English 11

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. Why is this course taught chronologically?
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   Because American writers answer each other, and out of order they look unconnected

2. Who is Emerson answering, and who answers Emerson?
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   He answers the Puritans; Whitman answers him

3. Define allusion.
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   A deliberate reference to an earlier text, assuming the reader knows it

4. What does Edwards say holds a person out of hell?
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   Nothing but the mere pleasure of God

5. What does Emerson tell the reader to do with received goodness?
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   Explore whether it is goodness rather than be hindered by the name

6. Show that Edwards and Emerson answer the same question.
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   Both ask what a person's own nature is worth. Edwards answers that it is heavy with wickedness, tends downward, and can do nothing to arrest its own fall, so only an external power sustains it. Emerson answers that it should be trusted absolutely and that every heart vibrates to the same true note. One says nothing and the other says everything, which makes them a disagreement rather than two topics. Both ask what a person's own nature is worth, and answer oppositely

7. What evidence is there that Emerson's reversal is deliberate?
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   He was raised in the New England Calvinist tradition, trained for its ministry, ordained, and resigned. The position he takes is against an inheritance he knew from the inside rather than one he encountered as an outsider. That biography converts an apparent difference of temperament into a considered refusal, which is what makes it a response rather than a contrast. He was trained in the tradition he is repudiating and left it

8. What do the two metal images accomplish?
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   Edwards makes wickedness "heavy as lead", pulling the self downward. Emerson makes the trustworthy self "that iron string", the thing every heart resonates to. Emerson keeps the metal and reverses its function, from dead weight to a vibrating instrument. Shared vocabulary turned to opposite ends is one of the clearest signs that a writer is answering rather than merely differing. Emerson keeps Edwards's metal and turns it from weight into an instrument

9. What does a reader lose by meeting Emerson without Edwards?
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   They read an essay about confidence. A reader who has met Edwards first reads a repudiation, and the insistence of Emerson's prose becomes legible as the pressure of what it is pushing against. The essay's most famous sentences are answers, and an answer read without its question sounds like an assertion nobody needed. The essay reads as assertion rather than as repudiation

10. State the method this course will use all year.
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    For every writer, ask what they had read and what they are refusing. That question converts a reading list into a conversation and makes comparison an argument rather than an observed coincidence. It is also exactly what standard RL.11-12.9 requires, since comparing how foundational works treat related themes means establishing that one could have known the other. Ask what each writer had read and what they are refusing

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. Define the plain style and give its justification.
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   Short words, concrete nouns and direct syntax, because ornament draws attention to the writer rather than the truth

2. Define typology.
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   Reading earlier events as foreshadowings of later ones

3. What does providence mean in this context?
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   That nothing is accidental, so every event is interpretable

4. Where does "a city upon a hill" come from?
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   The Sermon on the Mount

5. What does Winthrop say will happen if they deal falsely?
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   They will be made a story and a by-word through the world

6. Why is calling Puritan prose "simple" a mistake?
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   Because the plainness is a doctrine with a theological justification rather than a limit of skill. Ornament was held to direct attention to the preacher rather than the truth, so simplicity is a claim about the speaker's honesty and his relationship to his subject. The style was argued for, which makes it a rhetorical position rather than an absence of one. It is a doctrine with a justification, not a lack of skill

7. What does typology do to a migration?
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   It converts it into a meaning. A few hundred people crossing an ocean is an event; a few hundred people fulfilling a scriptural type is history with a direction. Applying the Sermon on the Mount to a shipload of English settlers claims that their voyage belongs to a pattern God established, which makes everything that follows interpretable rather than merely eventful. It converts an event into an instance of a divine pattern

8. Why is the conditional in the passage important?
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   "If we shall deal falsely" makes the sentence a warning rather than a boast. Visibility works both ways: a city on a hill can be seen failing as easily as succeeding. Winthrop is telling people who have not yet landed that their errors will be as public as their achievements, which is a very different speech from the one the phrase is usually quoted to support. It makes the passage a warning about visible failure, not a boast

9. How does providential logic raise the stakes?
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   If nothing is accidental, a failed colony cannot be bad luck; it must be a judgment, and it will be legible to everyone as one. The consequence of failure is therefore not hardship but disgrace, visible to the whole world and correctly interpreted by it. That is why the sentence ends on being made a story and a by-word rather than on any material loss. Failure becomes a legible judgment rather than misfortune

10. What does the later career of "a city upon a hill" show?
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    American politicians have used it for four centuries, almost always as a compliment to the country. Winthrop used it as a condition attached to a threat. The drift from warning to boast is itself evidence about how national self-images form: a phrase survives its context, keeps its prestige, and loses the clause that made it demanding. A warning became a boast, which shows how self-images form

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. When did Bradstreet emigrate, and with whom?
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   1630, on the same fleet as John Winthrop

2. How was her first book published?
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   In London in 1650, without her consent, arranged by her brother-in-law

3. What does Puritan doctrine require regarding worldly things?
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   Detachment from them

4. What does Bradstreet say about the goods in the first passage?
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   That they were God's own and never hers, and that the loss was just

5. Name three objects she points at in the second passage.
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   A trunk, a chest, and the store she counted best

6. What does the clause "when I could no longer look" reveal?
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   It dates the submission. She blesses God's name at the point where watching becomes impossible, not before, so the piety arrives when looking runs out rather than when conviction arrives. One subordinate clause tells the reader how long she stood there, and the poem never says anything further about it. The piety begins where watching becomes impossible

7. What are the demonstratives doing in the second passage?
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   "That trunk", "that chest" and "that store" are pointing words, and pointing requires something to point at. She is walking through a house that no longer exists and using grammar that reaches for objects that are not there. The syntax enacts the absence, which is a more exact representation of loss than any adjective would be. Pointing words reaching for objects that no longer exist

8. What changes when she says "under thy roof"?
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   She stops describing the house and begins addressing it. The building becomes a second person being told what it will never do again, which is the poem's only moment of direct address and is spent on a thing rather than on God. For a poem whose doctrine requires attachment to be directed elsewhere, that is a significant place to put it. She addresses the house directly, spending her only direct address on a thing

9. State the conflict the poem contains.
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   Doctrine holds that the goods were never hers and that attachment to them is error. The center of the poem is a detailed inventory of attachment, written by someone who remembers exactly where every object stood. The poem contains both and does not reconcile them until the closing lines oblige it to, which is what makes it a poem rather than a statement of belief. Required detachment against a detailed inventory of attachment

10. Why is the pious ending not the poem's meaning?
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    Because it was mandatory. A Puritan poem about loss had to close by turning to the house above, and any competent believer could have supplied that ending. The middle was not required: nothing obliged her to walk through the rooms naming furniture. Reading the conclusion as the content credits the poet with the one part she had no choice about. The ending was required and the middle was not

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. When and where was the sermon preached?
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   Enfield, Connecticut, 1741, during the Great Awakening

2. How did Edwards deliver it?
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   Reading from a manuscript in a level voice

3. Name the three parts of a Puritan sermon.
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   Text, doctrine, application

4. What is the sermon's central figure?
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   A person holding a spider or insect over a fire

5. What does the listener hang by?
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   A slender thread, with flames flashing about it

6. What does the relentless second person accomplish?
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   It denies the listener any position outside the danger. Five second-person pronouns in two short passages mean the sermon can never be heard as a description of sinners in general, which is the way a congregation would naturally prefer to hear it. The grammar removes the escape route before the images arrive. It prevents the listener from hearing it as being about someone else

7. Why is every verb in the present tense?
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   Because a future threat can be postponed and a present one cannot. Holds, abhors, burns, looks and hang report the situation as already the case rather than predicting it, which removes the interval in which a listener might resolve to deal with the problem later. The tense is doing the work that urgency usually requires volume for. A present threat cannot be postponed the way a future one can

8. What quality does the spider image import?
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   Casual indifference. Nobody holding a spider over a fire is engaged in a struggle or exerting effort, and the loathsomeness belongs to the holder's opinion rather than to anything the spider has done. The listener's position is not one of being punished after a contest; it is one of being considered, briefly, by something enormously larger. Effortless indifference rather than struggle or punishment

9. Why does the level delivery increase the effect?
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   A shouted sermon gives a listener something to react against, and reaction is a form of defense: one can find the preacher excessive and stop listening. A man reading terrible things calmly from a page offers nothing to resist, so the content arrives undiluted. Contemporary accounts report that the congregation interrupted him, which is the design working rather than failing. Calm delivery gives a listener nothing to react against

10. What does the sermon's structure tell you about the famous passages?
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    They are application, the last and longest of the three parts. That means they arrive after a doctrinal case has been laid out and are addressed to listeners who have already accepted the premises. The terror is not an opening gambit but a conclusion drawn from propositions the congregation had agreed to, which is why it could not be dismissed as mere frightening. They are the application, drawn from premises the congregation had already accepted

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. When and where was the Narrative published?
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   London, 1789

2. How did Equiano sell it?
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   By subscription, touring Britain to promote it

3. What was his purpose?
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   The abolition of the slave trade

4. What does he quote in the second passage?
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   The Golden Rule

5. Which writers inherit this genre?
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   Douglass and Jacobs

6. Why is the Middle Passage passage written clinically?
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   Because it is evidence presented to readers disposed to suspect exaggeration from an interested witness. Clinical description of closeness, heat, crowding and the resulting sickness cannot be dismissed as sensationalism, and a chain of physical causes reads as testimony. The restraint is a response to a specific anticipated objection rather than a temperamental preference. Clinical evidence cannot be dismissed as sensationalism

7. What does leaving the horror to the reader accomplish?
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   A conclusion a reader forms is more durable than one they are handed, and it also cannot be attributed to the writer's bias. Equiano supplies the conditions, the mechanism and the mortality, and the only judgment in the passage is the word "loathsome" applied to smells. Everything the reader concludes about the trade they concluded themselves. A conclusion the reader forms cannot be blamed on the writer's bias

8. Why is arguing from the Golden Rule the strongest available position?
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   Because it makes the case entirely from the audience's own stated beliefs. A reader who professes Christianity cannot reject the premise without abandoning something they claim, and cannot accept it without confronting the question Equiano asks. Arguments built from an opponent's commitments leave them nowhere neutral to stand. It argues from the audience's own professed commitments

9. Why is "nominal" the right word?
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   It makes a narrower and more defensible charge. He does not say his readers are not Christians, which would be an accusation about their souls and easily rejected. He says they are Christians in name, which is a claim about the gap between profession and conduct and can only be answered by changing the conduct. It charges a gap between profession and conduct, not unbelief

10. Describe the book's basic structure and what it accomplishes.
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    Chapters of restrained evidence punctuated by direct appeals grounded in the reader's own religion. The evidence earns the right to make the appeal, and the appeal converts the evidence from information into an obligation. That alternation is the slave narrative's founding form, and Douglass is still using it sixty years later. Restrained evidence alternating with appeals from the reader's own beliefs

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. When was the Autobiography written, and when published?
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   Written between 1771 and 1790; published after Franklin's death

2. What figure does the book invent?
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   The self-made man, whose worth comes from effort rather than birth

3. How does Franklin track his character?
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   With a list of thirteen virtues and a chart

4. What does he do with a wheelbarrow, and why?
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   Carries paper through the streets so as to be seen not being above his business

5. What does he say he would be proud of?
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   His humility, if he ever overcame his pride

6. What are the two separate claims in the first passage?
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   That he was industrious and frugal in reality, and that he avoided all appearances to the contrary. Those are different things, and Franklin asserts both without pretending the second follows from the first. He is describing a reputation as something built deliberately alongside the conduct it reports, which is the passage's real subject. Actual industry, and the deliberate management of its appearance

7. Why is the idea in that passage new?
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   Because the culture it emerged from understood character as given by God and merely confirmed by conduct. Franklin treats reputation as a thing a person constructs on purpose, like a business, and records arranging his own visibility without embarrassment. That is a different theory of the self, and the rest of American literature argues with it. It treats character as constructed rather than given

8. How does Franklin inherit the Puritans without their theology?
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   Winthrop's colony lived under observation and judgment by God; Franklin's tradesman lives under observation and judgment by customers. The chart of thirteen virtues is a spiritual diary with the salvation removed. The habit of continuous self-examination survives entirely intact while the thing being examined for changes from grace to reputation. The habit of living under observation survives with the observer changed

9. Analyze the sentence about pride.
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   It concedes the charge in the form of a joke. He describes pride as unkillable, warns that the reader will see it throughout the book, and closes by noting that conquering it would make him proud of his humility. The sentence is funny and it is also an accurate account of a real difficulty, and Franklin collects the credit for both at once. It concedes the charge as a joke and is accurate at the same time

10. What does missing the irony cost a reader?
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    They find a priggish man with a chart, which is the standard complaint about the book. A reader who notices the jokes finds someone who knows exactly how the project looks from outside and undertakes it anyway, which is both funnier and more interesting. It also matters for unit 5, since Fitzgerald is answering the ironic Franklin and not the earnest one. A comedian read as an earnest man with a chart

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. When was Common Sense published, and under what name?
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   January 1776, anonymously

2. Who did Paine write for?
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   Readers without classical education

3. What does he attack, beyond George III?
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   Monarchy as an institution

4. What is the satellite analogy?
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   That nature never makes the satellite larger than its primary planet

5. What happened to The American Crisis in December 1776?
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   Washington had it read aloud to the troops

6. Why is relocating the argument away from law the radical move?
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   Colonial argument up to 1776 was largely legal, conducted by lawyers in terms of charters, precedent and the rights of Englishmen. Paine moves the question into a domain, relative size, where any reader is a competent judge. Doing so asserts that ordinary people are entitled to settle the question, which is a more radical claim than anything he says about monarchy. It asserts that ordinary readers are entitled to judge the question

7. Assess the satellite analogy as an argument.
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   It is a strong figure and a weak argument. Nature has nothing to say about government, and the relative sizes of planets and moons are not evidence about constitutions. A reader should be able to admire how memorable it is and still notice that it establishes nothing, which is the discipline this course has applied to Henry and to Thoreau as well. Memorable and rhetorically strong, but it proves nothing

8. Analyze "the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot".
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   Two parallel noun phrases, both alliterating on s, both coined for the occasion and neither requiring explanation. The phrase is built to survive a single hearing and be repeated, which matters because the text was read aloud to soldiers rather than distributed for study. The construction follows from how it was going to be used. Built for the ear, to survive one hearing and be repeated

9. Why does Paine open the Crisis by conceding?
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   Because the audience had just been defeated repeatedly and knew it. Opening with denial or encouragement would have been transparently false to men who had been retreating for months. "These are the times that try men's souls" grants the situation before asking anything, which is what makes everything after it credible. Denying the defeats would be obviously false to the men who lived them

10. State the relationship between Paine's style and his argument.
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    The accessibility is not a simplification of a case made elsewhere in harder words. It is the case. Writing so that a farmer can settle the question asserts that the question belongs to farmers, and the choice of domestic and biblical images over Latin and legal citation is therefore a political act performed at the level of vocabulary. The plainness asserts that the question belongs to everyone

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. Name the four parts of the Declaration.
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   Preamble, statement of principles, grievances, conclusion declaring independence

2. How many grievances are listed?
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   Twenty-seven

3. Who is the "candid world"?
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   Impartial foreign observers, particularly France, Spain and the Netherlands

4. What did Congress remove from Jefferson's draft?
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   A passage blaming the king for the slave trade

5. Which later figures argue from the Declaration?
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   Douglass, Stanton and Lincoln

6. Set out the document as a syllogism and locate each part.
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   Major premise: a government destructive of these ends may be altered or abolished, which is the second paragraph. Minor premise: this government has been destructive of these ends, which is the entire grievance list. Conclusion: these colonies are therefore independent, which is the final paragraph. The Declaration is a syllogism with its middle term documented at length. Principles, grievances and conclusion are the three parts of one deduction

7. What do the proportions tell you?
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   The famous passage is one paragraph and the grievances run to twenty-seven specific charges, so roughly four fifths of the document is evidence. Its authors evidently expected the principles to be granted and the factual case to be challenged. An analysis that quotes the second paragraph and ignores the rest has skipped what the document thought it had to prove. Four fifths is evidence, so the facts were what needed proving

8. Why does every grievance begin with "He"?
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   It personalizes the case against a man rather than a nation, which was diplomatically useful: France could support a quarrel with George III more comfortably than a quarrel with Britain. The anaphora also makes twenty-seven separate complaints read as a single design rather than a series of disputes, which is what the minor premise needs them to be. It personalizes the case and makes the grievances read as one design

9. What does "let Facts be submitted to a candid world" reveal about the audience?
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   It is courtroom language, and a candid world means impartial observers rather than the opposing party. The audience being invited to judge is not Britain but the European powers whose recognition, money and navies the colonies needed. The document is a brief submitted to potential allies, which explains why it argues rather than merely announces. It addresses foreign powers whose recognition was needed

10. Why did the overreach of "all men are created equal" matter?
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    The principle was stated far more broadly than its authors' practice, in a document whose passage on the slave trade was struck by the body adopting it. That gap is exactly what Douglass, Stanton and Lincoln later use. A declaration that had described its principle narrowly enough to match its conduct would have been useless to every reformer who came after. A principle broader than its practice is what later reformers could use

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. What period does American Romanticism cover?
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   Roughly 1830 to 1865

2. Name the two accounts of the self it rejected.
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   The Puritan account of depravity and the Enlightenment account of reason as highest

3. What is Transcendentalism, and where was it centered?
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   The American branch of Romanticism, centered in Concord, Massachusetts

4. What is Dark Romanticism?
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   The countercurrent in Hawthorne, Poe and Melville, which denied that what is inside is good

5. What does Emerson ask for in the first passage?
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   An original relation to the universe

6. What does "original" mean in Emerson's demand?
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   First-hand rather than novel. He is not asking for a new relation nobody has had; he is asking to encounter God and nature directly rather than through the accounts of earlier generations. The complaint is that his age builds sepulchres and writes criticism, which means it reads about experience instead of having any. First-hand rather than novel

7. Show that the passage refuses both earlier positions.
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   Against the Puritans, it proposes that a person might reach God without scripture or ministry, which is a costly claim for a former minister to make. Against the Enlightenment, it dismisses biographies, histories and criticism, the products of rational scholarly method. The refusal is even handed: neither revealed nor measured knowledge satisfies the demand for direct encounter. It bypasses both revealed and measured knowledge

8. Explain why the transparent eyeball image is precise.
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   Transparent means nothing of the self obstructs the view, and an eyeball is nothing but receptivity, an organ with no purpose except to take in. The figure therefore describes a person reduced entirely to perception with the personality subtracted. It is mocked because it sounds absurd when visualized, and it is exact about the state Emerson is claiming. It describes a person reduced entirely to receptivity

9. Analyze "I am nothing; I see all."
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   It makes self-annihilation and total comprehension the same event, joined by a semicolon that asserts the connection without explaining it. Six words carry the whole Transcendentalist claim: that losing the ordinary self is the condition of seeing everything. Whether that is profound or unfalsifiable depends on the reader, which is precisely the problem the next lessons will pursue. Self-annihilation and total vision are asserted as one event

10. State the objection Hawthorne, Poe and Melville make.
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    That nothing in the claim can be tested. An intuition reaching truths reason cannot is by construction not answerable to reason, so there is no way to distinguish insight from conviction. The Dark Romantics accept Emerson's emphasis on the interior and deny his assumption that what is found there is good, which is why this unit ends with them. Untestable intuition, and no guarantee that the interior is good

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. When was "Self-Reliance" published?
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   1841

2. Where did the essays come from?
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   Journals and lectures

3. What is the unit of thought in an Emerson essay?
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   The sentence

4. What does he compare society to?
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   A joint-stock company

5. Name two of the four propositions in the first passage.
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   Envy is ignorance; imitation is suicide; one must accept oneself as one's portion; nothing nourishing comes but through one's own toil

6. What do the semicolons in the first passage accomplish?
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   They assert connection without specifying it. Four separate propositions are placed in a series and joined by punctuation that implies they belong together, with no reasoning supplied to show how. The reader is handed a genuine intellectual task rather than a gap in the argument, and whether they perform it determines what the sentence is worth to them. They assert a connection and leave the reader to construct it

7. Demonstrate that the structure is additive rather than sequential.
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   Remove "envy is ignorance" and the passage still works. Remove any paragraph of "Self-Reliance" and the essay still works, because no paragraph depends on a previous one having established something. The parts accumulate rather than build, which is what you would expect from a text assembled out of journal entries and delivered as lectures. Any sentence or paragraph can be removed without damage

8. Why would proving the case be self-defeating?
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   An essay demanding self-reliance cannot consistently ask a reader to rely on it. If Emerson supplied a complete argument, accepting his conclusion would be an act of deference to Emerson, which is precisely what the essay is against. The form has to leave the work undone or the content contradicts itself, so the method follows from the doctrine. Proof would require the reader to rely on Emerson

9. What makes the joint-stock company image effective?
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   A joint-stock company is voluntary. Nobody in the figure is oppressed; everyone has agreed, in exchange for the better securing of bread. That makes the charge harder than tyranny would be, because it locates the loss of liberty in a bargain people accepted rather than in a force imposed on them, and it leaves no villain to blame. It makes the surrender voluntary, which is a harder charge than tyranny

10. How should a student read Emerson?
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    By taking each sentence as a proposal and testing it against something they know. "Imitation is suicide" is either true of their experience or it is not, and Emerson supplies nothing to settle it. Reading passively produces either irritation at the lack of proof or a collection of slogans, and arguing back is the only reading the essays make room for. Test each sentence against your own experience

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. Define an aphorism.
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   A short self-contained statement claiming a general truth

2. Quote Emerson's most famous sentence in full.
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   "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."

3. Which three professions does he name?
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   Statesmen, philosophers and divines

4. What does he instruct the reader to do tomorrow?
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   Speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words, though it contradict everything said today

5. What is the other aphorism examined here?
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   "To be great is to be misunderstood"

6. What does dropping "foolish" do to the claim?
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   It converts a defensible claim into an indefensible one. Without the adjective, the sentence says that holding a position from one day to the next marks a small mind, which nobody can defend. With it, the claim is that consistency maintained for its own sake against new evidence is a failing, which is arguable and probably true. One word carries the entire difference. It turns an arguable claim into one nobody could defend

7. Why are statesmen, philosophers and divines the right targets?
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   Their authority rests on having held positions publicly, so changing their minds is expensive in a way it is not for other people. Emerson aims the insult precisely at those with a professional incentive to remain consistent regardless of evidence, which makes the charge specific rather than general grumbling about stubbornness. Their authority depends on having held positions publicly

8. What is the strongest objection to the instruction that follows?
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   A person who speaks in hard words today and contradicts it tomorrow is unreliable in every practical matter. Contracts, promises, institutions and friendships all depend on people saying tomorrow what they said today. Emerson offers no answer to this and does not appear to think one is needed, which is a real limitation in the essay. It makes a person unreliable in every practical matter

9. Name the fallacy in how "to be great is to be misunderstood" is used.
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   Emerson asserts that greatness implies being misunderstood. The sentence is almost always deployed to mean that being misunderstood implies greatness, which is affirming the consequent and is invalid. The reversal is what makes it useful to every crank in history, and noticing the direction of the implication is the whole of the analysis. Affirming the consequent: misunderstood does not imply great

10. State the procedure for analyzing any aphorism.
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    Restore the full sentence, identify the qualifying words, state the claim in plain prose, and ask whether it is true. An aphorism that survives that treatment is worth quoting. Most do not survive it intact, including two of Emerson's most famous, and finding that out is a more useful exercise than collecting quotations. Restore, identify qualifiers, restate plainly, then test

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. How long did Thoreau live at Walden, and when was the book published?
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   Two years and two months, from 1845; published 1854

2. What structural change does the book make to the chronology?
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   It compresses two years into one, running summer to spring

3. What did the house cost?
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   Twenty-eight dollars, twelve and a half cents

4. Whose land was the cabin on?
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   Emerson's

5. Why does he say he left?
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   He had several more lives to live and could not spare more time for that one

6. Why does the conditional in the first passage matter?
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   "See if I could not learn what it had to teach" does not assert that the woods teach anything. It proposes to find out. That is the grammar of an experiment rather than a sermon, and it distinguishes Thoreau from Emerson, who asserts. The difference is visible in a single clause and it runs through both books. It proposes to find out rather than asserting a result

7. What do the itemized accounts accomplish?
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   They make the claim checkable. A reader who doubts that a person can live on very little is handed the figures, to the half cent, and invited to dispute them. No Emerson essay offers anything a reader could audit. Thoreau converts a Transcendentalist claim into something with evidence attached, which is the book's methodological innovation. They make a Transcendentalist claim auditable

8. State the standard objection and assess it.
   Show the full solution

   The land was Emerson's, the pond is a mile and a half from Concord, he dined with the Emersons and took laundry home. All of that is accurate and none of it touches the hypothesis, which was that most labor is unnecessary rather than that a person can survive without society. Walking to town does not falsify a thesis about expenditure. Accurate, and it refutes a claim Thoreau never made

9. What is doing the work in "Simplify, simplify"?
   Show the full solution

   The repetition enacts exactly the excess it recommends against. Saying it once would have been sufficient, and Thoreau knows that, which is why the doubled word is a joke as well as an instruction. He is a funnier writer than his reputation allows, and noticing the humor changes how the whole book reads. The repetition performs the excess it warns against, as a joke

10. Why does the ending matter to how the book should be read?
    Show the full solution

    He leaves, and says he left for as good a reason as he went. The book therefore refuses to be a program: it reports an experiment, gives the results, and declines to instruct anyone to repeat it. That refusal is what separates Walden from a manifesto and is the part most often ignored by both its admirers and its mockers. It reports an experiment and refuses to prescribe it

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. What was the essay originally called, and when was it published?
   Show the full solution

   "Resistance to Civil Government", 1849

2. What was the occasion?
   Show the full solution

   His 1846 arrest for refusing a poll tax, protesting slavery and the Mexican War

3. How long was he in jail, and why did it end?
   Show the full solution

   One night; someone paid the tax against his wishes

4. What three options does he set out?
   Show the full solution

   Obey, amend while obeying, or transgress at once

5. What is his practical proposal?
   Show the full solution

   Withdraw practical support, chiefly by refusing taxes, and accept the consequences

6. Split the first sentence and assess each half.
   Show the full solution

   "Law never made men a whit more just" is a universal negative about all law at all times, asserted with no evidence anywhere in the essay and defeated by a single counterexample. "The well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice" is a specific claim about complicity, supported by citizens funding a war and slavery through taxes, and it is the essay's real contribution. An unsupported universal joined to a supported particular

7. What does fair presentation of the three options accomplish?
   Show the full solution

   It makes the choice an argument rather than an assertion. Thoreau states obedience, amendment while obeying, and immediate transgression without weakening any of them, then rejects the second on the ground that the machine keeps running during the delay. A reader is given enough to disagree, which is what distinguishes this passage from the unsupported universal. It gives the reader enough to disagree with the choice

8. Identify the warrant in the prison sentence.
   Show the full solution

   That a just person must share the condition of those unjustly treated. Nothing in the sentence argues for it, and an opponent would contest exactly there, holding that a just person is more useful at liberty working for change. Locating the warrant identifies the real point of disagreement, which the memorable phrasing conceals. That a just person must share the condition of the wronged

9. What does the night in jail reveal about the proposal?
   Show the full solution

   It ended because a relative paid the tax against his wishes, which is precisely the failure mode of the method. A protest that consists of withholding money can be quietly canceled by anyone willing to supply the money, so the cost Thoreau needed to impose on the state was never imposed. The essay does not address this. A withheld payment can be quietly supplied by someone else

10. Why must influence and soundness be assessed separately?
    Show the full solution

    That an argument changed history is a fact about its reception, not evidence about its premises. Citing influence as proof commits the same error as citing popularity, and plenty of unsound arguments have been enormously influential. Both questions are worth answering, and an essay that runs them together has answered neither. Influence is a fact about reception, not about reasoning

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. What did Fuller edit, and from when?
   Show the full solution

   The Dial, the Transcendentalist journal, from 1840

2. When was Woman in the Nineteenth Century published?
   Show the full solution

   1845

3. What does Fuller say woman needs?
   Show the full solution

   Not to act or rule as a woman, but as a nature to grow and a soul to live freely

4. What occupation does she name?
   Show the full solution

   Sea-captains

5. What event did the book precede, and by how long?
   Show the full solution

   Seneca Falls, by three years

6. Why is arguing from Transcendentalist premises so effective here?
   Show the full solution

   Her opponents in Concord cannot reject the premise without rejecting their own central doctrine. Fuller does not argue that a soul has a direct relation to truth; she takes it from Emerson, in Emerson's vocabulary, and draws the inference. The argument is constructed so that agreeing with Emerson entails agreeing with her. Rejecting her premise means rejecting the movement's own doctrine

7. What does relocating the question away from female qualities avoid?
   Show the full solution

   Any claim about women's special capacities invites a dispute about whether those capacities exist, which is a debate her opponents would have been happy to conduct. Fuller makes no claim about women except that they are souls, so the only way to meet her is to deny that, and nobody in her audience was willing to. It removes the ground every opposing argument stood on

8. Why is the sea-captains example chosen?
   Show the full solution

   Because it is the occupation her readers would find most absurd, and she grants it without hesitation. Testing a principle at its most comfortable point proves nothing; testing it where it costs something is the only test that counts. The example is extreme on purpose, and the casualness of "if you will" is part of the effect. It tests the principle at its most expensive point

9. What must a reader who balks at the sea-captains line explain?
   Show the full solution

   Where the line falls and why. Having accepted that a soul must unfold its own powers freely, they need a principled reason for stopping short of one occupation, and the premise they have accepted supplies none. The example is constructed so that refusing it requires abandoning something already granted. Where the limit falls, and on what principle

10. Why is Fuller's argument stronger than Emerson's?
    Show the full solution

    Because it is deductive. Emerson asserts and leaves the reader to test the assertion against experience, which is a method with no way of settling anything. Fuller takes a premise the movement has already granted and shows where it leads, which produces a conclusion the reader is committed to rather than one they are invited to consider. Hers is deductive; Emerson's is assertion

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. What was Hawthorne's family connection to Salem?
   Show the full solution

   He was descended from a judge at the witch trials

2. What term did he use for his fiction, and why?
   Show the full solution

   Romance, claiming latitude to depart from ordinary probability

3. What natural explanation does the story offer?
   Show the full solution

   That Brown fell asleep and dreamed the witch-meeting

4. Does the story confirm it?
   Show the full solution

   No; it says "be it so, if you will" and leaves it open

5. What is carved on Brown's tombstone?
   Show the full solution

   No hopeful verse

6. Show that the story works on either reading.
   Show the full solution

   If the witch-meeting happened, Brown's neighbors are secretly damned and his suspicion is correct. If he dreamed it, his own mind produced the accusation against everyone he loved. Both are fully supported by the text, and Hawthorne grants the natural explanation without endorsing it, which keeps both live to the last line. Either his neighbors are damned or his own mind invented it

7. Why does it not matter which reading is true?
   Show the full solution

   Because the consequence is identical. Whichever happened, Brown spends fifty years unable to listen to a psalm, dies in gloom, and receives no hopeful verse. Leaving the cause unsettled while fixing the outcome is what allows the story to argue that suspicion does its damage regardless of whether it is warranted. The outcome is the same either way

8. Analyze the list of adjectives.
   Show the full solution

   "Stern, sad, darkly meditative, distrustful, if not desperate" escalates across five terms, with the last hedged by "if not" as though the narrator is unwilling to commit to the worst. Hawthorne describes the deterioration with exactly the precision he refuses to apply to its cause, which reverses where a reader expects the certainty to be. Precise about the damage and deliberately vague about the cause

9. What does the tombstone detail accomplish?
   Show the full solution

   The judgment is delivered by the community rather than by the narrator: they carved no hopeful verse. The story's last fact is what other people concluded about Brown, which returns the theme of judgment to the very neighbors he spent fifty years silently condemning. The reversal is quiet and complete. The community judges the man who spent his life judging them

10. State Hawthorne's objection to Transcendentalism.
    Show the full solution

    Not that the self is unreliable in theory but that it has no way of checking itself. Emerson says trust yourself; Brown trusts what he saw, or thought he saw, and it destroys him and everyone around him. The story was published six years before "Self-Reliance", so it is the objection arriving before the claim rather than in reply to it. Self-trust supplies no way of checking the self

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. Where and when did Poe set out the unified effect?
   Show the full solution

   In an 1842 review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales

2. State the theory.
   Show the full solution

   Conceive a single effect first, then invent the incidents that establish it

3. What genre did Poe invent, and when?
   Show the full solution

   The detective story, in 1841

4. What does "The Philosophy of Composition" claim?
   Show the full solution

   That "The Raven" was written backwards from decisions about length, tone and refrain

5. How many times does "upon" appear in the quoted sentence?
   Show the full solution

   Five

6. Test the theory on the opening of "Usher".
   Show the full solution

   Bleak walls, vacant eye-like windows, rank sedges and decayed trees are four details of decay, none of which does any plot work. Nothing in the sentence is needed to understand what happens later. It exists to produce a state in the reader, which is exactly what the theory predicts a first sentence would do. Four decay details doing no plot work at all

7. What does the repetition of "upon" accomplish?
   Show the full solution

   The eye moves from item to item with no release, and each repetition restarts the same movement without concluding it. The syntax enacts the depression the sentence names at its end, so the reader experiences the accumulation before being told what it amounts to. It is the same technique unit 1 found in Bradstreet's demonstratives. It enacts the accumulation the sentence names at the end

8. Why is the emotion named last?
   Show the full solution

   Because the reader has already produced it by going through the catalog. Naming "an utter depression of soul" first would tell the reader what to feel; naming it last confirms what they have felt. A feeling a reader has generated is more durable than one they have been assigned, which is the same principle the pathos lesson in English 10 established. The reader produces the feeling first and receives its name after

9. What does the theory explain about Poe's plots?
   Show the full solution

   That they are thin because incident is only a means. "Usher" is a visit and a collapse; "The Tell-Tale Heart" is a murder and a confession. If the effect is primary and events are invented to produce it, then a story needs only as much plot as the effect requires, and the thinness stops being a weakness and becomes a consequence. Thin plots follow from making effect primary

10. Place Poe against Emerson.
    Show the full solution

    Both make the interior of a person the decisive place. Emerson finds the currents of the Universal Being circulating through him. Poe finds a man who murders over an eye and hears a heart beneath the floorboards. They agree entirely on where to look and disagree entirely about what is there, which is the Dark Romantic position in one comparison. Both locate truth inside; they disagree about what is inside

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. When and where was "Bartleby" published?
   Show the full solution

   Putnam's Magazine, 1853

2. Who narrates, and what is his profession?
   Show the full solution

   An elderly Wall Street lawyer

3. What is Bartleby's formula?
   Show the full solution

   "I would prefer not to"

4. What rumor does the narrator report at the end?
   Show the full solution

   That Bartleby had worked in the dead letter office

5. What is the story's last line?
   Show the full solution

   "Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!"

6. Why is "prefer" the story's most important word?
   Show the full solution

   It makes the statement grammatically about preference rather than refusal, and conditional rather than flat. A refusal can be argued with, overruled or punished; a stated preference offers nothing to engage. The lawyer cannot dispute what Bartleby prefers, so the formula leaves him with no purchase whatever, which is exactly its function. A preference offers nothing to argue with, unlike a refusal

7. What does the narrator's reasoning reveal about him?
   Show the full solution

   That his entire repertoire depends on the other person behaving recognizably. He states plainly that uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence would have led to immediate dismissal, so it is the absence of ordinary human reaction that paralyzes him. The story is measuring the limits of a decent man's equipment rather than his goodwill. He can handle anger but not calm, so decency has no procedure

8. Describe the pattern of the narrator's responses.
   Show the full solution

   He accommodates, then moves his offices to escape the problem, then disclaims responsibility to the new tenants, then visits the prison and pays for better food. Every response is kind and none of them addresses anything, which is the story's argument about what ordinary decency can and cannot do when it meets something outside its categories. Consistently kind and consistently ineffective

9. Why does the story withhold Bartleby's reason?
   Show the full solution

   A reason would convert him into a case with a cause, and the narrator could then respond appropriately, which would make the story about one man's misfortune. The withholding keeps it about the limits of ordinary decency when confronted with something it has no procedure for. Supplying a motive replaces Melville's technique with a more comfortable one. A reason would make it a case with a remedy rather than a limit

10. Give three readings of the final line.
    Show the full solution

    It may equate them, making Bartleby an emblem of the human condition. It may contrast them, lamenting one man and the species that failed him. Or it may be the narrator reaching for significance because he cannot bear the alternative, which is that nothing here can be summed up at all. The story supports all three. Equation, contrast, or a narrator reaching for a meaning that is not there

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. When was Leaves of Grass published, and by whom?
   Show the full solution

   1855, published by Whitman himself

2. What essay had Whitman read, and what did it ask for?
   Show the full solution

   Emerson's "The Poet", 1844, which called for an American poet

3. Define free verse.
   Show the full solution

   Poetry with no regular meter and no rhyme, organized by the line

4. Where does Whitman's long line derive from?
   Show the full solution

   The King James Bible, with parallelism replacing meter

5. What does the poet say when the child asks what the grass is?
   Show the full solution

   That he does not know what it is any more than the child does

6. What holds a Whitman line together, if not meter?
   Show the full solution

   Parallelism: repeated grammatical structure. "I celebrate myself, and sing myself" gives two verbs and one object in identical construction, and the technique runs through the whole poem. The ear registers regularity of syntax where it would otherwise register regularity of stress, which is why calling the verse unstructured is simply inaccurate. Repeated grammatical structure rather than repeated stress

7. What does the lengthening of the opening lines accomplish?
   Show the full solution

   Nothing forces it, since free verse imposes no line length, so the choice is entirely the poet's. The three lines grow from six syllables to thirteen while the claim grows from one self celebrating itself to every atom of one person belonging equally to another. The form widens as the assertion widens, and a reader feels the enlargement before analyzing it. The line widens exactly as the claim widens

8. Why is the admission of ignorance significant?
   Show the full solution

   A poem written to answer Emerson's call for a national bard opens its most famous passage by saying the poet does not know what grass is. That declines the authority the role would normally carry, and it makes the answers that follow proposals rather than pronouncements, which is consistent with a poem that refuses to be separate from its reader. A national bard declining the authority of the role

9. What does the accumulation of answers argue?
   Show the full solution

   Five or more answers arrive, each introduced by "or I guess", and the list does not narrow toward a conclusion. The poem treats a question as an occasion for proliferation rather than resolution, which is a claim about how meaning works: that a thing can support many true descriptions and that choosing one would be a loss. That meaning proliferates rather than resolves

10. Explain how the form makes a political argument.
    Show the full solution

    Metered verse inherits its rules from English poetry and from the classes with the education to teach them. A poem in unmetered lines, self-published in a plain edition with an engraving of the author in work clothes and no name on the title page, asserts that poetry requires no inherited authority. The form states the same claim as the content. Unmetered lines deny that poetry needs inherited rules

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. Define a Whitman catalog.
   Show the full solution

   An extended unranked list of people, places or occupations

2. Name four figures from the quoted catalog.
   Show the full solution

   A contralto, a carpenter, a pilot, a whaling mate, a duck-shooter, deacons, a spinning-girl

3. What device carries the lists?
   Show the full solution

   Anaphora, with the same opening word repeated

4. How does Whitman answer the charge of contradiction?
   Show the full solution

   "Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes"

5. What tense are the catalog lines in?
   Show the full solution

   Present

6. Why is each line a complete independent clause?
   Show the full solution

   It makes each person grammatically self-sufficient. Nobody in the catalog depends on anyone else for their sentence to work, and the lines could be reordered without damage. The form of the sentences is the form of the claim: these people are of equal standing and none is subordinate to another. Grammatical self-sufficiency enacts equal standing

7. What does the absence of transitions accomplish?
   Show the full solution

   Transitions imply relationship and often subordination: one thing follows from, or contrasts with, or matters more than another. Placing lines side by side with nothing between them asserts that no relationship requires explaining and that no item ranks above another. Omission is doing the argumentative work. It refuses to rank or subordinate any item

8. What is significant about the foreplane line?
   Show the full solution

   It is a technical observation about a woodworking tool, more precise and more attentive than anything the poem says about the contralto singing in the organ loft. Whitman is refusing to give the fine art better observation than the trade, and the refusal appears as a fact about the writing rather than as a statement. The trade gets more precise attention than the fine art

9. Why does the length of the catalogs matter?
   Show the full solution

   A list of five implies that five were chosen, which reintroduces selection and therefore ranking. A list that runs for dozens of lines implies that the poem would have continued and that the stopping point is arbitrary. The reader's exhaustion is part of the argument, because the claim being made is that nobody is left out. Length implies inclusiveness where brevity implies selection

10. Assess Whitman's answer to the charge of contradiction.
    Show the full solution

    A poem claiming to contain everyone will contain incompatible things, which is a real logical problem. Whitman concedes it and asserts scale instead of solving it, which converts the objection into a description of the speaker. It is either the poem's boldest stroke or an evasion dressed as confidence, and pressing the point requires explaining why a self should be consistent, which the poem never granted. He concedes and asserts scale, refusing the objection's terms

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. How many poems did Dickinson write, and how many did she publish?
   Show the full solution

   About 1,800 written; fewer than a dozen published in her lifetime

2. What are fascicles?
   Show the full solution

   Small hand-bound booklets into which she sewed her manuscripts

3. What did early editors do to the poems?
   Show the full solution

   Replaced the dashes with commas and added titles she never wrote

4. Which edition restored her punctuation, and when?
   Show the full solution

   Thomas Johnson's edition, 1955

5. State the poem's argument in one sentence.
   Show the full solution

   Truth is too bright to be told directly and must arrive gradually or it blinds

6. What does the first dash do that a comma would not?
   Show the full solution

   A comma joins the instruction and the reason into one continuous statement. The dash holds them apart and makes the reader wait between the advice and its justification, which enacts the gradualness the poem is recommending. The punctuation performs the content, and substituting a comma removes the performance entirely. It makes the reader wait, enacting the gradualness the poem recommends

7. Why does the poem end on a dash?
   Show the full solution

   There is no full stop, so the argument is not closed. A poem about truths that cannot be delivered all at once ends with its own sentence left open, which is consistent rather than incomplete. Editors who replaced that dash with a period were correcting the poem into saying the opposite of what it argues. It leaves the sentence open, as the poem's own argument requires

8. What do the capitals accomplish?
   Show the full solution

   Circuit, Delight, Truth, Lightning and Children are given the status of proper names, so Truth becomes an entity with behavior rather than an abstraction with a definition. It can dazzle and blind, which are things agents do. Capitalization converts concepts into characters, which is why the poem can describe what Truth does. Ordinary nouns become entities with behavior

9. Identify the pun in the second line and say what it does.
   Show the full solution

   "Success in Circuit lies" means both that success consists in indirectness and that a circuit involves lying. A poem instructing the reader to tell the truth slant contains a word for falsehood in its second line, which acknowledges the risk in its own advice without abandoning it. The pun is the poem's honesty about its own recommendation. "Lies" means both consists and deceives, admitting the risk

10. Compare her method with Whitman's.
    Show the full solution

    Whitman answers a question about grass with five images and keeps going; Dickinson states a whole theory of communication in forty words and stops. Both refuse to settle, and the refusals take opposite forms: one proliferates until no single answer can dominate, the other compresses until the reader must supply what has been left out. Both refuse to settle, one by proliferating and one by compressing

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. Define common meter.
   Show the full solution

   Alternating eight and six syllable lines, rhyming second and fourth; the meter of hymns

2. Define slant rhyme.
   Show the full solution

   A partial match, usually sharing consonants and missing on the vowel

3. Who is expected in the second stanza?
   Show the full solution

   The King

4. What arrives instead?
   Show the full solution

   A fly

5. Give the poem's last line exactly.
   Show the full solution

   "I could not see to see -"

6. What does hymn meter contribute to a poem about dying?
   Show the full solution

   It carries an association with worship and consolation before a word is read, since the rhythm is the rhythm of Protestant hymns. A nineteenth-century reader would have heard the promise of a good death in the form itself. Applying it to a deathbed where an insect arrives instead of the King sets the form against the content and makes the disappointment structural. The rhythm promises consolation the content withholds

7. Where does the only true rhyme fall, and why does that matter?
   Show the full solution

   On "me" and "see", in the last stanza, around the fly's interposition. Room and Storm, and Firm and Room, are slant. The poem withholds resolution through the stanzas of religious expectation and grants it exactly where the interruption occurs, so the one moment that sounds resolved is the least consoling. On the fly's arrival, so the only resolution is the least consoling moment

8. Analyze "With Blue - uncertain - stumbling Buzz -".
   Show the full solution

   Three adjectives, each isolated by dashes, so they arrive separately rather than as a phrase. A dying perception receives the world in pieces, and the punctuation makes the reader receive it the same way. Printed as "With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz" the line reports the same words and none of the effect, which is why the dashes are evidence. The dashes deliver the fly in pieces, as a failing perception would

9. What is happening in the last line?
   Show the full solution

   The verb repeats where a reader expects a different one, producing a sentence that cannot be paraphrased without loss. Seeing in order to see is either a tautology or a description of a faculty failing at its own operation. The poem's final gesture is to break grammar at exactly the point where perception breaks. The sentence fails at the moment perception does

10. State how the poem's formal elements work together.
    Show the full solution

    Hymn meter promises consolation, slant rhyme declines to close the stanzas, dashes stop the sentences short of arrival, and the last line refuses to complete its own meaning. Every formal element withholds something, and the poem's subject is a withholding, so the form and the claim turn out to be a single refusal rather than two. Every formal element withholds, and the subject is a withholding

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. When were Whitman and Dickinson born?
   Show the full solution

   Whitman 1819, Dickinson 1830

2. Did they read each other?
   Show the full solution

   So far as the record shows, no

3. State the problem they shared.
   Show the full solution

   Inherited English forms did not fit what they had to say

4. How does each solve it?
   Show the full solution

   Whitman abandons meter; Dickinson keeps the meter and breaks everything else

5. What does Dickinson's speaker call herself?
   Show the full solution

   Nobody

6. Contrast the two openings' relation to the reader.
   Show the full solution

   Whitman asserts identity: what he assumes the reader shall assume, and every atom of him belongs equally to them, so the reader is absorbed into the speaker. Dickinson proposes conspiracy: she is Nobody, asks whether the reader is too, and swears them to secrecy. One dissolves the boundary and the other recruits an ally against everyone. Absorption against conspiracy

7. What do both openings refuse?
   Show the full solution

   Addressing a general public from a position of authority, which is what a nineteenth-century poem normally did. Whitman refuses by dissolving the boundary between poet and reader so that no one is being addressed from above. Dickinson refuses by shrinking the audience to two people. Opposite methods aimed at the same convention. The authoritative address to a general public

8. How does each poet's publishing choice fit their poems?
   Show the full solution

   Whitman printed his own book, sent it to Emerson and used the reply as advertising, which suits poems addressed to a nation. Dickinson sewed hers into booklets and put them in a drawer, which suits poems addressed to one person at a time under conditions of secrecy. The publishing history is consistent with the work rather than incidental to it. One addressed a nation and one addressed one reader at a time

9. Compare the two first persons.
   Show the full solution

   Whitman's "I" is expansive, claims to contain multitudes, and grows as the poem proceeds. Dickinson's is a Nobody who fears being advertised and hides. Both are constructions rather than autobiographies, and reading either as a diary misses the design: each speaker was built to make a particular relation to the reader possible. Both are constructions, one expansive and one concealed

10. Write the comparative claim.
    Show the full solution

    "Both poets faced an inherited English prosody that could not carry what they needed to say, and both began by redefining the reader's relation to the speaker, but Whitman dissolved the boundary between them while Dickinson made the reader a co-conspirator, which is why his line expands to include everything and hers contracts until only two people can hear it." Shared problem, opposite redefinitions of the reader, and the formal consequence

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. When was Incidents published, and under what name?
   Show the full solution

   1861, under the name Linda Brent

2. How long was the authorship doubted, and who established it?
   Show the full solution

   Over a century; Jean Fagan Yellin established it in the 1980s

3. Give the dimensions of the crawlspace.
   Show the full solution

   Nine feet by seven, three feet at the highest point

4. Whom does the book address?
   Show the full solution

   Free Northern women readers

5. How does the book say her story ends?
   Show the full solution

   With freedom, not in the usual way with marriage

6. What does the list of the reader's qualifications accomplish?
   Show the full solution

   Purity sheltered from childhood, freedom to choose one's affections, and homes protected by law are three conditions Jacobs did not have. Listing them establishes the difference between reader and writer before any request is made, so the appeal that follows arrives as a statement of circumstance rather than as a plea for indulgence. It names three conditions the reader had and Jacobs did not

7. Why does she use the sentimental framework rather than reject it?
   Show the full solution

   Her audience read sentimental novels in which a woman's virtue is the plot, and that framework would have been applied to her whether she invoked it or not. Using it and demonstrating that its conditions did not apply to her is far stronger than rejecting it, because it argues inside the moral system her readers actually held. It argues inside the moral system her readers already held

8. Why is the crawlspace passage written without complaint?
   Show the full solution

   Because the reader computes the horror themselves. Nine feet by seven, three feet high, no light or air, held for nearly seven years: the measurements do the work and an adjective would only invite the charge of exaggeration that Jacobs, whose authorship was doubted for a century, had every reason to anticipate. Equiano used the same restraint for the same reason. Measurements cannot be dismissed as exaggeration

9. What does Jacobs write about that Douglass does not?
   Show the full solution

   The sexual exploitation of enslaved women. Douglass's Narrative could not address it directly, and Jacobs makes it the center of her book while managing an audience whose moral conventions made it nearly unspeakable. That subject is the reason the direct addresses and the sentimental framework are necessary rather than decorative. The sexual exploitation of enslaved women

10. What does the ending's refusal accomplish?
    Show the full solution

    A sentimental novel ends in a marriage that resolves everything, and Jacobs names that convention in order to decline it. She ends free and without a home of her own, and says so plainly. The refusal insists that freedom was an outcome rather than a happy ending, which is more honest and much harder for a reader to set down. It makes freedom an outcome rather than a resolution

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. When was the Second Inaugural delivered, and how long is it?
   Show the full solution

   4 March 1865; about seven hundred words

2. Name four things a victory speech would contain that this one omits.
   Show the full solution

   Claims of credit, lists of victories, names of generals, condemnation of the enemy

3. What does Lincoln name as the cause of the war?
   Show the full solution

   Slavery

4. What does he say about both sides' prayers?
   Show the full solution

   That both could not be answered and neither has been answered fully

5. Who called the speech a sacred effort?
   Show the full solution

   Frederick Douglass

6. What is "somehow" doing in the third paragraph?
   Show the full solution

   It is the only soft word in a sentence that otherwise states the cause of the war without hedging. It concedes that people disagreed about the mechanism, about extension, economics and states' rights, while insisting that everybody knew what the interest at issue was. The distinction is precise and generous and it costs the claim nothing. It concedes disagreement about mechanism while insisting on the cause

7. What does the grammar of the second passage accomplish?
   Show the full solution

   Both read, both pray, each invokes, the prayers of both, that of neither: five constructions treating the two sides as one subject. A speech given by the winning side five weeks before surrender refuses to use a grammar of victor and defeated, and the reconciliation is performed in syntax before it is proposed as policy. It makes the two sides a single grammatical subject

8. What does conceding the shared Bible cost and buy?
   Show the full solution

   It grants the enemy sincerity without granting that they were right. Lincoln does not say the Confederate cause was just; he refuses to say its people were insincere in their faith. That is the minimum concession that makes charity coherent, since charity toward people one has described as cynical would be condescension rather than charity. Sincerity granted, justice withheld, which makes charity coherent

9. Who is the hardest sentence addressed to, and why does that matter?
   Show the full solution

   The North. He tells a victorious side, after six hundred thousand deaths, that their own casualties may be payment owed for two hundred and fifty years of unpaid labor. Saying that to people who have buried their sons is the opposite of a victory speech, and it is the reason the address is remembered rather than the reason it was expected. The victorious North, told their dead may be a debt being paid

10. Why does "with malice toward none" depend on the preceding paragraph?
    Show the full solution

    Quoted alone it reads as gentleness, and it is usually quoted alone. It follows a paragraph saying the war may justly continue until every drop of blood drawn by the lash is repaid with the sword. The charity is therefore a decision taken in full knowledge of what might be deserved, not an absence of anger, and the two paragraphs only mean what they mean together. Charity chosen in full knowledge is not the same as charity from mildness

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. When was the story published, and what was Bierce's war service?
   Show the full solution

   1890; he served in the Union army from 1861 and was seriously wounded in 1864

2. Name the three parts of the story.
   Show the full solution

   The hanging, the flashback, and the apparent escape

3. When is the escape actually happening?
   Show the full solution

   In the instant before death

4. What is Farquhar's occupation?
   Show the full solution

   A planter, not a soldier

5. Quote the story's final sentence.
   Show the full solution

   "Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge."

6. Why is the ending not a twist?
   Show the full solution

   A twist withholds information, and this story supplies it. Bierce uses the word "preternaturally" in the third paragraph of part three and then describes impossible perceptions at length. The information a reader needs is present and prominent, and the ending works because readers want the escape enough to ignore what they have been told. The information is supplied; the reader ignores it because they want the escape

7. Why are the clues written beautifully?
   Show the full solution

   Because Bierce needs the reader's collaboration. The evidence of unreality, the veining of each leaf, the gray spiders stretching webs from twig to twig, is the most attractive writing in the story. Making the clues pleasurable ensures they are read as description rather than as warning, which is a far more interesting device than concealment. Pleasure makes the reader take evidence as description

8. What is the story actually about?
   Show the full solution

   The mind's capacity to construct a complete and detailed world in an instant, not death as such. The three-part structure exists so that one second can occupy more pages than the entire preceding narrative, which makes narrative time the subject rather than the technique. The hanging is the occasion and the experiment is the point. Narrative time, and a mind building a world in one second

9. What does the tone of the last sentence accomplish?
   Show the full solution

   It is flat, factual, and contains the gentlest verb in the story: the body "swung gently". After pages of preternatural perception the prose returns to plain reporting, and the contrast delivers the correction without comment. The mildness of "gently" is what makes the sentence unbearable rather than any emphasis would. Flat reporting after extraordinary prose delivers the correction without comment

10. State the argument the construction makes about war.
    Show the full solution

    Bierce had fought and been badly wounded. The story gives a civilian who wanted war as an opportunity for distinction a death with no distinction in it, and spends its most beautiful writing on a fantasy it then declares unreal. That is a veteran's judgment on the romance of war delivered entirely through structure rather than statement. A veteran's judgment on the romance of war, made by construction

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. Name the two books and their years.
   Show the full solution

   Whitman's Drum-Taps, 1865; Melville's Battle-Pieces, 1866

2. What did Whitman do during the war?
   Show the full solution

   Worked as a volunteer nurse in Washington hospitals from 1862

3. What were Melville's sources?
   Show the full solution

   Mostly newspaper accounts, as he says in his preface

4. What kind of verse does Melville announce he will write?
   Show the full solution

   Plain and ponderous rather than nimble

5. What does Whitman ask the dead man?
   Show the full solution

   "Who are you my dear comrade?"

6. What has the war done to Whitman's line?
   Show the full solution

   The catalogs are gone. A poet who had listed an entire nation of occupations now describes three covered figures in one gray dawn, lifting a blanket from each. The reduction from multitudes to three is the war's effect registered in the form itself, and no statement about the war's effect could show it as clearly. It narrows from national catalogs to three covered figures

7. What does the unanswerable question accomplish?
   Show the full solution

   It refuses to summarize the dead man. Whitman had spent a decade claiming to contain multitudes and to know what every American was; here he stands beside a body and admits he does not know who it is. The retraction is never stated, it is performed, which is why the poem is more convincing than an apology would be. It performs a retraction of his earlier claim to contain everyone

8. State Melville's argument about prosody.
   Show the full solution

   War has laid aside its Orient pomp, so poetry about it should lay aside ornament and the rhyme's barbaric cymbal. Mechanized combat between iron ships requires a different verse from cavalry and banners. The poem makes the claim and demonstrates it simultaneously by being deliberately plain and ponderous, which is the strongest way to advance it. Mechanized war requires plain verse, and the poem demonstrates it

9. What does Melville's distance buy him?
   Show the full solution

   A thought about the future of war that no bedside could produce. Reading about ironclads in a newspaper lets him notice that the nature of combat has changed permanently, which is a generalization and turned out to be correct. Proximity and insight are different things, and assuming the nurse must write the better war poetry is a mistake. A correct generalization about the future of war

10. Write the comparative claim.
    Show the full solution

    "Both poets abandoned their earlier manner under the pressure of the war, but Whitman narrowed from national catalogs to one face he could not name while Melville turned to a deliberately clumsy verse arguing that mechanized war has made ornament obscene, so proximity produced a refusal to generalize and distance produced a generalization worth having." Shared abandonment of earlier manner, opposite directions, opposite gains

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. What period does American realism cover?
   Show the full solution

   Roughly 1865 to 1900

2. Name the two things realism refuses.
   Show the full solution

   The Romantic self and the sentimental plot

3. Who was realism's chief advocate?
   Show the full solution

   William Dean Howells, editor of the Atlantic Monthly

4. Define regionalism and naturalism.
   Show the full solution

   Realism specialized to place; realism plus the thesis that heredity and environment determine conduct

5. What does Huck decide?
   Show the full solution

   To tear up the letter and go to hell rather than return Jim

6. Why is "writing about real life" a useless definition of realism?
   Show the full solution

   Every literary movement claims to do that, including Romanticism, which held that intuition reached truths reason could not and therefore described reality more accurately than measurement. Realism is defined by specific refusals: the expansive self, the rewarded virtue, the resolving ending. Naming what is refused is what makes the definition do any work. Every movement claims it; the definition must name the refusals

7. How does Huck's decision defeat self-reliance?
   Show the full solution

   His conscience is the thing Emerson tells him to trust, and it has been formed by a society that taught him slavery is right. Consulting himself produces the wrong answer, because the self was built by the place it came from. Self-trust is only reliable if the self is not a local product, and the novel shows that it is. His conscience is a local product and delivers the wrong answer

8. What is remarkable about the moral climax?
   Show the full solution

   Huck acts correctly and believes he is damning himself for it. The novel gives its decisive moral moment to a boy who thinks he is choosing evil and does it anyway. No Romantic account of the self can explain that, because it requires a person to be right against their own conscience rather than because of it. He does right while believing he is choosing damnation

9. What does the sentimental plot refuse to supply here?
   Show the full solution

   Recognition and resolution. A sentimental novel would have Huck realize he was right, or have someone tell him so, or reward him for the choice. He gets none of it: he tears up the letter and remains convinced he has done a wicked thing, and the novel never corrects him. The refusal is what makes the moment land. Recognition, reward, and the correction of his belief

10. State realism's central claim about character.
    Show the full solution

    That a person is made by their circumstances, and that conscience is a local product rather than a universal instrument. Where Emerson has every heart vibrating to one iron string, realism has hearts tuned by the places they grew up in. That claim is what the whole unit tests, and the next lessons supply the evidence. People are made by circumstance, and conscience is local

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. When was Huckleberry Finn published?
   Show the full solution

   1884 in Britain, 1885 in the United States

2. Define vernacular.
   Show the full solution

   The ordinary spoken language of a place, as opposed to formal literary English

3. How many dialects does Twain's note claim?
   Show the full solution

   Seven

4. What does Huck say about Mr. Mark Twain?
   Show the full solution

   That he told the truth, mainly, with some things stretched

5. How old is Huck, roughly?
   Show the full solution

   About fourteen

6. What does the opening line establish before it says anything?
   Show the full solution

   The register. "Without you have read" for "unless", and "that ain't no matter" as a double negative, tell a reader in twenty words that this book will be narrated in nonstandard speech throughout. A reader who expects the dialect to be a frame around literary English has been corrected before the first paragraph ends. That the whole novel will be in nonstandard speech

7. What does "he told the truth, mainly" tell you about the narrator?
   Show the full solution

   That he distinguishes degrees of truth and cares about the distinction. A boy who grades an author's reliability and notes the stretching is a boy who notices when people are not telling the truth, and the whole novel depends on his being that kind of observer. The characterization is complete in one adverb. He notices and cares about degrees of truthfulness

8. What is the technical achievement of the river passage?
   Show the full solution

   It is a genuinely beautiful sentence written entirely in Huck's grammar, with a nonstandard participle, a hedge and an invented word for the bullfrog sound. Previous novelists used dialect for comedy and switched to literary English for description. Twain does not switch, which proves the vernacular can do lyric work and is what Hemingway meant. Lyric writing sustained entirely in the vernacular

9. What does the choice of narrator prevent, and what does it buy?
   Show the full solution

   It prevents analysis, context and moral judgment from any source but Huck, so everything must be something a fourteen-year-old with no education could notice and say. What it buys is irony: Huck reports accurately without understanding, and the reader understands more than the narrator. The constraint creates the novel's central device. No narratorial judgment, which creates the irony the novel runs on

10. How should a student handle the novel's racial slur?
    Show the full solution

    By noting that the usage reproduces the speech of Missouri in the 1840s, by not reprinting it, and by quoting around it. That is standard scholarly practice, it costs nothing analytically, and it lets the discussion be about what the book does rather than about the quotation. The fact of the usage should be stated plainly rather than avoided. State the fact, quote around it, and do not reprint it

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. Define dramatic irony as it operates here.
   Show the full solution

   The reader knows more than the narrator, for the whole novel

2. What is the novel's target?
   Show the full solution

   Huck's conscience, trained by a slave society

3. How long did it take Huck to apologize to Jim?
   Show the full solution

   Fifteen minutes

4. What does Huck conclude about Jim's feeling for his family?
   Show the full solution

   That he cared as much as white folks do, though it does not seem natural

5. What happens at the end of the novel?
   Show the full solution

   Tom Sawyer returns and turns Jim's escape into an elaborate game

6. Identify the two judgments in the apology passage.
   Show the full solution

   Huck's judgment is that apologizing was a humbling that took effort to perform. The reader's judgment is that it was ordinary decency requiring no effort at all. Both are present in the sentence and the novel states only the first, which is the mechanism of the whole book: the narrator supplies the fact and the reader supplies the verdict. He calls it humbling; the reader calls it ordinary decency

7. Why is the fifteen minutes the most damning detail?
   Show the full solution

   Because it measures the force of what he was taught. Huck mentions the number as a small fact about himself, without seeing what it shows, and a reader computes that an ordinary apology required a quarter of an hour of struggle against training. The most serious evidence in the passage arrives as an incidental detail. It measures the force of his training, reported as a small detail

8. What does "it don't seem natural" accomplish?
   Show the full solution

   It shows a conclusion being reached against resistance. A boy who found it obvious that Jim loved his family would prove nothing about anything; a boy who finds it unnatural and believes it anyway demonstrates that evidence has overcome training. The prejudice is left visible in the sentence that defeats it, which is why the moment is convincing. It shows evidence overcoming training, with the prejudice still visible

9. Why does Twain never comment?
   Show the full solution

   A narrator stating that Huck's conscience is corrupt would give the reader a position to agree or disagree with, and the reader could then simply decline. Letting Huck condemn himself makes the reader supply the correction, and a correction a reader has made themselves is one they have committed to and cannot easily abandon. The reader supplies the verdict and therefore owns it

10. Set out the argument the structure makes, and state the dispute about the ending.
    Show the full solution

    A boy's conscience tells him that helping a friend escape slavery is theft; he does it and calls himself damned; therefore conscience is not reliable, being trained by the society that produced it. On the ending: Tom returns, the register drops into farce, and Hemingway advised stopping before it. The defense is that a country which freed people and then tormented them with ritual is being described accurately. Conscience is a local product; the ending is either a failure or an accurate description

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. When did regionalism flourish, and where was it published?
   Show the full solution

   About 1870 to 1900, in magazines that paid for short fiction

2. What gave the writing documentary urgency?
   Show the full solution

   Railroads and national markets were erasing local difference

3. Name four regionalist writers.
   Show the full solution

   Freeman, Jewett, Chopin, Mary Austin

4. Distinguish regionalism from local color.
   Show the full solution

   In regionalism the place is causal; in local color it is scenery

5. What does the hunter offer, and what does he want?
   Show the full solution

   Ten dollars, for anyone who can show him where the white heron nests

6. Apply the relocation test to "A White Heron".
   Show the full solution

   Sylvia knows where the heron nests because she walks these woods every evening driving a cow home. Move her to a city and the knowledge does not exist, so the plot becomes impossible rather than merely different. The place is causal, which is the test that separates regionalism from local color, and this story passes it. Relocated, the knowledge the plot depends on would not exist

7. What do the four adjectives about the cow accomplish?
   Show the full solution

   Plodding, dilatory, provoking, and a valued companion for all that. Jewett spends four adjectives on a farm animal, which tells a reader what Sylvia's days consist of and how few other companions are available. Characterizing the cow characterizes the life, economically and without any statement about loneliness. They establish what her days contain and how few companions she has

8. Why is the conflict not good against evil?
   Show the full solution

   The hunter is pleasant, Sylvia likes him, and ten dollars is a great deal of money to a household this poor. Jewett sets a genuine benefit against a knowledge only Sylvia has, so the choice costs something real whichever way it goes. A villain would make the decision easy and would destroy the story. The offer is genuine and the money matters to the household

9. Assess the charge of nostalgia.
   Show the full solution

   The story notes the poverty, the isolation, and that Sylvia was sent to the farm because town life had been too much for her, so it is not pretending the place is idyllic. What it declines to do is treat the arrival of money and taxonomy as progress, which is a judgment rather than nostalgia. The distinction is worth holding carefully. It records the hardship and refuses to call the change progress

10. What does the ending's silence decide?
    Show the full solution

    Who the place belongs to. Sylvia climbs the pine, sees the heron and the sea beyond it, comes down and says nothing, and the ten dollars is not taken. The story gives its climax to a refusal to speak, which means the decision is about whether local knowledge is for sale rather than about a bird. Whether local knowledge is for sale

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. When was The Awakening published, and how was it received?
   Show the full solution

   1899; the reception was hostile

2. Where is it set?
   Show the full solution

   Grand Isle and New Orleans, in Creole Louisiana

3. What is Edna's background?
   Show the full solution

   Kentucky Presbyterian, not Creole

4. What is the novel's central event?
   Show the full solution

   Edna learning to swim

5. What does she say she would not give for her children?
   Show the full solution

   Herself

6. What does the paradox of the light predict?
   Show the full solution

   That the novel will not end with Edna acting successfully on her awakening. A light which shows the way and forbids it means that understanding arrives already carrying its own obstruction. Chopin states the shape of the book in the early chapters, so the ending is prepared rather than imposed, whatever a reader concludes about it. Understanding arrives already carrying its own obstruction

7. What does the toddler simile establish?
   Show the full solution

   A married woman of twenty-eight with two sons is compared to a child walking for the first time. The comparison places her development roughly a quarter century behind her life, which is a statement about what her upbringing and marriage permitted rather than about her capacity. It is also affectionate and slightly alarming. Her development is a quarter century behind her life

8. Why are the two sentences about shouting written separately?
   Show the full solution

   "She could have shouted for joy" reports capacity; "She did shout for joy" reports action. Chopin separates them because the gap between what Edna is capable of and what she actually does is the novel's whole subject, and this is the one moment where the two coincide. The repetition marks the coincidence. Capacity and action coincide here, which is rare in the novel

9. Explain the inversion of essential and unessential.
   Show the full solution

   Ordinary usage treats life as essential and possessions as unessential. Edna puts her money and her life together on the unessential side and reserves only the self. By her own account, therefore, the ending is consistent with a statement she makes in the middle of the book, which is the strongest internal evidence in the argument about it. She places her life among the unessential, reserving only the self

10. What does Edna misread about the Creoles?
    Show the full solution

    She reads their physical frankness and established flirtation as permission. It is not: the frankness is possible precisely because the marriage rules are absolute, so nobody is at risk and nothing is at stake. Their openness and their rigidity are consistent rather than hypocritical, and the misunderstanding is entirely hers. She takes frankness for permission; it is possible because the rules are absolute

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. What happens in the final chapter?
   Show the full solution

   Edna swims out from the beach at Grand Isle

2. Does the novel state that she drowns?
   Show the full solution

   No; the word suicide never appears and no death is stated

3. Name the four readings.
   Show the full solution

   Tragic, liberation, defeat, accident

4. What does the novel open with, in bird imagery?
   Show the full solution

   A caged parrot repeating phrases nobody attends to

5. What does Edna perceive in the final paragraph?
   Show the full solution

   Her father's voice, her sister, a chained dog, cavalry spurs, bees and pinks

6. Trace the bird imagery and give three readings of the last one.
   Show the full solution

   A caged parrot opens the novel; Mademoiselle Reisz says a bird soaring above tradition needs strong wings; a bird with a broken wing falls to the water at the end. It may mean Edna's wings were not strong enough, supporting defeat. It may be Chopin's judgment rather than Edna's thought. Or it may be a seabird on a beach, with the reader supplying the symbol. Defeat, authorial judgment, or a bird the reader symbolizes

7. What does the content of the final paragraph support?
   Show the full solution

   Not decision. Every item she perceives, her father's voice, her sister, the chained dog, the cavalry spurs, the bees and the pinks, is from childhood in Kentucky and none is from the present. The passage reads as the present dissolving into memory, which is consciousness ending rather than a choice being carried out. Dissolution into memory rather than a decision being executed

8. State the strongest evidence for a decision.
   Show the full solution

   In the pages immediately before the swim Edna thinks clearly about her children, about Robert, and about what she will and will not give. The deliberation is present, recent and specific, and it is the strongest counterweight to the dissolution in the final paragraph. Both are in the same chapter. Clear deliberation in the pages immediately before the swim

9. Assess the accident reading.
   Show the full solution

   She learned to swim only months earlier and the text notes her inexperience, so swimming out too far is exactly what a new swimmer does. Nothing in the text states intent. The reading is genuinely available, though it sits awkwardly beside the deliberation in the preceding pages, and a good essay would say so rather than dismissing it. Available, given her inexperience and the absence of stated intent

10. State the honest conclusion about the ending.
    Show the full solution

    The text supports several readings and excludes none, because Chopin removes the one sentence that would settle it: any statement of Edna's intention. A novel in which every character spends three hundred pages misreading Edna ends by denying the reader the position of knowing her too, which is consistent rather than evasive. Underdetermined by design, consistent with the novel's subject

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. Name the two books and their dates.
   Show the full solution

   Freeman's A New England Nun, 1891; Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs, 1896

2. What had depopulated rural New England?
   Show the full solution

   The Civil War and migration west

3. How long has Louisa been engaged?
   Show the full solution

   Fifteen years

4. What does Louisa do at the climax?
   Show the full solution

   Releases her fiancé without mentioning what she overheard

5. What biblical story does the last passage allude to?
   Show the full solution

   Esau selling his birthright for pottage

6. Why is the domestic detail so precise?
   Show the full solution

   Because it establishes that Louisa's satisfactions are real and that they constitute the whole of what she has. A damask napkin, sugared currants in a glass dish and light white biscuits are tiny things described with complete seriousness. Freeman refuses to condescend to them, so a reader cannot dismiss what the marriage would cost her. It makes her small satisfactions real so the cost is visible

7. Analyze "little feminine weapons".
   Show the full solution

   It is the narrator's phrase and it is double-edged. Little and weapons do not usually belong together, and the pairing names her constraint and her competence at once. She has almost nothing to work with and she works with it effectively, which is precisely what the story is about. Constraint and competence named in one phrase

8. What does the diplomacy actually consist of?
   Show the full solution

   She overhears her fiancé with another woman and releases him without ever mentioning it, so that he believes the decision was mutual and keeps his dignity. She gets what she wants and costs him nothing, using the only instrument available to someone with no power in the situation. The climax is an act of tact. Releasing him without revealing what she knows, so he keeps his dignity

9. Count the hedges in the birthright passage and say what they do.
   Show the full solution

   "If" she had sold it, "she did not know it", the pottage "was so delicious", and the narrowness "had become to her as the birthright itself". Four qualifications in two sentences. Freeman raises a severe judgment through the biblical allusion and then declines to deliver it, leaving the reader holding both the charge and the reasons against it. Four hedges raise a judgment and refuse to deliver it

10. State what the story argues about choice.
    Show the full solution

    That a woman offered exactly two futures, a marriage she no longer wants and a solitude that has become her entire world, is not choosing between a large life and a small one. She is choosing among the small, because nothing larger was on offer. Freeman's refusal to condescend to the currants is what makes that visible rather than pitiable. She chooses among small options because nothing larger exists

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. What period does American naturalism cover?
   Show the full solution

   Roughly 1890 to 1915

2. State naturalism's thesis.
   Show the full solution

   That heredity and environment determine conduct

3. Name its intellectual sources.
   Show the full solution

   Darwin, Spencer and Zola

4. What is the first sentence of "The Open Boat"?
   Show the full solution

   "None of them knew the color of the sky."

5. What is nature's only word, in the story?
   Show the full solution

   A high cold star on a winter's night

6. Why is the opening sentence a thesis statement?
   Show the full solution

   Four men in a boat do not know the color of the sky because their attention is entirely on the next wave. The largest thing available has become irrelevant to them, which establishes the story's scale before any event occurs. Crane states his subject in nine words and then spends the story demonstrating it. It establishes scale: the largest thing available is irrelevant

7. Why is indifference a sharper claim than hostility?
   Show the full solution

   A hostile universe is addressed to you and can be defied, which preserves your significance in the act of opposing it. An indifferent one offers nothing to contend with. Crane says it exactly: the man wants to throw bricks at the temple and hates deeply that there are no bricks and no temples. There is no target. A hostile universe can be defied; an indifferent one offers no target

8. What does Crane refuse to do, and why does it matter?
   Show the full solution

   He refuses the pathetic fallacy entirely: the sea is never malicious, the waves are never vengeful, the storm is never a judgment. Every temptation to make nature expressive is declined. The refusal is the technique that carries the thesis, because a sea that felt anything would contradict the claim the story is making. He refuses the pathetic fallacy, which is what carries the thesis

9. What complicates the determinism in the story?
   Show the full solution

   The men behave well. They take turns rowing, they look after the injured captain, and Crane calls the fellowship of the crew the best experience of his life. Determinism about the universe does not prevent solidarity among people, and the story is careful to include it rather than treating bleakness as the whole answer. The men behave well and Crane records the fellowship as valuable

10. State the story's actual argument.
    Show the full solution

    Not that life is meaningless but that meaning is made among the people in the boat and is not supplied by anything outside it. That is a considerably more interesting position than pessimism, and it is what separates Crane from a writer merely being bleak. Calling naturalism pessimistic misses the claim about where meaning comes from. Meaning is made in the boat, not supplied from outside

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. Name the three settings and their dates.
   Show the full solution

   Crane's open sea, 1897; London's frozen trail, 1908; Dreiser's city, 1900

2. What is London's man's defect?
   Show the full solution

   He is without imagination

3. What does London call him throughout?
   Show the full solution

   The man; he is never named

4. What happens to the dog?
   Show the full solution

   It survives

5. What scandalized reviewers about Sister Carrie?
   Show the full solution

   That Carrie is never punished

6. What exactly kills London's man?
   Show the full solution

   Not the cold, which is survivable with the right procedure and which he knows how to guard against with mittens, ear-flaps, moccasins and thick socks. What kills him is the inability to extrapolate: fifty below is precisely fifty below to him and nothing more. His knowledge is accurate, complete and insufficient, which is an exact diagnosis rather than a moral. Accurate knowledge with no capacity to extrapolate from it

7. Why is the man unnamed?
   Show the full solution

   It reduces him to a specimen. A name would make the story about a person with a history; "the man" makes it about a type under test conditions, which is exactly what Zola meant by the experimental novel. The naming decision announces the method before the story begins. It makes him a specimen in an experiment rather than a person

8. What does the dog's survival establish?
   Show the full solution

   That the thesis is not that nature kills. The dog has instinct where the man has knowledge, and it lives. London is claiming that a particular kind of mind is unfitted for particular conditions, and including a control that survives the same cold is what makes the claim testable rather than merely atmospheric. The thesis is about a kind of mind, not about nature killing

9. Why does Dreiser refuse to punish Carrie?
   Show the full solution

   Because a determinist novel cannot consistently punish conduct it says was caused by circumstance. Reviewers in 1900 expected the sentimental machinery to operate and Dreiser declines, which was read as immorality and is actually logical rigor. Applying the thesis and then moralizing about the outcome would contradict the thesis. Punishment would contradict the determinism the novel asserts

10. Where does the thesis strain, and what registers the strain?
    Show the full solution

    In the city. At seventy-five below one error is fatal and determinism is arithmetic; in Chicago other people in Carrie's circumstances do otherwise, so the environment shapes rather than dictates. Dreiser's own hedge, "how dimly as yet we see", registers the difficulty, which is why the comparison is worth making rather than choosing one book. In the city, and Dreiser's own hedging registers it

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. What period does American modernism cover?
   Show the full solution

   Roughly 1910 to 1945, centered on the 1920s

2. Name three things modernism distrusts.
   Show the full solution

   Chronological plot, reliable narration, settled meaning

3. Whose phrase is "the lost generation"?
   Show the full solution

   Gertrude Stein's

4. What advice does Nick's father give?
   Show the full solution

   Not to criticize anyone, since not everyone has had the advantages he has

5. Name three social changes reshaping the decade.
   Show the full solution

   Prohibition, the automobile, and new money

6. Count the distancing devices in Gatsby's opening.
   Show the full solution

   The advice is his father's rather than his own, it was given in his younger years, he has been turning it over ever since, and it arrives inside quotation marks. Four layers stand between the reader and any claim the narrator actually holds, which is the opposite of Whitman beginning by celebrating himself and assuming the reader shares him. Someone else's words, long ago, still unresolved, and quoted

7. What has happened to the Romantic first person?
   Show the full solution

   Whitman's speaker contains multitudes and assumes the reader shares him without hesitation. Nick Carraway opens by reporting something his father said and partly withdraws it before the paragraph ends. The confident first person has become a hedged one, and the "I" is now presented as a problem rather than as an instrument. Confidence has become hedging, and the "I" is now a problem

8. What does a modernist narrator supply instead of judgment?
   Show the full solution

   Material for judgment. Nick reports and evaluates inconsistently, and the reader assembles a verdict he never quite delivers. That is fragmentation applied to moral reasoning rather than only to chronology, and it is why the novel has supported contradictory readings of Gatsby for a century. Material the reader must assemble into a verdict

9. What does modernism keep from the earlier movements?
   Show the full solution

   The first person at the center, as in Whitman and in Twain. The continuity is real: American literature keeps putting an "I" in charge of the telling. What changes is that the "I" is now offered as a question rather than as a source, and the novel's most interesting problem becomes whether to believe him. The centrality of the first person

10. State the method for reading this unit.
    Show the full solution

    For each text, ask what the reader has to assemble. In Gatsby it is a chronology and a verdict on the title character. In Cane it is a structure the book refuses to declare. In Hughes it is the relation between a borrowed form and the tradition it comes from. The work transferred to the reader is what makes the writing modernist. Ask what work the text transfers to the reader

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. When was Gatsby published, and when did it enter the public domain?
   Show the full solution

   Published 1925; public domain in 2021

2. What two claims does Nick make about himself early on?
   Show the full solution

   That he reserves judgment and that he is one of the few honest people he has known

3. What are Nick's relationships to Daisy and Tom?
   Show the full solution

   Daisy's cousin and Tom's former classmate

4. What does Nick arrange?
   Show the full solution

   The meeting between Gatsby and Daisy

5. What does Nick say about Tom and Daisy at the end?
   Show the full solution

   That they were careless people who let others clean up their mess

6. Test the honesty claim against the novel.
   Show the full solution

   He conducts a relationship with Jordan Baker, whom he describes as incurably dishonest, mentions an entanglement at home that he never explains, and says nothing at the inquest about who was driving. He is not lying to the reader, but his self-assessment is inaccurate, and a narrator wrong about himself in chapter three requires checking elsewhere. He is not lying, but his self-assessment is inaccurate

7. What is unusual about "Gatsby turned out all right at the end"?
   Show the full solution

   It is a verdict delivered on the third page, before the reader knows anything about Gatsby, and it is never argued for anywhere in the novel. A narrator who claims to reserve judgment opens by delivering one, and the reader is asked to accept a conclusion that the remaining two hundred pages will complicate considerably. A verdict delivered before any evidence and never defended

8. What does Nick blame instead of Gatsby, and what does that achieve?
   Show the full solution

   He blames "what preyed on Gatsby" and "what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams", which are atmospheres rather than people or actions. The construction lets him assign responsibility without naming anyone, and it exempts his friend from the specific conduct the rest of the novel describes. An atmosphere, which exempts Gatsby without naming anything

9. State the double standard precisely.
   Show the full solution

   Tom and Daisy are condemned for smashing things and letting other people clean up after them, which is accurate. Gatsby allowed Daisy to kill a woman with his car and let her husband believe he had done it himself. Nick applies the standard to one couple and exempts his friend from the same standard within the same novel. The same conduct condemns Tom and Daisy and excuses Gatsby

10. What does the novel require of the reader?
    Show the full solution

    To assemble the verdict Nick will not deliver. Every fact is supplied accurately by a narrator who has arranged them so that one person comes out excused, and the novel contains no correcting voice. Reading Gatsby means reading against the man telling it, which is what makes it modernist rather than simply well written. To read against the narrator and assemble the verdict yourself

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. Where is the green light, and where is it seen from?
   Show the full solution

   On Daisy's dock, seen from Gatsby's lawn across the bay

2. How many times does it appear, and where?
   Show the full solution

   Three: end of chapter one, chapter five, and the last page

3. What does Nick say has diminished by one?
   Show the full solution

   Gatsby's count of enchanted objects

4. Name the novel's other two major images.
   Show the full solution

   The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg and the valley of ashes

5. What pronoun does the last page use?
   Show the full solution

   Us

6. What does "might have been the end of a dock" accomplish?
   Show the full solution

   It refuses to identify the light. The symbol is introduced before it can be decoded, so the reader receives a man's gesture toward something without knowing what the something is. That is precisely Gatsby's situation for five years, and the syntax puts the reader in it before the plot explains anything. The reader gets the gesture without its object, as Gatsby did

7. What does the second appearance argue?
   Show the full solution

   That the light's value came from distance. With Daisy standing beside him it becomes again a green light on a dock, and Gatsby's count of enchanted objects diminishes by one. Getting the thing destroys the thing, and Fitzgerald places the collapse at the moment of success rather than of failure, which is the novel's key structural decision. Value came from distance, so success destroys it

8. Analyze the phrase "enchanted objects".
   Show the full solution

   It implies a count, an inventory, a set of things whose value depends on enchantment rather than on any property they have. Gatsby maintains a portfolio of such objects and the reader is told it is depleting. The phrase turns a private emotional economy into something with a balance, which is a quietly devastating way to describe him. An inventory whose value depends on enchantment, and it is depleting

9. Assess the generalization on the last page.
   Show the full solution

   It is beautiful and it is Nick's final act of exculpation. Making Gatsby's wanting universal, with the pronoun shifting from he to us, excuses the specific things he did to pursue it. The last page performs the same operation as the third, which means the novel's most famous passage is also its most partial one. Beautiful, and a final exculpation performed by shifting to "us"

10. Why is the green light a symbol rather than a code?
    Show the full solution

    A code has one fixed referent. The green light has three meanings in three places: unreachable, then diminished, then generalized, and the third is a judgment on the first. "The green light means hope" describes none of them, and an essay that says it has not read the second appearance at all. It has three meanings in three places, and the third judges the first

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. What distinction do East Egg and West Egg represent?
   Show the full solution

   Old money and new money

2. What does Gatsby say about Daisy's voice?
   Show the full solution

   That it is full of money

3. Name three of Gatsby's social errors.
   Show the full solution

   The pink suit, "old sport", a library of uncut books, uninvited parties

4. Where does Gatsby's fortune come from?
   Show the full solution

   Bootlegging and stolen bonds

5. Who produces the boyhood schedule, and when?
   Show the full solution

   Gatsby's father, at the funeral

6. Why is a voice the right marker for this distinction?
   Show the full solution

   Money can be acquired and a voice cannot. Gatsby has bought the house, the shirts, the car and the parties, and the one thing that remains unpurchasable is the sound of having always had them. Fitzgerald picks the single attribute that cannot be obtained with the fortune Gatsby spent five years assembling. It is the one attribute money cannot buy

7. State the distinction precisely.
   Show the full solution

   Not wealth but time. Tom Buchanan is not richer than Gatsby by the end of the novel; he has been rich longer. The novel treats duration as the entire difference, which is why Gatsby's enormous success changes nothing and why reading the book as a critique of wealth misses what it is about. Duration, not amount

8. What does the schedule allude to, and what does the allusion argue?
   Show the full solution

   Franklin's chart of virtues, established in unit 1 as the invention of the self-made man and of character as a project. Gatsby followed the method exactly, with dumbbell exercise, study and elocution practice, and it killed him. Fitzgerald delivers his verdict on the American program by quoting its founding document into a dead boy's notebook. Franklin's chart; it condemns the program by quoting it

9. Why does it matter who produces the schedule?
   Show the full solution

   Gatsby's father produces it, proudly, at a funeral almost nobody attends. He believes it proves his son would have been a great man, and he is holding the evidence that the belief is false. Fitzgerald puts the document in the hands of the one person least able to read it, which is why the scene is unbearable rather than merely sad. His father offers it as proof, holding the evidence against his own claim

10. State the novel's class argument.
    Show the full solution

    Money is obtainable and manner is not, so a society that tells people to make themselves is offering a route that arrives at a wall. Gatsby does everything Franklin prescribed, acquires more money than the man he is competing with, and dies in a swimming pool while his father shows strangers the timetable. The program worked and it was not enough. Self-making obtains the money and cannot obtain the manner

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. Who speaks the last page, and from where?
   Show the full solution

   Nick, alone on the beach, two years after the events

2. Name the three steps the passage moves through.
   Show the full solution

   Gatsby, the Dutch sailors, and "we"

3. Quote the novel's last sentence.
   Show the full solution

   "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

4. Which word returns from chapter five?
   Show the full solution

   Enchanted

5. What did the Dutch sailors see?
   Show the full solution

   A fresh, green breast of the new world

6. What do the Dutch sailors do to the argument?
   Show the full solution

   They make Gatsby's condition the country's founding condition. If the first Europeans to see the continent experienced the same enchantment before an object commensurate to their capacity for wonder, then Gatsby is not a criminal with a fantasy but an American having the original American experience. The historical move converts a private failing into a national inheritance. They convert a private failing into a national inheritance

7. What does the return of "enchanted" connect?
   Show the full solution

   The continent and the green light. Enchantment depends on distance and does not survive arrival: the Dutch sailors held their breath before landing, and the light stopped meaning anything when Daisy stood beside it. Nick applies the novel's thesis about Gatsby to the country by reusing one adjective. Both enchantments depend on distance and die on arrival

8. Analyze the contradiction in the last sentence.
   Show the full solution

   Boats beat forward against a current and are carried backward. Effort and direction are opposed within one image, and the sentence's grammar moves forward, "so we beat on", while its meaning moves back, "borne back ceaselessly". The prose performs the condition it describes, which is why the line is quoted more than any other in American fiction. Effort moves forward while the sentence's meaning moves backward

9. What tradition does "into the past" reverse?
   Show the full solution

   Winthrop's colony faced a future to be justified before a watching world. Franklin's tradesman built one deliberately. Emerson demanded an original relation to the universe. Whitman sang a nation becoming itself. Nick ends the sequence by reporting that the current runs the other way, which is the course's whole first five units answered in four words. Winthrop, Franklin, Emerson and Whitman all faced forward

10. State the honest reading of the page.
    Show the full solution

    It is Nick's final and most beautiful act of exculpation, and it is also true. Both can hold. A student can argue that universalizing Gatsby's desire excuses him, or that it correctly identifies something national, and the strongest essays argue that the page does both at once and that its beauty is part of what makes it suspect. It exculpates and it is accurate, and the best reading holds both

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. When and where did the Harlem Renaissance take place?
   Show the full solution

   Roughly 1918 into the 1930s, centered in Harlem, New York

2. What migration preceded it?
   Show the full solution

   The Great Migration from the rural South to northern cities

3. What was the movement's manifesto?
   Show the full solution

   Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro, 1925

4. State the two positions in the internal disagreement.
   Show the full solution

   That art should demonstrate respectability, or that it should show ordinary life without adjustment

5. Where and when did Hughes publish his essay?
   Show the full solution

   The Nation, 1926

6. Describe the method of the first passage.
   Show the full solution

   Hughes quotes one sentence and translates it three times, each version more explicit than the last, ending at "I would like to be white". The chain of inferences is displayed rather than asserted, and he marks the steps with "I believe" and "subconsciously", which shows he knows he is interpreting rather than reporting. A chain of translations, each marked as interpretation

7. What position is he attacking?
   Show the full solution

   That there is a universal poetry and that writing about Black life is a departure from it into the merely particular. Hughes holds that the poetry being offered as universal was in fact white, and that calling it universal was the problem rather than a neutral description. The argument is about who gets to be the default. That a poetry which was white was being called universal

8. What is the harder half of the second passage?
   Show the full solution

   Rejecting the second audience. The respectability position was held by Black critics, editors and institutions, and Hughes declines their approval in the same paragraph as everyone else's. Refusing white approval was expected of him; refusing the approval of his own movement's leadership was the costly half of the sentence. He rejects Black approval as well as white

9. Analyze "We know we are beautiful. And ugly too."
   Show the full solution

   Four words in two sentences. He claims beauty and immediately adds ugliness, which refuses the respectability program in its own terms: a literature permitted to show only the presentable is not showing anything. The second sentence is the whole argument, and its brevity is what makes it impossible to soften. Claiming ugliness refuses respectability in its own terms

10. State the movement's real question and how the next lessons answer it.
    Show the full solution

    Not what Black writing should be about but who it is answerable to. Hughes's blues line, McKay's sonnet and Toomer's refusal of genre are three different answers: build the form from the tradition itself, take the most prestigious European form and turn it, or refuse the categories entirely. Each formal choice is a position on audience. Who the writing answers to; the three poets answer it differently

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. When was The Weary Blues published?
   Show the full solution

   1926

2. Describe the blues stanza.
   Show the full solution

   A statement, the statement repeated with variation, and a response

3. Why does the repetition exist in performance?
   Show the full solution

   It gives the singer time to compose the third line

4. What form does "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" use?
   Show the full solution

   Whitman's long line and parallelism

5. When was it published?
   Show the full solution

   1921

6. What does the blues repetition have in common with Homeric epithets?
   Show the full solution

   Both are oral technologies rather than ornaments. A blues singer repeats the first line with small variation to buy time while composing the response, exactly as a performer composing hexameters aloud deploys a ready-made phrase to fill a metrical slot. What reads as repetition on the page is the machinery that made live composition possible. Both buy the performer time during live composition

7. What survives when the blues moves to the page?
   Show the full solution

   The shape: a claim, its insistence, and a response that goes further than either. The music does not survive and Hughes does not pretend it does, which is why he adapts rather than transcribes. "I wish that I had died" arrives after two lines of mere dissatisfaction, and the response slot delivers what the statement did not prepare. The shape, and a response slot that escalates

8. What argument does using the blues form make?
   Show the full solution

   That a poem need not derive its authority from English prosody. It is the position of the 1926 essay executed in verse: the tradition supplies the form, and no external approval is required because no external standard is being met. The formal choice states the argument more economically than the essay could. That the tradition supplies the form and needs no outside approval

9. What does the rivers poem claim by using Whitman's form?
   Show the full solution

   Not that a Black poet can write like Whitman, which would concede that Whitman is the standard, but that Whitman's form belongs to him too. Hughes takes the national voice and uses it to speak for a history Whitman's catalogs did not include, which is a claim on the tradition rather than an application to join it. That the national form is his, and can carry a history Whitman omitted

10. How do the two modes relate?
    Show the full solution

    One builds from inside a Black tradition and needs nothing from outside it. The other takes the most American form available and puts it to a use its inventor did not anticipate. Both answer the question of who the writing is answerable to, and they answer differently, which is why Hughes wrote in both rather than choosing. Two different answers to the question of who the writing answers to

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. Name the two books and their dates.
   Show the full solution

   McKay's Harlem Shadows, 1922; Cullen's Color, 1925

2. What form is "If We Must Die"?
   Show the full solution

   A Shakespearean sonnet, ABAB CDCD EFEF GG

3. What was its occasion?
   Show the full solution

   The racial violence of the summer of 1919

4. What position did Cullen take in the movement's disagreement?
   Show the full solution

   That Black poets should work in the established tradition

5. Quote Cullen's final couplet.
   Show the full solution

   "Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: / To make a poet black, and bid him sing!"

6. Why does perfect execution of the sonnet matter here?
   Show the full solution

   A poem meeting every formal requirement of the English tradition cannot be dismissed as the work of someone who does not know the tradition. McKay removes the easiest available objection before a reader reaches the content, which means the poem has to be engaged on its argument rather than on its qualifications. It removes the charge of not knowing the tradition

7. What does the absence of a racial term cost and buy?
   Show the full solution

   It buys universality and portability, which is why the poem was quoted during the Second World War in a completely different context. It costs specificity: a reader who does not know the occasion can receive the poem without confronting the violence of 1919 that it was written about. The trade is real in both directions. Universality gained, and the specific occasion obscured

8. What does McKay put in the couplet's emphatic position?
   Show the full solution

   A refusal rather than a resolution. The closing couplet is the sonnet's most emphatic slot, conventionally used to settle or reverse what the quatrains built. McKay uses it for "pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back", which resolves nothing and commits to a posture, and the form's own architecture delivers it. A refusal, in the slot the form reserves for resolution

9. How does Cullen's poem build to its couplet?
   Show the full solution

   Twelve lines of things God does that are hard to explain: the mole's blindness, flesh that must die, Tantalus, Sisyphus. It is a theological argument conducted in the form of a love poem. Then the final and most curious item is his own situation, which places being a Black poet alongside the cosmic paradoxes in two lines. Twelve lines of cosmic paradoxes, then his own situation as the strangest

10. Why is using European forms not assimilation?
    Show the full solution

    Because taking the form a culture most values and using it to say what that culture has not said is more aggressive than refusing the form. It cannot be answered by a charge of incompetence, and it leaves the tradition looking narrower than the poets working inside it. The prestige of the form is being borrowed and turned. It turns the culture's most valued form against it

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. When was Cane published?
   Show the full solution

   1923

2. What forms does it contain?
   Show the full solution

   Short prose, lyric poems, sketches, and a closing piece written as drama

3. Name the three parts and their settings.
   Show the full solution

   Rural Georgia, then Washington and Chicago, then Georgia again

4. What was Toomer doing in Georgia?
   Show the full solution

   Working for a few months as a temporary school principal

5. What does he ask to be poured into song?
   Show the full solution

   That parting soul

6. What happens to register in the Karintha passage?
   Show the full solution

   It changes three times in four lines. "Karintha is a woman" is a plain declarative; the next sentence has no main verb and is closer to a lyric fragment; the third shifts into dialect with "She ain't no gal for a man to marry". The prose refuses to settle into one voice, which prepares the reader for the book's larger refusals. Declarative, then verbless lyric, then dialect, in four lines

7. What does the interrupting song accomplish?
   Show the full solution

   It prevents the reader from settling into narrative. Every time the prose begins to proceed, the song returns and the piece becomes lyric again, so the form never lets the reader forget that it is constructed. A story that keeps being stopped by something that is not story cannot be consumed as a story. It stops the reader settling into narrative

8. What is the song doing at the level of content?
   Show the full solution

   It is what a community sings about a person. Toomer places the communal voice inside a sketch about one woman, so the individual and the culture that produced her occupy the same page without either being subordinated to the other. That is a structural solution to a problem about representation. It puts the communal voice on the page beside the individual

9. What does the word "parting" establish?
   Show the full solution

   That the soul is leaving, and that the instruction to pour it into song is urgent rather than leisurely. Toomer believed the rural Black folk culture of the South was ending, and the book is constructed as an act of preservation performed against a deadline. One participle carries the whole motive. Urgency: the thing being recorded is disappearing

10. Why does the subject require the mixed form?
    Show the full solution

    A novel would impose a plot on a culture, and a poetry collection would omit the people. Mixing them lets the book hold a place, its songs, its stories and its ending without deciding which is the main one. Gatsby fragments chronology and judgment; Toomer fragments genre itself, which is the further refusal. Neither a novel nor a poetry collection could hold the whole thing

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. What is the difference between a topic and a question?
   Show the full solution

   A topic is a subject; a question can be answered correctly or incorrectly

2. What does it mean for a question to be open?
   Show the full solution

   Competent readers have disagreed about it

3. What test confirms a question is live?
   Show the full solution

   Drafting two opposed answers that are both arguable

4. What is a thesis?
   Show the full solution

   The answer to the question, written as a disputable sentence

5. Name the two legitimate kinds of literary research question.
   Show the full solution

   Interpretive, asking what a text does, and historical, asking what conditions produced it

6. Why is "Is Nick a reliable narrator?" a weak choice despite being arguable?
   Show the full solution

   It is arguable, which is why it passes the first test, but it is the most written about question in American literary study and a student paper cannot add to it. The research would consist of summarizing a century of criticism. Narrowing to a specific chapter or scene gives the student something to own. Arguable but exhausted, so the paper becomes a summary of criticism

7. Apply the opposed-answers test to the funeral question.
   Show the full solution

   One answer: the chapter confirms Nick's admiration, since the absence of guests proves the parties were hollow while Gatsby was not. The other: it undermines him, since Gatsby's father's schedule shows a man performing since boyhood. Both are defensible from the same pages, so evidence has real work to do and the question is live. Both answers are defensible from the same chapter

8. Why is a question about an author's private feelings out of bounds?
   Show the full solution

   Because it cannot be answered from the text, and literary evidence is textual. A paper asking what Fitzgerald felt about wealth can only speculate or import biography that the novel does not confirm. Questions have to be answerable with the material a reader and a critic can both examine. It cannot be answered from the evidence available

9. Why is "How does modernism represent the American dream" the wrong size?
   Show the full solution

   It would require a book and in ten pages produces only generalities. Scope has to match the space: one chapter, one narrator and one interpretive claim fit a ten-page paper, and a question spanning a movement guarantees that no claim in the paper is supported in enough detail to convince anyone. Too large, so every claim is underdeveloped

10. What should a student do when research undermines the question?
    Show the full solution

    Change it. If the schedule argument turns out to be well worn, shift to the funeral's guest list or to something else the reading opened up. That is research working correctly rather than a setback, and the question stays adjustable until the final draft begins. Defending a question the evidence has already answered is the commonest way to waste a term. Change the question; that is what research is for

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. What is the primary source in a literary paper?
   Show the full solution

   The literary text itself

2. What are secondary sources?
   Show the full solution

   Writing about the text: criticism, reviews, scholarly articles

3. Why must the edition be named?
   Show the full solution

   Page numbers are meaningless without it

4. What does peer review mean?
   Show the full solution

   Other scholars evaluated the article before publication

5. Name two databases that hold literary criticism.
   Show the full solution

   JSTOR and Project MUSE

6. How can a 1925 review be both primary and secondary?
   Show the full solution

   It is secondary for an interpretive question, because it evaluates the novel, and primary for a question about how the book was first received, because it is then the evidence itself. Primary and secondary are positions relative to a question rather than fixed properties of a document, which is the rule the example establishes. The category depends on the question being asked

7. Why is a study guide website unusable?
   Show the full solution

   It is unattributed, unreviewed and written for a general audience, so it carries no authority a reader can check. Citing one in a documented paper signals that the student did not reach the actual criticism, which damages the paper beyond the single citation because it calls the whole research into question. Unattributed, unreviewed, and it signals the research was not done

8. What is the right use of an encyclopedia?
   Show the full solution

   As a starting point. Use it to learn names, dates and the shape of a scholarly debate, then follow its bibliography to the sources it drew on and cite those instead. The entry does real work in orienting the student and none at all as a citation in the finished paper. Orientation and a bibliography, never a citation

9. Why is a 1920s advertisement not a bad source for the funeral question?
   Show the full solution

   Because it is not bad, only irrelevant. It is genuine primary evidence for a historical question about how new money was marketed and displayed, and it simply cannot speak to an interpretive question about Nick's narration. Distinguishing weak sources from misapplied ones matters when building a source list. It is irrelevant to this question, not unreliable

10. State the proportion a literary paper should keep.
    Show the full solution

    Most quotation should come from the primary text, with roughly four to eight secondary sources supporting, complicating or being answered. A paper citing twenty critics has usually stopped arguing for itself and become a survey, which is the failure mode the whole lesson is built to prevent. Mostly primary text, with four to eight secondary sources

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. Where does most literary criticism sit?
   Show the full solution

   Behind library databases, not on the open web

2. How can a student reach those databases free?
   Show the full solution

   Through a public library card

3. What should a student read before a full article?
   Show the full solution

   The abstract

4. Name three critical approaches.
   Show the full solution

   Formalist, historicist, feminist

5. What is required before disagreeing with a critic?
   Show the full solution

   An argument from the primary text

6. Why build three searches of different widths?
   Show the full solution

   Because a single phrasing finds only what happens to be phrased that way. "Great Gatsby funeral" is narrow, "Gatsby Carraway narrator reliability" is conceptual, and "Gatsby chapter nine" is structural, and each surfaces different scholarship. Research is several searches at different widths rather than one lucky one. One phrasing finds only what matches that phrasing

7. Why is a bibliography more useful than another keyword search?
   Show the full solution

   Because a good article cites the work its author had to answer, which means the bibliography is the field's own map of what matters. Those citations reach sources no keyword search would surface, since scholars cite by argument rather than by the words a student happened to type. It maps what the field itself considers essential

8. What does the date of an article tell a reader?
   Show the full solution

   What critical assumptions were in force. A 1955 formalist article may treat the novel as a self-contained object and decline to discuss class at all. It is not worthless, but it answers a question the student may not be asking, and knowing the period keeps the student from mistaking a school's silence for the text's. Which assumptions were current when it was written

9. What makes a disagreement with a critic legitimate?
   Show the full solution

   A verifiable point about the text. If a critic writes that Nick alone attends the funeral and the novel also places Owl Eyes there, the claim is factually wrong and the student may say so. Disagreement grounded in what the page actually contains is always permitted, whatever the critic's standing. A checkable claim about the text that the text contradicts

10. How is a disagreement written?
    Show the full solution

    Name the critic, state the claim fairly in its strongest form, quote the passage that contradicts it, and state what follows for your own argument. Disagreement is argued and cited rather than announced, and a version that misstates the critic's position first is worthless even when the conclusion is right. Name, state fairly, quote, then draw the consequence

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. What three categories should a note be marked as?
   Show the full solution

   Quotation, paraphrase, or your own thought

2. Does paraphrase require a citation?
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   Yes

3. How is a real paraphrase written?
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   Without looking at the source, from your understanding

4. Give an example of common knowledge about Gatsby.
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   That it was published in 1925

5. When should full source details be recorded?
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   At the moment the first note from that source is taken

6. Why does a citation not rescue a near-copy?
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   A citation credits the idea, and the offense in a near-copy is presenting someone else's sentence architecture as your own prose. Changing six words while keeping the structure leaves the reader unable to tell which words are the student's, and that is a separate problem from attribution. The citation credits the idea, not the borrowed sentence structure

7. What makes the acceptable paraphrase acceptable?
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   The sentence is built differently, using a colon and a causal clause the original does not have, and it names the critic as the source of the argument. The debt is acknowledged and the prose belongs to the student, which are the two separate requirements that a near-copy satisfies only one of. Different architecture plus explicit attribution

8. When should a writer quote rather than paraphrase?
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   When the critic's own phrasing is what the paper wants to examine. Quote when the wording is the point and paraphrase when the idea is. A paper quoting every source at length has surrendered its voice, and one that never quotes cannot show the reader what it is answering. When the wording itself is what you are discussing

9. Why do first-year sales figures need a citation when the publication year does not?
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   Because the publication year is in any reference work and belongs to no one, while the sales figures are the result of research somebody performed. The test is not how well known a fact is but whether it came from a particular investigation that a reader might want to check. One is in every reference work; the other is somebody's research

10. What does the square-bracket line in a note do?
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    It keeps the student's own reaction separate from the critic's argument, in the same note, marked as belonging to the student. Weeks later, when the draft is written, the brackets are what prevent an original thought from being cited to a critic or a critic's thought from being presented as original. It separates the student's thinking from the source's

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. What is the difference between summary and synthesis?
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   Summary reports one source at a time; synthesis puts sources in relation

2. What is the symptom of an unsynthesized paragraph?
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   It begins with a critic's name rather than with a claim

3. What is a synthesis matrix?
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   A grid with sub-questions down one side and sources across the top

4. Should paragraphs be organized by idea or by source?
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   By idea

5. Who controls the opening and closing of a paragraph?
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   The writer; sources appear in the middle

6. Why are the empty cells in a matrix informative?
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   Because they show which sub-questions a given critic did not address. A source silent on Nick's role in arranging the funeral cannot be cited for a claim about it, and a sub-question no source addresses is either a gap the student can fill or a sign the question is not the one the field thinks matters. They show what each source does not address

7. Why is agreement between sources worth only a sentence?
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   Because a settled point needs asserting, not arguing. If all three critics treat chapter nine as evaluative rather than merely concluding, one sentence with three citations establishes it, and the paper's space belongs to the places where the sources part company and the student's argument has room to work. Settled points need asserting, and space belongs to disputes

8. Why is disagreement the most useful finding?
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   Because it marks where the student's own argument can operate. Smith reading chapter nine as vindication and Jones reading it as exposure means two competent readers face the same evidence and reach opposite verdicts, which is an opening. Where the field agrees, there is nothing for a new paper to do. It locates the opening where a new argument can work

9. What exactly changed between the two versions of the paragraph?
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   The paragraph now opens with a claim of the student's, that the disagreement turns on which document the reader weighs, and the critics arrive as the two sides of a dispute the student has identified. The same three sources and the same information, put into relation instead of into a list. The student's claim now opens it and the sources serve it

10. What move does the third source make possible?
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    It resolves the dispute the other two left. Nakamura's observation that Nick arranged the funeral means the empty church is evidence about Nick's invitations before it is evidence about Gatsby, which makes both prior readings incomplete. Using one source to settle a disagreement between two others is a move only the student's own argument can perform. It settles the dispute by reframing what the empty church proves

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. Name the three parts of a literary argument.
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   Claim, evidence, warrant

2. Which part is most often omitted?
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   The warrant

3. What is a dropped quotation?
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   A sentence of text followed immediately by the next claim, with no reasoning

4. When is a quotation set as a block?
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   When it runs over four lines; indented, without quotation marks

5. What is the usual content of a literary warrant?
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   Close reading: attention to a specific word, image or piece of syntax

6. Why do writers omit the warrant?
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   Because they can see the connection and assume the reader can. The writer has spent weeks with the text and the link between the schedule and the claim about performance feels self-evident, which is exactly the condition under which it goes unwritten. The reader has spent thirty seconds with the quotation. The connection is obvious to the writer, who assumes it is obvious to everyone

7. Diagnose the unwarranted version.
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   "This shows Gatsby was always ambitious" restates rather than reasons. Nothing connects the quoted line about practicing poise to the claim that the document contradicts its owner's intention. The reader is told evidence exists and is not told what in it does the work, which is the definition of a dropped quotation. The final sentence restates the evidence instead of reasoning from it

8. What does the warrant actually notice?
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   That the schedule's item is a manner rather than a subject. A boy who schedules the study of electricity is acquiring knowledge; a boy who schedules the practice of poise is acquiring a surface. The distinction between those two lines of the same document is the whole warrant, and it is close reading of a single word. Poise is a manner, not a subject, unlike electricity

9. How does the counterargument get stated?
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   In its strongest form: that self-improvement schedules were ordinary for boys in 1906 and reading this one as theatrical imports a suspicion the document does not carry. Stating an objection weakly is worse than not raising it, because a reader who can think of the strong version will supply it and stop trusting the paper. In its strongest form, not a version easy to knock down

10. How does the concession strengthen the paragraph?
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    By granting that the document is wholly conventional and making that the point. Fitzgerald chose an ordinary Franklin-style schedule precisely because the novel's argument is that the convention produced the man. Conceding the objection's factual content while denying its conclusion is stronger than disputing a fact the reader can check. It grants the fact and turns it into the argument

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. Which MLA edition is current, and where is it used?
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   The ninth, used in literature and the humanities

2. What goes in an in-text citation?
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   Author and page, with no comma and no "p."

3. How many core elements are there?
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   Nine

4. How is the Works Cited page ordered?
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   Alphabetically by the first element, usually the author's last name

5. What indent do entries use?
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   A hanging indent: first line flush left, the rest indented half an inch

6. What problem did the nine core elements solve?
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   Earlier editions supplied a separate template for every kind of source, which failed as soon as a new kind appeared. The nine elements are assembled in order and skipped when they do not apply, so the same procedure handles a book, an article, a podcast and a format nobody has invented yet. Dozens of templates that could not cover new source types

7. Define a container and give three examples.
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   The larger work holding the source. An article's container is its journal, a story's container is its anthology, and a web page's container is its website. That single concept replaced the old list of per-format templates, and recognizing the container is most of the work in building any entry. The larger work holding the source: journal, anthology, website

8. How is an article read through a database cited?
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   With two containers. The journal is the first container, with its volume, number, date and page range, and the database is the second, added at the end with its own location, usually a DOI or stable URL. The nesting records both where the article was published and where the student actually read it. Journal as first container, database as second with a DOI or URL

9. Give the exact order of punctuation around a quotation.
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   Closing quotation mark, space, open parenthesis, page number, close parenthesis, period. The citation sits outside the quotation and inside the sentence, so the sentence ends after the parenthesis. It is the most frequently botched detail in student papers and it is entirely mechanical. Quotation mark, space, parenthesis, then the period

10. Why must the match run both ways?
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    Every in-text citation needs an entry so the reader can find the source, and every entry needs at least one citation because a Works Cited listing something the paper never cites claims to have used a source that went unused. The list documents the paper's argument, not the student's reading history. An uncited entry claims work the paper did not use

Questions 1 to 5 are recall. Questions 6 to 10 ask for reasoning.

1. Distinguish revision, editing and proofreading.
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   Revision changes the argument, editing changes the sentences, proofreading catches errors

2. What is a reverse outline?
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   One sentence per paragraph, written after the draft, then read as a list

3. What should each reverse-outline sentence state?
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   What the paragraph claims, not what it discusses

4. Why read the paper aloud?
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   The ear catches sentences the eye skips

5. When should the introduction be rewritten?
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   Last, after the body is settled

6. Why must the three passes run in that order?
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   Because polishing a paragraph you will cut is wasted work. Structural decisions determine which sentences survive, so the argument pass comes first, the source pass second, and the sentence pass last. A student who proofreads before revising spends the most careful hours on material that leaves the paper. Structure decides which sentences survive to be polished

7. What does a reverse outline reveal that a full draft hides?
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   Duplication and sequence. If paragraphs three and six both argue that the schedule is theatrical, that is invisible across twelve pages of prose and obvious in an eight-line list. Compressing each paragraph to its claim strips away the writing and leaves only the structure to be judged. Repeated claims and bad order

8. What should a student do when the body outgrows the thesis?
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   Change the thesis. If the introduction promised an argument about the guest list and six of eight paragraphs are about the schedule, the paper discovered something better while being written. Forcing the body back toward a thesis drafted before the thinking happened is the wrong repair. Change the thesis to match the better argument the paper found

9. What are the two diagnoses for a paragraph with no quotation?
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   Either it makes claims without support, in which case evidence has to be found and added, or it is summary rather than argument, in which case it should be cut. Both require going back into the draft to decide which, and a paragraph that survives the check unchanged is rare. Unsupported claim, or summary that should be cut

10. What does the source pass check?
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    Every quotation word by word against the original, every page number, and the two-way match between in-text citations and Works Cited entries. Transcription errors are common and invisible to the writer, who remembers what the source meant rather than what it said, which is why the pass is mechanical and done with the sources open. Quotation accuracy, page numbers, and the two-way citation match