Exam 1 Study Guide

Note: This page is intended as a guide, but it may not cover everything. Material not listed here might appear on the exam.

The notes you took in class should be your best guide. Check the American Author pages at http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/aufram.html for other resources.

You will not be able to use your book or notes on this exam. Bring notebook paper with you (no blue books) so that you can write the essay portion.

I. Format.  Exam I will consist of three or four parts:

• Multiple-choice questions;
• Matching
• Identification questions
• Essay: one essay question from a choice of two or three questions. 

II. Works Covered (You should know title, author, main characters, and the significance of scenes and events)

• Twain, "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" (61-66)
• Emerson, selections from Nature; "Each and All," "Hamatreya," "The Rhodora"
• Jewett, "A White Heron" (194-202)
  Twain, from Old Times on the Mississippi (72-93)
• Howells, "Editha" (111-121)
  Freeman, "A New England Nun" (204-212)
• Chopin, "At the 'Cadian Ball" (213-222)
  Chopin, "The Storm" (222-227)
• Zitkala-Sa, "The School Days of an Indian Girl" (428-438)
  Norris, "A Deal in Wheat" (324-333)
• Douglass, from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
  Chesnutt, "The Passing of Grandison" (228-242)
• Stephen Crane, "The Open Boat" and poems (334-358)
• Mena, "The Vine-Leaf" (898-904)
  Glaspell, Trifles (780-791)
• McKay, poems (704-708 "If We Must Die," "The Lynching")

• Southwestern humor
• Transcendentalism (and how it differs from Calvinism)
• Local color or regionalism
• Realism
• Naturalism
• General information about early film (from your lecture notes and our discussion)
• Poetry terms
  • Sonnet
    • Petrarchan sonnet
    • Shakespearean sonnet
    • Quatrain
    • Couplet
    • Sestet
    • Octave
    • Volta
  • Rhyme scheme
  • Common meter or hymn measure
  • Scansion (Note: You'll be asked this in the multiple choice portion.)
    • Iambic pentameter and other measures of line length (trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter)
      • Trochaic
      • Anapestic
      • Dactylic
• Other material from lectures and discussions, including Laptop Days.

IV. Potential Essay Questions.

1. Essay questions may ask you

• To compare and contrast
• A specific aspect or character of the two works
• Two characters from different stories.
• Themes or ideas in the works
• Technique or style
• To analyze a passage through close reading as it relates to the work as a whole
• To address a larger theme or idea as it relates to the work
• To analyze a particular pattern of imagery or symbolism in a work
• To respond to a critic’s statement about the work

2. Your class notes and the discussion questions will be your best guides to potential essay questions.

3. Sample essay questions:

• Using two pieces of writing that we have discussed, contrast the views of nature expressed in naturalism and Transcendentalism (or, in a more specific version, something like "compare the nature poems of Stephen Crane and Ralph Waldo Emerson")
• Several of the pieces we've read involve a character who is able to trick others--a trickster--yet the trickster is sometimes tricked himself. Choose any two stories and discuss this idea.
• What means have writers such as Zitkala-Sa, Frank Norris, Claude McKay, Frederick Douglass, Charles W. Chesnutt, or Susan Glaspell used to protest injustices due to race, gender, or economic circumstances? Choose any two writers and show how they use literature or literary techniques to protest the treatment of a group being discriminated against.
• Closely analyze the following passage or poem [example] and discuss the literary features that the author uses to convey his or her point, including, if they are in the passage, repetition of words or phrases, contrast, parallel structures, shifting points of view, imagery, and symbolism. Remember, the overall idea is not so much to name the literary feature as to discuss the effect that it has on the reader.
• Animals have been used as symbols in a number of the works we've read. Choosing any two works, discuss the symbolism of the animals in the stories.