Capstone and Course Close

Unit nineteen ended on organized knowledge, confirmed by a second clue. This last unit gathers the whole course and closes it. Its governing idea is the course's own: the methods outlast the questions. The exam rewards reading once with care; the literature rewards rereading for a lifetime. We move in four steps: how the exam fits together and how to time it; then the six periods in review, one by one; then the three genres of question, poetry, drama, and fiction with nonfiction, with a chronology to carry and two full walk-throughs; and then what the course teaches by description, what it leaves out, credit, and the literature after the exam.

We begin with the exam itself: how its questions divide, and how to spend its ninety minutes.

First, the exam's shape.

ENL 1901 How the Exam Fits Together

The exam has about ninety-five questions in ninety minutes. By period: Middle Ages ten percent, sixteenth and early seventeenth century fifteen, Restoration and eighteenth century ten, Romantic twenty, Victorian twenty, twentieth century twenty-five. By genre: poetry forty-five, drama twenty, novels fifteen, short stories and nonfiction ten each. Six periods, five genres. Poetry is nearly half the exam.

Next, the clock.

ENL 1902 Timing Ninety-Five Questions in Ninety Minutes

Ninety-five questions in ninety minutes leaves a little under a minute each. Passage sets take longer, so answer quick knowledge questions briskly to bank time. Read each passage once with care, then answer its questions together, and do not let one hard question consume three. Under a minute each; bank time. Tutorials do not count against the ninety minutes.

Now the six periods in review, each in the order the exam lists it.

First, the Middle Ages.

ENL 1903 The Middle Ages in Review

The Middle Ages are ten percent of the exam, in three parts. Old English: alliterative half-lines and kennings, Beowulf's heroic code, The Dream of the Rood and the elegies, all in translation. Chaucer: the Tales' frame, the Prologue's portraits and irony, the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner, his couplets and rhyme royal. The rest: Gawain's challenge and girdle, Malory, the ballads, the mystery and morality plays, Julian and Margery Kempe. Ask first whether a passage is Old or Middle English, then whether it is heroic, courtly, comic or devotional.

Next, Tudor poets to Milton.

ENL 1904 The Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Century in Review

This is fifteen percent, in four groups. The sixteenth century: Wyatt and Surrey's sonnets, Sidney's sequence and Defence, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Marlowe's mighty line. Shakespeare: the sonnets, the comedies, histories, tragedies and romances, his blank verse and soliloquies. The early seventeenth century: Donne's conceits, Herbert's devotion, Jonson and the Cavaliers, Marvell, Bacon and the King James Bible. Milton: the early lyrics, Lycidas, Areopagitica and Paradise Lost, published after the Restoration by a Commonwealth man. Test first for the sonnet, blank verse or the conceit.

Then wit, satire and the novel.

ENL 1905 The Restoration and Eighteenth Century in Review

This is ten percent, in two parts. The Restoration: the reopened stage and its first actresses, the comedy of manners, Dryden's couplets, Rochester, Behn, Bunyan and Pepys. The eighteenth century: Pope's couplets, Swift's Gulliver and Modest Proposal, Addison and Steele, the novel from Defoe to Sterne, Johnson and Boswell, Gray's Elegy, sensibility and the Gothic. Listen for the closed couplet and ask what the wit exposes, and never attribute a satirical speaker's proposal to the author.

Now the two generations.

ENL 1906 The Romantic Period in Review

This is twenty percent. The first generation: Blake's paired Songs, Burns in Scots, Charlotte Smith, Wordsworth's Preface, Tintern Abbey, the Ode and The Prelude, Coleridge's Mariner, Kubla Khan and Biographia. The second: Byron's Harold and Don Juan, Shelley's West Wind, Ozymandias and Defence, Keats's odes and Negative Capability, and Hemans. Prose: Frankenstein, Austen's ironic novels, Scott, and Lamb, Hazlitt and De Quincey. Ask how a poem joins mind and world. Austen belongs here, though her irony is not lyric.

Then the Victorians.

ENL 1907 The Victorian Period in Review

This is twenty percent. Poetry: Tennyson, Browning's monologues, Barrett Browning, Arnold's Dover Beach, the Rossettis, Hopkins, Hardy, Housman and Kipling. Fiction: Dickens, the Brontës, Thackeray, Gaskell, George Eliot, Trollope, Collins, Hardy and Stevenson, in serials for a mass readership. Prose: Carlyle, Ruskin, Mill, Newman, Arnold and Pater. Drama: Wilde and Shaw. Separate speaker from poet and narrator from character, and check pen names and families: Currer Bell, George Eliot, the Brownings and the Rossettis.

Last, the largest share.

ENL 1908 The Twentieth Century in Review

This is twenty-five percent, the largest share. Modernism: Conrad, Yeats, Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Forster, Mansfield, Eliot, the war poets, Imagism and the Irish Revival. After nineteen thirty: Auden, Thomas, Orwell, Huxley, Waugh, Greene, Golding, Beckett, Osborne, Pinter, Stoppard, Larkin, Hughes, Plath, Heaney, Lessing, Spark, Carter and the Booker novelists. Beyond Britain: Achebe to White. Works after nineteen thirty appear by description, so use the distinctive detail, confirm with nationality and date, separate realist from absurd, and check whether a work answers a classic.

Now the genres of question, a chronology to carry, and two sets worked from start to finish.

Here is the poetry method.

ENL 1909 Poetry Questions in Review

Poetry is forty-five percent. Read the whole poem for its situation: who speaks, to whom, about what. Find the turn, in a sonnet's volta, an ode's return or a monologue's revelation. Name the tone from the diction. Identify the key figure and ask what it argues. Check the form, which often answers a period question. Then answer from the line the question points to, and eliminate options true of poetry in general but not of this poem, because an option can be true and still wrong.

Here is the drama method.

ENL 1910 Drama Questions in Review

Drama is twenty percent. Identify the kind: tragedy, comedy, comedy of manners, closet drama, realist or absurdist. Identify who speaks and to whom; a soliloquy reveals thought, dialogue conflict. Read for dramatic irony, what the audience knows that a character does not. Notice verse or prose, which Shakespeare shifts for rank and mood. For later drama, ask whether the play explains its situation by society or leaves it unexplained. Then cite the speech and its effect on stage, reading drama as performance.

Here is the fiction and nonfiction method.

ENL 1911 Fiction and Nonfiction Questions in Review

Novels, stories and nonfiction make thirty-five percent. For fiction, find the narrator and point of view, the narrator's attitude, the social facts and how character is shown. For a short story, look for the turn or epiphany near the end, as in Dubliners. For nonfiction, read an argument: thesis, opponent, key terms and tone, whether Swift's mask, Johnson's weight or Arnold's urbanity. For criticism, find the claim, evidence and turn. Then name the stance and evidence, and remember the narrator is not always the author.

Here is a chronology to carry.

ENL 1912 A Chronology to Carry

Carry a short chronology of landmarks. Beowulf; Chaucer's Tales in the late fourteenth century; Malory in the fifteenth; Spenser and Shakespeare at the end of the sixteenth; the King James Bible in sixteen eleven; the First Folio in sixteen twenty-three; the Restoration in sixteen sixty; Paradise Lost in sixteen sixty-seven; Pope's Essay on Criticism in seventeen eleven and Johnson's Dictionary in seventeen fifty-five; Lyrical Ballads in seventeen ninety-eight; Victoria from eighteen thirty-seven to nineteen-oh-one; the Origin in eighteen fifty-nine; Ulysses and The Waste Land in nineteen twenty-two; Godot in nineteen fifty-three; Midnight's Children in nineteen eighty-one. Hang the rest on the nearest landmark.

Here is a poem set worked in full.

ENL 1913 Working a Poem Set: A Full Walk-Through

Suppose the passage is Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning." Read for the situation: a speaker about to travel forbids his beloved to mourn, because their love is spiritual and absence cannot divide it. Find the central figure: the lovers' souls as the two feet of a compass. Apply the conceit method: unlike things, several precise parallels, and the argument that her firmness makes his circle complete and brings him home. Name the tone: tender, reasoning and calm. The argument by conceit points to the metaphysical poets, not the Cavaliers or the Petrarchan sonnet. For meaning, choose the conclusion, constancy, not the comparison. Eliminate options about love poetry in general, Petrarchan suffering or carpe diem urgency. The same sequence works for any poem set.

Here is a prose set worked in full.

ENL 1914 Working a Prose Set: A Full Walk-Through

Suppose the passage is Swift's "A Modest Proposal." Separate speaker from author: the proposer is calm and statistical, proposing that the children of the Irish poor be sold as food to the rich. Recognize the method: irony, in the deadpan voice of a reformer who believes he helps. Name the tone: businesslike on the surface, savage beneath, so Juvenalian. Identify the target: English exploitation of Ireland and the reasoning that treats people as commodities. The mask and target point to Augustan satire. For meaning, choose the satire's purpose, exposing cruelty, and reject any option that attributes the proposal to Swift or reads it as a serious plan. The calmest voice in satire is often the target.

Last, the course's limits stated plainly, how credit works, and what to read after the exam.

First, why recent works are described.

ENL 1915 The Writers This Course Teaches by Description

Works first published from nineteen thirty-one on are still in copyright, so this course describes them rather than quoting them: Auden, Orwell, Beckett, Larkin, Heaney, the Booker novelists and the postcolonial writers. The exam does the same, naming recent works and describing them. Described, not quoted. Expect description questions on recent works.

Next, what the course leaves out.

ENL 1916 What This Course Does Not Cover

Some topics are left out because no source on disk could carry them: Jonson's Volpone, Wordsworth's spots of time, Yeats's "Among School Children," and some living writers' work beyond basic facts. The optional essay section is not taught. A good anthology fills these gaps. Known gaps, stated plainly. Read one anthology alongside the course.

Then credit and scores.

ENL 1917 Credit, Scores and What Comes Next

The American Council on Education recommends credit for a score of fifty, worth six semester hours, but each college sets its own policy. The board's sheet describes an optional essay scored by the requesting college. Ask your college about its score, credit and the essay before you test. Fifty; six hours; ask first. This is ACE's recommendation, not a promise.

The last entry closes the course.

ENL 1918 The Literature After the Exam

The exam ends, and the literature it samples does not. This course has followed English literature from the Old English scop to the postcolonial novel: Beowulf's code and the exile's elegy; Chaucer's pilgrims; the Elizabethan sonnet and Shakespeare's stage; Donne's conceits and Milton's epic; Dryden and Pope's couplets and Swift's masks; the novel from Defoe to Austen; the Romantics from Blake to Keats; the Victorians' monologues, doubts and realist novels; the Modernists' fragments; and the writers after nineteen thirty who answered all of it, from Beckett's waiting tramps to Achebe's Okonkwo and Rhys's Antoinette. It taught methods: scanning a line, reading a conceit, a monologue, a satire and an argument, dating a passage, and reading a description of a work you cannot yet quote. Those methods will outlast the questions. Read widely in a good anthology, and return to the poems that held you. Read Tintern Abbey again in five years, as Wordsworth returned to the Wye, and it will have changed because you have.

This unit closed the course. We described the exam's periods and genres, and its clock of under a minute a question. We reviewed the Middle Ages, the Tudor and early Stuart writers to Milton, and the Restoration and eighteenth century. We reviewed the Romantics, the Victorians and the twentieth century, the largest share, known by description after nineteen thirty. We answered poetry, drama and fiction questions by their methods, hung the dates on a chronology, and worked Donne and Swift in full. And we stated what the course describes, what it leaves out, and how credit works, closing where the course began: the methods outlast the questions. This is the end of English Literature. Read the writers this course could only describe, now that you know where each of them stands.