Study Guide for Exam 2

This page is intended as a helpful guide to studying for the exam.  It may not cover all the information that is on the test.  Your class notes and your books with your annotations should be your principal guide to studying for the exam.

Exam 2 will be given in two parts.

1. Part I (multiple choice, identification questions, short explication of a passage, etc.) will be given in class on Friday, December 9.
2. Part II will be an essay; the questions will be given out on Friday, December 9, and your essay will be due no later than Wednesday, December 14, at 3 p.m. (if you're turning in a paper copy) or Thursday, December 15 at 3 p.m. (if you're e-mailing your essay to me)

I. Works Covered

All the works on your syllabus since Exam 1 may be covered; however, the works listed below will receive more emphasis. You should know the title of the story, the author, and the important features (see your class notes):

• Freeman, "A New England Nun" 725-733; "Luella Miller"
• Chopin, "The Storm" and "Desiree's Baby"
• Twain, "The Diary of Adam and Eve," CSSMT 273-295
• Sui Sin Far, "Mrs. Spring Fragrance" 867-876
• Mena, "The Vine-Leaf" (handout)
• Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs
• Chesnutt, Conjure Tales, "The Goophered Grapevine"; "Po' Sandy" 44-55; "The Sheriff's Children" TCCL 32-46; "The Passing of Grandison"
• London, "To Build a Fire" 977-987
• Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware
• Zitkala-Sa, "Impressions," "School Days," and "Indian Teacher" 1006-1035
• Eastman, from From the Deep Woods to Civilization

II. General issues, literary movements, ideas, and terms (from your notes). If you’ve been taking notes this semester, all of this information should be readily available in your notebook.

• Naturalism
• Realism
• Regionalism or local color (including controversies over The Country of the Pointed Firs)
• The plantation tradition
• Hebraism and Hellenism
• Form and style as it is used in works like "To Build a Fire"
• Issues of identity, the idea of identity as marked on and in the body.
• Gender and class; social roles; position of women.
• Race and ethnicity; oppression and resistance; racial identity (the color line, the one-drop rule, passing);
• General information from reports, such as backgrounds on authors and literary movements; information on history, etc. (Again, consult your notes for information from the reports. You will not be asked detailed, specific questions about these, but general information may be asked.)
• Material from lectures on literary history, such as the ways in which certain authors were or were not included in the canon at various times; 19th-century publishing and literary magazines, etc.
• Some knowledge of background information on Aestheticism, the slave narrative, ghost stories, the western, and other literary forms as discussed in class.

III. Potential Essay Questions. Note: These are sample questions; there is no guarantee that they will be on the test. At least one of the questions will invite you to use materials from earlier in the semester (i.e., such as Daisy Miller) IF you want to do so, but you will not be required to write about materials covered before Exam 1.

• In what ways have certain authors of color expressed their resistance to dominant ideas about their culture? To what extent have they complied with or resisted (or seemed to comply with but actually resisted) these dominant ideas, and what devices have they used to appeal to their audiences?
• In their works, Johnson and Frederic incorporate the theme of a quest for self-knowledge, one that should end in an initiation from innocence to experience. To what extent does this quest end satisfactorily for the character?
• Compare and contrast the vision of nature in "To Build a Fire" and The Country of the Pointed Firs.
• Identify and closely analyze the language, style, symbolism, and meaning of these two passages.
• Explore the role of one of the following in any two works read during this part of the semester: tricks and tricksters, music, faith, Darwinian theories of evolution and social relationships, nature imagery, color symbolism, or allusions to the Bible.
• Compare and contrast the characters of the women in any two of the following works: “A New England Nun,” "Mrs. Spring Fragrance," "Impressions of an Indian Girlhood," "The Vine-Leaf," "The Foreigner," The Damnation of Theron Ware, or The Country of the Pointed Firs.
• What techniques does nonfiction such as autobiographies and essays (and works pretending to be autobiography or essays) use to achieve its rhetorical purposes of persuading its audience? You might note features such as allusions to (or inversions of) well-known works such as fairy tales, features that recall a standard genre like the slave narrative, and so forth.