Capstone: The Exam, the Bands, the Sample Questions

This is Unit Nineteen of American Literature, part one of two: the exam itself, its bands, and the first of nine worked sample questions. Eighteen units have covered four centuries of writing. This one covers the test, and its governing idea, which part two pays off, is that the exam rewards reading more than it rewards recall. The board's fact sheet is explicit about the proportions. Between thirty-five and forty percent of the questions ask you to understand and interpret a short poem or an excerpt, with no author identification required at all, which makes that the largest single demand on the paper. Twenty-five to thirty percent asks for knowledge of works, their authors and characters and plots. Fifteen to twenty percent asks for critical terms, and another fifteen to twenty for historical and social context. Across all of that run five chronological periods weighted fifteen, twenty, twenty, twenty and twenty-five percent. We take the shape first, then each period in a single entry, then the four skill bands, then a timeline, the movement labels and twenty pairs, and then we begin working the board's own published questions. By the end you will be able to state the exam's shape and how this course was built. To summarize the five period bands. To name the four skill bands. To place twenty dates and nine labels. And to hold twenty pairs and work the first two drills.

Two entries to open: what the test is made of, and what this course was made from, including what it could not source.

A hundred questions, ninety minutes.

AML 1801 How the Exam Is Built: 100 Questions, 90 Minutes, Five Periods

The board's fact sheet says the exam holds roughly one hundred questions to be answered in ninety minutes, some of them unscored pretest items. The five chronological periods carry fifteen, twenty, twenty, twenty and twenty-five percent, so the most recent period is the largest one on the paper.

One anchor, six witnesses, thirty disclosures.

AML 1802 The Anchor, the Witnesses, and the Copyright Line

This course was built from one open anchor textbook and six witnesses, and it quotes freely from work published before nineteen thirty while teaching later work by description. Where no source carried a planned topic, the entry was re-scoped, and all thirty such changes are listed in this unit. Nothing here was written from memory alone.

Five entries, one for each period the board weights, each closing on the sample question that comes from it.

Oral traditions, Puritans, revolutionaries.

AML 1803 Band 1 in One Entry: Beginnings–1800

Fifteen percent of the exam. Native oral traditions and exploration narratives, then the Puritans: Bradford, Winthrop, Bradstreet, Taylor, Rowlandson and Edwards. Then the Enlightenment and the revolution: Franklin, Paine, Jefferson, Wheatley, Equiano, Occom and Rowson's *Charlotte Temple*. Bradstreet is the board's first sample question.

Romantics, transcendentalists, the narratives.

AML 1804 Band 2 in One Entry: 1800–1865

Twenty percent. Irving and Cooper first, then the transcendentalists Emerson, Thoreau and Fuller, then the dark romantics Poe, Hawthorne and Melville, then Whitman and Dickinson, and alongside all of it the slave narrative and abolition: Douglass, Jacobs and Stowe. Douglass supplies two of the board's sample questions.

Realism, regionalism, naturalism, after.

AML 1805 Band 3 in One Entry: 1865–1910

Twenty percent. Realism in Twain, Howells and James; regionalism in Jewett, Chopin, Freeman and Harte; naturalism in Crane, Norris, Dreiser and London; Wharton in the drawing rooms; and Washington, Du Bois, Chesnutt and Dunbar writing after Reconstruction. The regionalist label is the board's fifth question.

Imagism, Harlem, three novelists, the stage.

AML 1806 Band 4 in One Entry: 1910–1945

Twenty percent. Modernist poetry from imagism through Pound, Williams, Stevens, Frost, Eliot, Moore and Cummings; the Harlem Renaissance in Hughes, Hurston, McKay, Toomer and Cullen; modernist fiction in Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Cather and Steinbeck; and O'Neill and Wilder on stage. *The Great Gatsby* is the board's seventh question.

The biggest band, and the newest.

AML 1807 Band 5 in One Entry: 1945–Present

Twenty-five percent, the largest band. Postwar fiction from Ellison and Baldwin through Bellow, Roth, Updike and Salinger; confessional poetry, the Beats and the Black Arts Movement; postmodernism in Pynchon and Barth; Williams and Miller on stage; then the multicultural writers. Two of the nine sample questions come from here.

Four entries on what the exam asks you to do, in the four proportions the board publishes.

The largest demand asks no names.

AML 1808 The Interpretation Band and How to Practise It

Thirty-five to forty percent of questions ask you to understand and interpret short poems, excerpts from long poems, and excerpts from prose. This is the largest single demand and it needs no author identification at all. Practise it by reading passages cold. Two-fifths of the exam is reading rather than recall.

Pairs, learned as pairs.

AML 1809 The Knowledge Band: Authors, Characters, Plots

Twenty-five to thirty percent asks for knowledge of literary works: authors, characters, plots, settings, style and themes. Two of the board's nine samples are pure matching, one pairing a novelist with a character and one pairing a novelist with a title. Matching questions reward the pairs learned as pairs rather than as lists.

A sixth of it is vocabulary.

AML 1810 The Terms Band: What Gets Asked

Fifteen to twenty percent asks for familiarity with critical terms, verse forms and literary devices. The board's second sample question is of this kind, asking for the form of a passage and offering allegory, burlesque, epistle, fable and parody as its five choices. A sixth of the exam is vocabulary you can sit down and study.

Settings, relations, traditions, influences.

AML 1811 The Context Band: Movements and Influences

Fifteen to twenty percent asks for the historical and social settings of specific works, the relations between literary works, the relations of works to traditions, and the influences on authors. The regionalist question is one of these, asking what three writers are collectively called. This band rewards knowing the movement labels.

Three procedures that compress the whole survey: twenty dates, nine movement labels, and twenty author-and-work pairs.

Twenty dates, holding a survey.

AML 1812 A Timeline of American Literature in One Entry

Fix the dates the movements hang on. Sixteen twenty, Plymouth and Bradford's history. Sixteen fifty, Bradstreet's poems printed in England. Sixteen ninety-two, Salem. Seventeen seventy-six, independence and the pamphlets around it. Eighteen thirty-six, Emerson's *Nature* and the start of transcendentalism. Eighteen forty-five, Douglass's narrative and Poe's "The Raven". Eighteen fifty, *The Scarlet Letter*; eighteen fifty-one, *Moby-Dick*; eighteen fifty-two, *Uncle Tom's Cabin*; eighteen fifty-five, *Leaves of Grass*. Eighteen sixty-five, the war ends and realism begins. Eighteen eighty-four, *Huckleberry Finn*. Eighteen ninety-nine, *The Awakening*. Nineteen twelve, *Poetry* magazine and imagism. Nineteen twenty-two, *The Waste Land*. Nineteen twenty-five, *The Great Gatsby*. Nineteen twenty-nine, the crash and *The Sound and the Fury*. Nineteen thirty-nine, *The Grapes of Wrath*. Nineteen fifty-two, *Invisible Man*. Nineteen fifty-nine, *Life Studies*. Nineteen seventy, *The Bluest Eye*. Nineteen eighty-seven, *Beloved*. Dates on this exam are a means rather than an end, since you are asked to place a work in a period rather than recall its exact year.

Nine labels, with date ranges.

AML 1813 The Movements in Order, With Their Dates

Nine labels cover most of what the context band asks. Puritanism, roughly sixteen twenty to seventeen forty, writing to record providence and examine the soul. The Enlightenment, roughly seventeen forty to eighteen hundred, writing to argue and persuade. Romanticism and transcendentalism, eighteen twenty to eighteen sixty-five, valuing intuition, nature and the individual, with the dark romantics testing the same beliefs against evil. Realism, eighteen sixty-five to nineteen hundred, ordinary life rendered plainly, with regionalism its local branch. Naturalism, eighteen ninety to nineteen fifteen, heredity and environment as forces the character cannot beat. Modernism, nineteen ten to nineteen forty-five, fragmentation, allusion and the broken vocabulary. The Harlem Renaissance, the nineteen twenties, Black writing on its own terms. Confessional poetry, from nineteen fifty-nine. Postmodernism, from the nineteen sixties, self-conscious fiction about its own telling. These ranges overlap and writers cross them.

Twenty pairs, both directions.

AML 1814 Twenty Author–Work Pairs Worth Knowing Cold

Bradstreet and *The Tenth Muse*. Rowson and *Charlotte Temple*. Franklin and the *Autobiography*. Irving and "Rip Van Winkle". Emerson and *Nature*. Thoreau and *Walden*. Hawthorne and *The Scarlet Letter*. Melville and *Moby-Dick*. Whitman and *Leaves of Grass*. Douglass and the *Narrative*. Stowe and *Uncle Tom's Cabin*. Twain and *Huckleberry Finn*. Chopin and *The Awakening*. Crane and *The Red Badge of Courage*. Eliot and *The Waste Land*. Fitzgerald and *The Great Gatsby*. Hemingway and *The Sun Also Rises*. Faulkner and *The Sound and the Fury*. Ellison and *Invisible Man*. Morrison and *The Bluest Eye*. Learn each pair in both directions, title to author and author to title, because the board asks it both ways. Knowing a pair is not knowing a book, and the interpretation band is larger than the knowledge band, so the pairs are the floor and the reading is the work.

Two entries to close the part: the board's first published sample question, and its second, both worked to the answer.

Massachusetts, a mother, London.

AML 1815 Drill 1: The Seventeenth-Century Poet

The board's first sample question describes a seventeenth-century Massachusetts wife and mother whose poems were initially published in England in the sixteen fifties, and asks who she was. The five choices are Abigail Adams, Sarah Kemble Knight, Mary Rowlandson, Anne Bradstreet and Julia Ward Howe. The answer is Anne Bradstreet. Three facts settle it together. She lived in Massachusetts Bay, she was a wife and the mother of eight, and *The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America* was carried to London and printed there in sixteen fifty without her knowledge. Test the distractors. Abigail Adams belongs to the revolutionary generation a century later and wrote letters rather than poems. Knight wrote a travel journal. Rowlandson wrote a captivity narrative in prose. Howe is a nineteenth-century writer. Rowlandson is the strong distractor because she is the other famous Puritan woman writer, and the question's words, poems and the sixteen fifties, both exclude her.

Capitalized abstractions, doing things.

AML 1816 Drill 2: The Form of the Passage

The board prints a passage from Rowson's *Charlotte Temple* in which a couple retire to a cottage where Love and Hymen attend them, Plenty and her handmaid Prudence preside at the table, Hospitality stands at the gate, Peace smiles and Content reigns. The question asks for the form, offering allegory, burlesque, epistle, fable and parody. The answer is allegory. The test is mechanical: abstract qualities are capitalized and given bodies that act, and that personification of abstractions is what allegory means. Check the others. A burlesque mocks by exaggeration, and nothing here is mocked. An epistle is a letter, and this is narration. A fable ends in a stated moral and usually uses animals. A parody imitates a particular target. Do not decide by the passage's sweetness, since the form question asks what the words are doing.

That is the exam's shape and the first two questions. Part two works the remaining seven. You can state that the exam holds about a hundred questions in ninety minutes with some unscored pretest items, and that its five periods carry fifteen, twenty, twenty, twenty and twenty-five percent. You can summarize each period in a sentence and name the sample question that comes from it. You can name the four skill bands and their proportions, and say that the largest of them, between thirty-five and forty percent, asks for reading and requires no author identification at all. You can fix twenty dates from Plymouth to *Beloved*, place nine movement labels with their overlapping ranges, and hold twenty author-and-work pairs in both directions. And you can work the board's first question, where three facts converge on Anne Bradstreet, and its second, where capitalized abstractions with bodies and jobs make a passage an allegory and nothing else offered.