Reading Prose and Drama: Voice, Plot, Style

This is Unit Two of American Literature, part two of two: six procedures for a prose passage you have never seen, and two of them worked on the exam's own text. Part one ended with three words that are modes before they are periods, which closed the vocabulary. Now the governing idea of both parts arrives at its payoff. Every claim about a passage has to be traceable to something printed on the page, and a procedure is what makes that tracing fast enough to be worth doing under time. So this part is almost all procedure. Six moves for any passage, ending on a claim you test against the last clause. A method for naming a passage's form, which eliminates five options on one distinguishing feature each, worked on the passage the board actually prints from Rowson. A method for building a theme out of the sentences that evaluate rather than the ones that narrate, worked on the passage the board prints from Douglass. A way of dating a passage from its syntax before its content. A set of checks that keep a narrator's opinion from being attributed to a book. And the three traps that account for most lost marks. By the end you will be able to read a prose passage in six moves. To name its form by elimination. To build its theme from its evaluating sentences. To place it in a period from its prose. And to avoid the three standing traps.

Three procedures, and the last two are worked directly on passages the board prints in its published sample questions.

Six moves, ending in a test.

AML 0126 Reading a Prose Passage in Six Moves

A prose passage under exam conditions takes six moves. One: read for the plain sense and settle what is happening to whom. Two: name the narrator, first person or third limited or omniscient, because the pronouns give it away within a sentence and half the questions will depend on it. Three: mark the register, formal or plain or dialect, and notice any shift, because a shift means a second voice has entered the passage. Four: find the passage's turn, the sentence where the situation or the judgment changes, which in a short excerpt is usually near the end. Five: name what the passage claims, in one sentence with a verb in it, and that sentence is the theme. Six: test that sentence against the passage's last clause, because prose most often deposits its point there. A passage can describe at length and argue in a single clause. Reading for the argument means reading for the clause that evaluates rather than the clauses that narrate, and in the board's own examples the evaluating clause comes last.

Eliminate five options, one feature each.

AML 0127 Naming the Form of a Passage

The board sets a question that prints a passage and asks what form it takes, offering allegory, burlesque, epistle, fable and parody. The method is elimination on one feature each. An epistle is a letter and shows it through an address and a signature. A fable is brief, usually involves animals, and ends in a stated moral. A parody imitates a known work and needs that work in view to function. A burlesque mismatches its subject and its treatment for comic effect. An allegory personifies abstractions and lets them act. The board's own passage comes from Rowson's *Charlotte Temple*. It seats Plenty and her handmaid Prudence at a table, stands Hospitality at the gate, and has Peace smile and Content reign. Those are abstractions with bodies and with jobs, which is allegory and nothing else on that list. The trap here is reading the passage's sentimentality as burlesque or as parody. Neither one has a target in this passage, and a piece of prose can be thoroughly overwritten without mocking anything at all.

Four steps from subject to claim.

AML 0128 Finding the Theme a Passage Argues

A best-describes-the-theme question is answered in four steps. One: write the subject as a noun phrase, which for the board's example passage is a mistress who owned slaves. Two: find the sentences that evaluate rather than describe. In that passage the narrator says slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to him, and that the tender heart became stone. Three: turn that evaluation into a claim with a verb, which gives you that slaveholding corrupted the woman who practised it. Four: test each option against that claim, discarding any option that is true of the passage but narrower than its argument. There, the option that slaveholders were naturally cruel and the option that women could be as cruel as men both contradict a passage that insists she began kind. The option saying she was corrupted by unchecked power is the passage's own stated explanation. Two options can each be true of one detail and still miss the argument, and the sentence that states a cause is worth more than the sentences reporting behaviour.

Two procedures on attribution: reading a period out of the sentences, and keeping a narrator's opinion off the author's account.

The syntax dates it before the content does.

AML 0129 Placing a Passage in Its Period by Its Prose

When a question asks where a passage comes from, the prose itself narrows the field before any content does. Long periodic sentences with capitalized abstractions and direct address to a reader point to the eighteenth century or the early republic. Elaborate subordination carrying moral commentary from an intrusive narrator points to the middle of the nineteenth. Plain declarative sentences about ordinary people, with dialect in the dialogue, point to realism after the Civil War. Sentences stripped down to subject and verb, with the emotion withheld, point to modernism after the First World War. Fragmented interior narration without transitions points to that same period's other wing. Content then confirms the guess: a passage about enslavement narrated in the first person is almost certainly a slave narrative of the eighteen forties or fifties. A modern writer can imitate an older manner, so treat the prose as evidence rather than as proof, and let a dated reference inside the passage override the style.

The teller is not the writer.

AML 0130 Telling Narrator From Author

Prose questions punish readers who take the narrator for the writer, and three checks prevent it. First, ask whether the narrator is a character inside the story, because a first-person narrator always is, and a character has interests to serve. Second, ask whether the details support the narrator's account, because when a narrator's confidence outruns the evidence the author is arranging that gap on purpose. Third, in third-person passages, watch for sentences that borrow a character's vocabulary without quotation marks. Free indirect discourse puts a character's view into the narrator's grammar, and a reader who misses it attributes an opinion to the book that actually belongs to a person inside it. The question may ask what the narrator believes, or it may ask what the passage shows, and those two differ often enough that the exam builds distractors out of the gap between them.

Two entries to close: the errors that cost the most marks, and the argument the whole unit rests on.

Three errors, and a costlier fourth.

AML 0131 The Three Traps in Prose Questions

Three errors account for most lost marks on prose questions. The first is answering a theme question with the subject, choosing an option that names what the passage is about rather than what it argues, and the cure is insisting on an option with a verb in it. The second is treating a narrator's judgment as the work's own, which the free indirect construction makes very easy, and the cure is asking whether the details support the sentence. The third is choosing an option that is true of the whole book rather than of the printed passage, which rewards prior knowledge and is exactly why the board's passages are self-contained. The cure there is answering only from what is on the page. A fourth error is rarer and costlier than any of those: deciding what a passage must mean from the author's reputation. The board prints passages without attribution for the questions that test reading, and supplies attribution only when the question is about knowledge.

Teller, shape, people, place, sentence, claim.

AML 0132 How Prose Means: The Method This Course Uses

This unit sets the instrument the course uses on every passage of fiction, nonfiction and drama that follows, and its argument is the one the poetry unit made: a claim about meaning has to be traceable to something on the page. The parts stand in order. First the teller, because who narrates decides what a reader may know, and the difference between a first-person narrator inside the story and an omniscient one above it changes the value of every sentence. A narrator who is a character has interests, and when the details quarrel with the account, the quarrel is the author's doing. Second the shape, which is plot: a situation established, complicated, turned and settled, with the climax defined as the decisive turn rather than the loudest event, and with conflict as the engine, external against a person or nature or society, internal against the self. Third the people, sorted on two independent axes, flat or round for depth and static or dynamic for change, and characterized directly by telling or indirectly through speech and act and the reactions of others. Fourth the place, which in American writing is rarely neutral, since the frontier and the village and the plantation and the tenement each permit and forbid particular lives, so a question about setting is a question about pressure. Fifth the sentence itself, where style lives and where a register shift announces that a different voice has entered. Sixth the claim, which is theme, written as a full sentence with a verb, because the board asks what a passage says and not what it is about. What this unit does not do is settle meaning by authority. A theme is a reading, and the course says whose reading it is, which is the same standard the exam applies when it asks which description is best rather than which is correct.

That closes unit two, and with it the craft units. Everything after this is American literature in order. You can take an unseen prose passage in six moves, ending on a one-sentence claim that you test against the last clause rather than the first. You can name a passage's form by eliminating five options on one distinguishing feature each, and you have seen that done on the exam's own Rowson passage, where abstractions sit at the table and stand at the gate, which is allegory and nothing else offered. You can build a theme in four steps by separating the sentences that evaluate from the sentences that describe, and you have seen that done on the exam's own Douglass passage, where the stated cause is unchecked power and not natural cruelty. You can date a passage from its syntax and then let its content confirm or overrule the guess. You can keep a narrator's opinion off the author's account through three checks. And you know the three standing traps, and the fourth, where a reputation decides a reading before the page does. Unit three begins the survey, at the beginning.