Final Exam Study Guide

Exam will be held on Friday, May 2, 2008, from 10:10-12 noon in our regular classroom

The second examination will resemble the first one in format. It will consist of multiple choice questions, identification questions, a short passage to explicate, or some combination of the three in addition to an essay. The first part(s) may include characters or places from the novels, quotations, or some of the terms and ideas discussed in class. Your class notes will be the best guide to preparing for this section.

I. Works Covered

• Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894)
• Frances E. W. Harper, Iola Leroy (1892)
• Stephen Crane, "The Open Boat" and "Stephen Crane's Own Story" (1897); "The Monster" (1898); Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893)
• Frank Norris, McTeague (1899)
• Information from critical essays and reports, as discussed in class

II. Terms and ideas

• "one drop" rule and 19th-century terms for mixed-race individuals
• domestic fiction
• slave narrative
• realism
• naturalism
• local color fiction
• changes in critical perspectives during the twentieth century about the canon 19th-century American literature
• visual culture in the late nineteenth century: stereopticons (stereoscopes), photographs, panoramas, early films

III. Possibilities for essay questions

• Role of art, architecture, manners; art objects and artistic sensibility as indicators of character.
• Disguise and exchange of identity
• Social order: law, justice, and social customs. In what ways do certain works protest an unjust social or legal system?
• Relationship between journalism or a real-life incident and its presentation in fiction
• Relationship between the body and identity; the constitution of the self through culture; how identity is or is not situated in the body; how traits are signified by identifying physical features
• Relationships between objects and their representation; the symbolic nature of objects; the transition from a culture in which objects or concepts of value are valued for themselves and one in which they are represented by pieces of paper
• The rise and fall of characters in realism and naturalism
• The role of gender in these works: how is it defined? What does the representation of women say about nineteenth-century conceptions of their nature?
• The function of a particular character in embodying a theme, facilitating the plot, or providing a structure
• Wealth, greed, and the passion for collecting or possessing objects
• Ethnic or racial identity and the confirmation of or rejection of stereotypes
• Freedom of choice, responsibility, and fate
• The role of the spectator; the spectator as artist or collector; the spectator as embodying a point of view
• Role of money or race in determining the characters' fate
• Point of view as it affects the theme, plot, and symbolic structure of the novel