Capstone: The Exam, the Bands, the Sample Questions

This is Unit Nineteen of American Literature, part two of two, and the last lecture in the course: the board's remaining seven published questions, worked to their answers. Part one ended with a passage of capitalized abstractions identified as allegory. This part carries the unit's governing idea all the way, which is that this exam rewards reading over recall, and every one of these seven questions proves it. Two of them come from one Douglass passage, and neither requires you to have read the book: one asks for the theme and is settled by finding the sentence that names a cause rather than an outcome, and the other asks for the source and is settled by the narrator's sex and his situation. One asks what three writers are collectively called, and its trap is the other post-war label. One prints a whole poem and asks what its speaker feels, and the answer is decided by what the poem refuses to say. One turns on a single image on a billboard. One is a NOT question about five author-and-character pairs. And the last names a character and asks for her book. Then the course closes. By the end you will be able to answer a theme question from a stated cause. To identify a source from a narrator. To give the regionalist label. To answer a speaker's-response question from silence. And to work the last three drills.

Three entries: two questions set on one Douglass passage, and the movement label the board attaches to three writers.

Kind first, then influence, then stone.

AML 1817 Drill 3: The Theme of the Passage

The board prints Douglass on his mistress, who began as a kind and tender-hearted woman treating him as one human being ought to treat another, and under slaveholding's influence became stone, her lamblike disposition giving way to a tigerlike fierceness. The question asks for the theme. The answer is that slaveholders were corrupted by the unchecked power of slaveholding. The passage's own structure proves it: it insists she was genuinely kind first, then names the influence, then gives the result. Reject the alternatives against that structure. Slaveholders naturally cruel fails, because the passage says she began kind. Women as cruel as men is true elsewhere but is not this passage's claim. Never to be trusted mistakes an outcome for a cause, and it is the strongest distractor, because it describes the same events and gets the cause wrong.

A man, a city household, a mistress.

AML 1818 Drill 4: The Source of the Passage

The board asks where that passage came from, offering Jacobs's *Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl*, Washington's *Up from Slavery*, Du Bois's *The Souls of Black Folk*, Douglass's *Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass* and Wheatley's "On Being Brought from Africa to America". The answer is Douglass's *Narrative*. Two signals settle it. The narrator is a man enslaved in a city household watching his mistress change, which is the Baltimore episode in Douglass. And the voice is first-person testimony from inside slavery, which excludes Washington, writing after emancipation about his rise, and Du Bois, writing sociology and essay. Jacobs wrote first-person testimony too, and she is the real distractor here rather than Washington. The way past her is the narrator's sex, which the passage gives you.

Three writers, three places, one label.

AML 1819 Drill 5: What Jewett, Chopin, and Twain Are Called

The board asks what Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin and Mark Twain are all sometimes called, offering romantics, modernists, regionalists, transcendentalists and naturalists. The answer is regionalists. The common factor is place: Jewett wrote coastal Maine, Chopin wrote Louisiana and its Creole and Cajun communities, Twain wrote the Mississippi valley, and each rendered a local dialect and local custom closely. The distractors fail on dates and on method. Romanticism and transcendentalism belong to the period before the Civil War. Modernism belongs to the twentieth century. Naturalism is the closest in time and is the trap, but it is defined by heredity and environment as overwhelming forces, which is a different claim from close attention to a place.

Five entries to finish: a poem's silence, a billboard, a mismatch, a first novel, and the argument four centuries keep making.

Twelve lines of envy, two of fact.

AML 1820 Drill 6: The Speaker's Response in "Richard Cory"

The board prints Robinson's "Richard Cory" whole and asks how the speaker's apparent response to the events can best be characterized, offering concern, bewilderment, malice, remorse and anger. The answer is bewilderment. Read the last stanza against the first three. The speaker spends twelve lines listing what made Cory enviable, then reports in two lines that he went home and put a bullet through his head, and offers no explanation at all. That refusal to explain is the response: a collective we that cannot reconcile the two halves. Malice, remorse and anger all require a reaction the poem never states, and concern is too mild and too forward-looking for a speaker reporting a completed event. The temptation is to pick the emotion you feel reading it, and the question asks about the speaker.

An oculist's sign, taken for God.

AML 1821 Drill 7: The Billboard and the Novel

The board asks in which novel the author suggests the vacancy of old orders of belief, ideals or virtues by the image of sightless eyes looking down from a billboard, offering *The Great Gatsby*, *Light in August*, *The Sun Also Rises*, *To Kill a Mockingbird* and *Native Son*. The answer is *The Great Gatsby*. The image is the faded advertisement for an oculist, Doctor T. J. Eckleburg, whose enormous blue eyes behind yellow spectacles stand over the valley of ashes, unrepaired, and which a grieving character takes for the eyes of God. Everything the question says is in that description: eyes that cannot see, raised above a wasteland, mistaken for a belief nobody tends any more. Faulkner and Hemingway are in the options because they are Fitzgerald's contemporaries, so the answer turns on the image rather than the period.

Read the question's NOT.

AML 1822 Drill 8: The Author–Character Mismatch

The board asks which pairing does NOT correctly match an author with a character he created, offering Updike and Harry Angstrom, Roth and Alexander Portnoy, Ellison and Bigger Thomas, Salinger and Holden Caulfield, and Bellow and Augie March. The answer is Ellison and Bigger Thomas. Bigger Thomas belongs to Richard Wright and *Native Son*, published in nineteen forty. Ralph Ellison's protagonist has no name at all, which is the whole point of *Invisible Man*. The other four pairs are correct as printed. Note what the question is doing: it puts the period's two most famous Black novelists beside each other, ten years apart, and asks whether you know which wrote which. Four of the five pairs here are right, and the work is to find the single wrong one.

Pecola Breedlove, and blue eyes.

AML 1823 Drill 9: Morrison and Pecola Breedlove

The board asks in which book Toni Morrison examines the effects of racism, abuse and internalized self-hatred on an eleven-year-old child named Pecola Breedlove, offering *Tar-Baby*, *Beloved*, *The Color Purple*, *The Woman Warrior* and *The Bluest Eye*. The answer is *The Bluest Eye*, Morrison's first novel, of nineteen seventy. Pecola is the girl who prays for blue eyes. Two of the distractors are not Morrison's at all: *The Color Purple* is Alice Walker's and *The Woman Warrior* is Maxine Hong Kingston's. Of the two that are hers, *Beloved* turns on a mother and a returning child, and *Tar Baby* is about people trapped in self-deceptions. Internalized self-hatred is the phrase to hold, since it is the exact subject of the first novel.

One question, four centuries.

AML 1824 Five Periods, One Argument: What American Literature Keeps Asking

Four centuries of American writing return to one question in different vocabularies: who is authorized to speak for this country, and on what grounds. The Puritans answered from providence, reading a storm or a captivity as a message and writing to examine a soul. The revolutionary generation answered from reason and argued its way out of an empire, while Wheatley, Equiano and Occom wrote from inside the contradiction that the argument left standing. The transcendentalists moved the authority inward, to intuition and nature and the self, and Poe, Hawthorne and Melville immediately tested that confidence against evil and found it thin, while Douglass and Jacobs answered from testimony, which is authority of a different kind and harder to refuse. After the war, realism asked instead who gets described: Twain and Howells and James on ordinary life, the regionalists on particular places and their speech, the naturalists on forces no character can beat. Modernism broke the inherited vocabulary and built techniques in its place, Hemingway by omission, Faulkner by accumulation, Eliot by fragment and allusion, and the Harlem Renaissance by insisting that Black writers set their own terms instead of answering white ones. After nineteen forty-five the question turned inward again and then outward: Lowell and Plath made the private self the material, Ellison and Baldwin named an invisibility that belonged to the viewers, the postmodernists made the telling the subject, and the multicultural writers reopened the whole question of who writes America, which is where the exam's largest band now sits. The exam tests that history in four ways, and the largest of them asks you to read a passage you have never seen and say what it is doing.

That closes the course. Nine published questions, worked, and four centuries behind them. You can answer a theme question by finding the sentence that names a cause, and reject the distractor that describes the same events and gets the cause wrong. You can identify a passage's source from the narrator's sex and his situation, getting past Jacobs rather than past Washington. You can give the label the board attaches to Jewett, Chopin and Twain, and say why naturalism is the trap beside it. You can answer a speaker's-response question from a poem's own silence rather than from your reaction to it. You can name the novel with the sightless eyes on a billboard, find the single wrong pairing in a NOT question, and place Pecola Breedlove in Morrison's first novel. And you can state what four centuries of this literature keep asking: who is authorized to speak for the country, and on what grounds. Two facts to carry in: Bigger Thomas is Richard Wright's, and *The Bluest Eye* is Morrison's first.