplaying or undervaluing of a thing to create emphasis or irony
• Metaphor: comparison; figurative language that describes something as though it were actually something else.
• Simile: comparison of unlike things using "like" or "as"
• Paradox: apparent contradiction that reveals an unexpected truth
• Apostrophe: a turning away, or redirection of attention; speaker addresses a real or imagined listener who is not present
• Synecdoche: "taking one thing out of another." A part stands for the whole. "All hands aboard." Example: Keats's "To Autumn" when the gourd and hazel shells stand in for the harvest. “Wheels” instead of car; “rhyme” instead of poetry.
• Metonymy: transfer of name; substitution of one thing for another with which it is allied. The White House
• Overstatement (hyperbole): exaggeration for effect
• Understatement (litotes): understatement for effect, often to create irony
• Rhyme scheme: identifying the pattern of end rhymes in a poem by "using small letters to represent each end rhyme--a for the first rhyme, b for the second, and so on" (G27).