Reading a Contemporary Passage Without Its Context

The idea

About half the exam gives you a passage and no author, so build the habit of reading what is on the page. First, who speaks, and does the voice belong to a character or to a narrator standing outside? Second, how long are the sentences, and do they accumulate or stop short? Carver stops short; McCarthy accumulates. Third, is the ordinary world stable? If a dead child speaks or a barn is famous for being photographed, the strangeness is doing argumentative work. Fourth, what does the passage assume you already know, a scripture, a ritual, a migration, a war? That assumption often names the tradition. Fifth, where is the feeling: stated outright, withheld, or displaced onto an object such as a quilt, a wall, a cathedral drawn on a paper bag?