English 12

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

1. What period does Old English cover?
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   About 450 to 1100

2. Describe the structure of the alliterative line.
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   Four stresses, two on each side of a caesura

3. Which stress never alliterates?
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   The fourth

4. Define a kenning and give two examples.
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   A metaphorical compound: whale-road for sea, ring-giver for king

5. Whose translation does this course use, and when was it made?
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   Francis Gummere's, 1910

6. Why is alliteration structural rather than decorative here?
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   Because it is what binds the two halves of the line into one line. A half-line without a matching sound in the other half is not joined to anything, exactly as an unrhymed line in a sonnet would break the form. Alliteration does the work rhyme does later, which is why it cannot be removed without destroying the verse. It joins the half-lines, as rhyme later joins a stanza

7. Explain why kennings exist, technically.
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   A poet composing aloud needs several names for the same thing, each beginning with a different sound, so the line can be completed whatever the alliteration demands. Sea can be whale-road, swan-path or the gannet's bath depending on the letter needed. The figurative richness is a by-product of a technical requirement. They supply synonyms with different initial sounds

8. What does variation do to the pace of the verse?
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   It slows it. "From squadroned foes, from many a tribe" names the same enemies twice in different terms, so the poem advances by restating rather than by adding. A modern reader expecting new information in every clause experiences this as repetition; an audience hearing it once experiences it as emphasis and as time to absorb. It advances by restating, which slows the line

9. Analyze "the mead-bench tore".
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   Scyld destroyed his enemies' mead-benches, which means he destroyed their halls. The hall is where a lord feeds his followers and distributes treasure, so it is the physical center of the bond that holds a society together. Taking the benches is not vandalism but the dismantling of a people, and the detail is chosen for that reason. Destroying the hall dismantles the society, not just a building

10. State the reading method this unit requires.
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    Ask what the sound is doing before asking what the content means. In a poetry built for the ear the argument arrives through the pattern of stress and alliteration, so a reader who takes it in silently as prose has removed most of the poem. Reading Old English verse aloud, even in translation, is not an optional enrichment. Read for sound first, because the sound carries the argument

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

1. In how many manuscripts does Beowulf survive?
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   One, the Nowell Codex, damaged by fire in 1731

2. Define the comitatus.
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   The reciprocal bond between a lord and his retainers

3. What is wergild?
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   The man-price paid to settle a killing and stop a feud

4. What does lof mean?
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   Fame or praise, the poem's only form of survival

5. Why does Beowulf refuse a sword?
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   Because Grendel uses none, and equal means are seemly and right

6. What does the hall's condition signify?
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   Heorot standing idle and useless after dark means the society has stopped functioning. The hall is where the comitatus is enacted through feasting, gift-giving and song, so an unusable hall is not an inconvenience but a suspended civilization. The poem measures the disaster in social rather than in physical terms. An unusable hall means the society has stopped working

7. Why is Grendel a horror rather than merely an enemy?
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   Because he cannot be settled with. The poem states that he will pay no wergild, which means the mechanism the society uses to end killing does not apply to him. An enemy who can be paid is inside the system; one who cannot is outside it, and the horror is the discovery that the system has an outside. He refuses wergild, so the system cannot reach him

8. What does "hero to hero" assume about Grendel?
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   That he is enough of a person for fairness to apply to him. Beowulf extends the heroic code to a creature the poem has called a descendant of Cain, which may be generosity, arrogance or a category error. All three readings are defensible from the text, and choosing one with evidence is what the essay requires. That the code applies to him, which is arguable

9. Explain what the boast actually does.
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   It converts an intention into a public obligation. Made before Hrothgar and his court, the speech means Beowulf cannot afterward take up a sword without losing the standing the speech bought him. A warrior who makes no boast has offered nothing and can be held to nothing, which is why reading the boast as vanity misses its function. It binds the speaker publicly to what he has said

10. State the poem's central question.
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    Whether a system built on reciprocal obligation can hold against something that does not reciprocate. Grendel takes no settlement, his mother acts on feud logic the code cannot stop, and the dragon wants nothing the code can offer. The poem tests the arrangement three times and the answers get worse. Can reciprocity survive what will not reciprocate

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

1. Whom is Grendel descended from?
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   Cain

2. What specifically enrages him?
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   The noise of the hall, and the singer's song of creation

3. Whom does Grendel's mother kill, and why?
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   Aeschere, in payment for her son

4. How does the poem rank her attack against Grendel's?
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   As less terrible

5. How is the mere described?
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   As an anti-hall: underwater, joyless, roofed with fire

6. What does assigning Grendel envy accomplish?
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   It gives him an interior before it gives him a shape. Something capable of envy is capable of wanting to be included, so the poem's first account of its monster is a description of exclusion felt from inside. A reader who has been told what Grendel feels cannot afterward treat him as pure appetite. It makes exclusion something he experiences

7. Why does it matter that he hears a creation song?
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   Because it specifies what he is excluded from. Not a party but an account of the world's making that has no place for him in it. The rage is at a story rather than at a noise, which raises the stakes considerably and connects the Cain genealogy to what actually happens in the hall. He is enraged by a creation story he is not part of

8. Describe the alternation in the poem's treatment of Grendel.
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   One passage gives him envy, grief and an interior; the next gives him only origin and habitat in the vocabulary of Christian demonology. The poem humanizes and expels him in turn, repeatedly. A reading that picks one mode and discards the other is tidying the poem rather than describing what it does. It humanizes him and expels him by turns

9. Why is Grendel's mother the harder problem?
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   Because she acts on the society's own principle. She kills one man in payment for a son, which is feud logic, and the poem calls her raid less terrible than Grendel's precisely because it follows a rule. The poem has conceded that its monster reasons the way the Danes reason, which makes the boundary between inside and outside a matter of definition rather than of nature. She follows the same feud logic the humans follow

10. What is the right way to write about these monsters?
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    Describe what the poem does when it describes them rather than deciding what they represent. The alternation between interior and expulsion is the evidence, and the poem's refusal to settle it marks the edge of what the heroic code can contain. An essay that names the alternation and argues about its effect will outperform one that assigns a fixed meaning. Write about the alternation, not about what they symbolize

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

1. How much time passes before the dragon episode?
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   Fifty years

2. What rouses the dragon?
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   A stolen cup, taken by a fugitive

3. Who buried the hoard, and why?
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   The last survivor of a vanished people, because nobody was left to give it to

4. Who stays with Beowulf?
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   Wiglaf

5. What does the woman at the funeral foretell?
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   Invasion, slavery and slaughter for the Geats

6. What does the Last Survivor's speech argue?
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   That treasure exists to circulate. "Now hold thou, earth, since heroes may not" concedes that the objects have outlived the arrangement that gave them meaning, so the ground may as well have them. The poem stops its plot for this speech because the speech states the economics the whole last third depends on. Treasure without circulation is dead, so the earth may keep it

7. How does the dragon embody the poem's economics?
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   A dragon sitting on gold is wealth that does not move. The poem has spent two thousand lines presenting treasure as obligation made visible, given by a ring-giver and binding those who receive it, and the dragon is that entire system stopped. The monster is a picture of hoarding rather than of appetite. It is the image of wealth that does not circulate

8. Why is the cause of the disaster strange?
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   Because a fugitive takes one cup from a hoard nobody was using, harming no living person, and a kingdom is destroyed as a result. The poem deliberately arranges a catastrophe with a negligible cause, which removes any account of the ending as a punishment earned or a fate deserved. A theft that harmed nobody destroys a kingdom

9. Analyze Wiglaf's rebuke.
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   He does not call the retainers cowards in general terms. He says the sword-gifts, the estates and their families' standing will fail, which is exactly the reciprocal consequence the code specifies. The rebuke is delivered in the code's own vocabulary, which makes it a formal finding rather than an insult. He states the code's own penalty, not a general insult

10. State the ending's verdict on the heroic code.
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    The retainers flee, the treasure is reburied useless, and the people are prophesied to be destroyed, so everything the code promised is void at the moment it is called in. What survives is lof, the praise, which is the poem itself. That is either a bleak assessment of the arrangement or a claim that poetry is the only thing that keeps its promise, and the text supports both. Everything fails except the praise, which is the poem

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

1. In what manuscript do these poems survive?
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   The Exeter Book

2. What does an elegy lament in Old English?
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   The lost lord and hall

3. What is the ubi sunt formula?
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   A series of unanswered "where are they now" questions

4. What does wyrd mean?
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   Fate, or what happens

5. How do both poems end?
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   By turning toward Christian consolation

6. Why are the ubi sunt questions left unanswered?
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   Because the form's point is that there is no answer. A question asked five times without reply performs absence more effectively than any statement of it could, since the reader supplies the silence themselves. Answering even one would convert the lament into information. The silence after each question is the poem's content

7. Analyze the order of the Wanderer's list.
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   Horse, warrior, treasure-giver, feasting seats, joys of the hall: object, person, role, place, experience. The list widens as it goes, moving from a thing that could be replaced to a condition that cannot. By the last item the speaker is naming something with no physical existence at all, which is where the loss actually lives. It widens from a replaceable object to an irrecoverable state

8. Why "the giver of treasure" rather than a name?
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   Because the speaker misses a function in a system rather than a particular man. The phrase tells the reader what exile actually costs: not companionship but standing, the position of being someone to whom treasure is given. A name would make the poem about grief for a person; the role makes it about the loss of a place in the world. He misses a role in a system, not an individual

9. How does The Seafarer make solitude measurable?
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   By defining its speaker against someone who has what he lacks. "He who is happiest on land does not know how I..." sets up a comparison that gives the reader a scale, since solitude described alone has nothing to be measured against. The land-dweller exists in the poem only to make the sea legible. It sets the speaker against a land-dweller who cannot know

10. State a defensible position on the Christian ending.
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    That it does not undo the lament but renames its object. A reader can argue the poem finds a lord who cannot be lost, or that the same grief has simply been given a new address. Both readings must account for the fact that the imaginative energy of the poem is in the loss rather than in the consolation, and an essay that notices where the writing is strongest is arguing from evidence. It renames the object of the longing rather than ending it

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

1. When did Chaucer write The Canterbury Tales?
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   From about 1387 until his death in 1400, unfinished

2. Define a frame narrative.
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   A story containing other stories, with a device explaining why they are told

3. Where does the company assemble?
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   The Tabard, a tavern in Southwark

4. How many pilgrims are in the company?
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   Nine and twenty, plus the narrator and the Host

5. What does the Host propose?
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   A storytelling contest, with a supper as the prize

6. What does the eighteen-line opening sentence argue?
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   That pilgrimage belongs inside a natural cycle. The whole account of April rain, root, sap and flower is a subordinate clause, and the main clause is that people then long to go on pilgrimages. Religious motive and the return of spring are joined by grammar, so the poem opens by declining to separate devotion from biology. Devotion and the spring are joined in one sentence

7. Why is the tavern the necessary setting?
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   Because it is the one kind of place where a knight, a miller, a prioress and a cook could legitimately share a room. A church, a court or a hall would each admit only part of the range. The frame is chosen for what it permits socially, and the poem's entire social breadth depends on that choice. It is the only place that could mix those ranks

8. What work does "by aventure y-falle in felaweshipe" do?
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   It insists the mixture happened by chance. That is a useful fiction: it lets Chaucer assemble exactly the cross-section of English society he wants while presenting the assembly as accidental. A reader who notices the claim also notices how carefully selected the twenty-nine actually are. It presents a carefully chosen sample as an accident

9. Why does Chaucer write himself in as a pilgrim?
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   It gives him a narrator who reports without judging. The pilgrim Chaucer admires almost everyone and records details that contradict his admiration, so the reader receives accurate observation with unreliable evaluation and must reconcile them. The device is the same one Twain would use five centuries later. To get a narrator who observes accurately and judges badly

10. What does the contest add to a collection of tales?
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    An audience and a motive. Each tale is now aimed at listeners the reader can see, and several are aimed at a specific rival in the company, so tales answer and insult each other. The frame converts a collection into an argument, and reading a tale out of that context loses the half of it that is directed at somebody. It makes the tales compete with and answer each other

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

1. What is estates satire?
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   A medieval genre reviewing each social order and finding it failing its duty

2. What is Chaucer's main satirical technique?
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   An unreconciled detail placed inside an admiring description

3. What does the Pardoner sell?
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   Forged relics and pardons

4. What is the Pardoner's tale about?
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   Avarice, which he condemns

5. How does the Wife of Bath's prologue compare to her tale?
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   It is roughly twice as long

6. Why is the narrator's approval part of the technique?
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   Because the reader has to notice what he does not. The pilgrim Chaucer calls the Wife good and her deafness a pity, with no reservation anywhere in the portrait, so any judgment in the reader's mind was produced there rather than delivered. A narrator who disapproved would do the work and leave the reader passive. The judgment has to be produced by the reader

7. Analyze the claim about Ypres and Ghent.
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   Those were the great cloth-making cities of Flanders, so claiming a woman from near Bath surpassed their weavers is a very large claim. The reader is left to decide whether it is true or whether the narrator is repeating what she told him about herself, and the portrait supplies no way to settle it. The detail strains the praise without contradicting it. It is either remarkable or her own boast repeated credulously

8. Work the logic of "I wol nat beggen ydelly".
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   It means he will not beg without profit. The Pardoner has taken a phrase shaped like a principle, refusing idleness, and used it to describe efficient fraud. The joke is grammatical: the sentence has the form of a moral commitment and the content of a business plan. A sentence shaped like a principle describing efficient fraud

9. Why is the Pardoner's confession the hard part?
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   A concealed hypocrite is a simple target. The Pardoner announces his method to the company and then preaches so effectively that his tale against avarice is genuinely powerful. Chaucer has arranged a case where the sermon works and the preacher is false, which is a much more interesting problem than exposure would be. He admits the fraud and then preaches effectively

10. State the reading rule for Chaucer.
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    Take the tale and the teller together. A tale is evidence about the person telling it, and several are aimed at rivals in the company, so separating the two discards half of what is on the page. The Pardoner's excellent sermon from a mouth he has just declared false is the clearest case, and the poem leaves open whether a true sermon from a false preacher still works. Read tale and teller together, always

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

1. In what manuscript does the poem survive?
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   Cotton Nero A.x, with three other poems by the same author

2. What is a bob and wheel?
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   A very short line ending a stanza, followed by four rhymed lines

3. What does the pentangle stand for?
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   Five sets of five virtues, endless and interlocked

4. What does Gawain keep and conceal?
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   The green girdle, said to preserve his life

5. How does the court respond at the end?
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   It laughs and adopts the green girdle as a badge

6. Why does the pentangle's design matter to the plot?
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   Because a figure whose lines are endless and interlocked cannot lose one part and remain itself. The shield is a promise that Gawain can only be wholly good or wholly undone, with no partial credit available. That design is what converts a concealed belt into a total failure by the poem's own stated standard. Interlocked virtues make any single failure a total one

7. Weigh Gawain's failure honestly.
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   He refuses the lady three times, keeps an appointment he could have avoided at the cost of his life, and flinches once at an axe he expects to kill him. The only actual breach is failing to hand over a belt in a game. Stated plainly, the offense is very small, and the poem's difficulty comes from the gap between its size and its consequences. One concealed belt, after passing every larger test

8. Compare Gawain's verdict with the Green Knight's.
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   Gawain names cowardice and covetousness and says he forsook his true nature, which is the strictest reading and the one the pentangle demands. The Green Knight nicks his neck once and calls him the most faultless knight alive, since he acted from love of life rather than greed. The injured party is lenient and the offender is merciless. The offender condemns himself; the victim acquits him

9. What does the court's laughter accomplish?
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   It converts a mark of shame into a fashion. Camelot adopts the green girdle as a badge, which either means it has not understood what Gawain is telling it or has decided not to. Either way the poem's last movement shows a society absorbing a moral crisis by turning it into a style, which is a very modern observation. It turns his shame into a fashion

10. State the poem's real subject.
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    Not whether Gawain failed but whether a code admitting no partial failure can be lived in by an actual person. Three verdicts are offered, by Gawain, by the Green Knight and by the court, and they do not agree. The poem ends without choosing, so an essay that picks one and ignores the others has removed the difficulty the poem was built around. Whether a code with no partial credit is livable

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

1. How is a Petrarchan sonnet divided?
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   An octave of eight lines and a sestet of six

2. Where does the volta fall?
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   At line nine

3. Give the octave's rhyme scheme.
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   ABBAABBA

4. Who brought the sonnet into English, and where was it printed?
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   Wyatt and Surrey; Tottel's Miscellany, 1557

5. What is written on the deer's collar?
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   "Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am"

6. What does the turn change in this poem?
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   The addressee as well as the subject. The octave describes the speaker's own exhaustion; line nine turns to warn other hunters. A reader tracking only content would call it a change of topic, but the more precise observation is that the poem stops speaking about itself and starts speaking to someone else. Both the subject and who is being addressed

7. What does the sestet supply that the octave lacked?
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   A reason. Eight lines describe a hopeless pursuit without explaining why it is hopeless, and the sestet answers with an inscription: the deer belongs to Caesar. The structure withholds the cause until the turn, so the octave's exhaustion is experienced before it is explained. The reason the pursuit was always hopeless

8. Explain the allegory without overstating it.
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   Wyatt was at Henry VIII's court and Anne Boleyn was widely believed to be the subject, with Caesar standing for the king. The poem never says so, and does not need to: a collar bearing an owner's name conveys the situation completely. Stating the identification as probable rather than certain is the accurate way to write about it. Caesar is the king; the identification is probable, not stated

9. Analyze "in a net I seek to hold the wind".
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   A net catches what has substance and lets air pass, so the image states an impossibility in terms of the tool rather than the goal. It is also the octave's most beautiful line and sits immediately before the turn, so the poem's finest writing marks the moment the speaker gives up. The tool is defined by letting the target through

10. What does the last line do to the sestet's claim?
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    It qualifies it. "Wild for to hold, though I seem tame" lets the deer speak, and what she says undercuts the ownership asserted two lines earlier. Caesar's claim is stated and immediately complicated, so the poem's final position is that possession is asserted rather than achieved. It undercuts Caesar's ownership from the deer's own mouth

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

1. How is an English sonnet divided?
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   Three quatrains and a couplet

2. Give its rhyme scheme.
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   ABAB CDCD EFEF GG

3. Why does that scheme suit English?
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   English has fewer rhymes available, and this needs only two per sound

4. When were Shakespeare's sonnets published?
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   1609, probably without his consent

5. Name the three images of Sonnet 73 in order.
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   A season, a day, a fire

6. What does the sequence of images accomplish?
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   It accelerates. Autumn covers months, twilight covers minutes, a dying fire covers moments, so the poem gets faster as it proceeds even though the stanzas stay the same length. The structure delivers the claim that approaching death feels quicker the nearer it comes, without ever stating it. Months, then minutes, then moments: the poem accelerates

7. Analyze "Bare ruin'd choirs".
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   The branches are compared to the roofless choirs of monasteries dissolved under Henry VIII, ruins standing across England when the poem was written. Birdsong becomes a vanished liturgy, which adds a historical loss to a personal one and gives the speaker's aging a national scale for three words. Dissolved monasteries make birdsong a vanished liturgy

8. Work the paradox of the third quatrain.
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   "Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by": the wood that fed the fire becomes the ash that smothers it. What sustained the life is what ends it, which is a description of living rather than of dying. The paradox is the harshest thing in the poem and it arrives in the quietest line. What sustains the fire is what puts it out

9. What does the anaphora stage?
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   "In me thou see'st", repeated, presents the poem as something being shown rather than confessed. Each quatrain begins by directing the beloved's attention to the speaker, so the reader watches a demonstration conducted for a second person who is present throughout. That staging is what makes the couplet's claim on that person possible. A demonstration performed for a listener who is present

10. Test whether the couplet earns its conclusion.
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    It does not. The quatrains establish decline and nothing else, and the couplet asserts that perceiving the decline strengthens the beloved's love. That is an argument the poem has not made, delivered with a conclusion's confidence, and the sonnet is more moving because of it: a man cataloguing his own decay ends by telling the person he loves that it should make them love him more. No: it asserts what the quatrains never established

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

1. Name the two sequences and their dates.
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   Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, 1591; Spenser's Amoretti, 1595

2. Give the Spenserian rhyme scheme.
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   ABAB BCBC CDCD EE

3. What is a blazon?
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   A catalog of the beloved's features with metaphorical comparisons

4. What do the names Astrophil and Stella mean?
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   Star-lover and star

5. How does Amoretti differ from most sequences in its ending?
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   It ends in marriage rather than frustration

6. What is Sidney's first sonnet actually about?
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   The difficulty of writing about Stella rather than Stella herself. The opening poem of the sequence is about failing to write the sequence, which places the convention itself at the center before any love poem has been attempted. That is an unusually self-aware way to begin. The difficulty of writing the poems that follow

7. Identify the paradox in "look in thy heart, and write".
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   A command to abandon convention in favor of sincerity is delivered inside a perfect Petrarchan sonnet, in long alexandrine lines, and is spoken by a classical Muse. The sincerity is itself conventional, and Sidney is sophisticated enough to know it, which is why the line is a joke as well as a manifesto. Convention is rejected by a thoroughly conventional poem

8. What does the Spenserian rhyme linkage do?
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   Each quatrain hands a rhyme to the next, so the stanzas interlock rather than sitting side by side. The sonnet becomes continuous instead of segmented, which suits a sequence whose poems also connect to one another, and it makes the English sonnet's three separate versions of an idea harder to write. It interlocks the quatrains into one continuous poem

9. Why does it matter that Spenser's beloved speaks?
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   Because the Petrarchan lady is normally silent, and much of the convention depends on that silence: an unanswering beloved cannot contradict the lover's account. Spenser's woman calls him vain and states that a mortal thing cannot be immortalized, so the sonnet contains an argument between two people, and she has the stronger position. It turns a lament into an argument she is winning

10. State the reading rule for sequences.
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    Find where the poet breaks the convention. Sidney makes the convention his subject, Spenser lets the woman answer, and Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 refuses the blazon outright. The break is where the poem is thinking, and an essay that identifies the rule before identifying the departure has the whole analysis available. Locate the break in the convention

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

1. Define blank verse.
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   Unrhymed iambic pentameter

2. What did Ben Jonson call Marlowe's verse?
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   His mighty line

3. How long is Faustus's bargain?
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   Twenty-four years

4. What older form does the play borrow from?
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   The morality play, with Good and Bad Angels

5. How does Mephistopheles define hell?
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   As deprivation of God, a condition rather than a place

6. Why did the stage adopt blank verse?
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   Because it can carry an ordinary sentence and a grand one in the same meter. "Why this is hell, nor am I out of it" is plain speech in ten syllables, and the same line length holds Faustus's cosmic commands. Rhyme marks every line as verse; blank verse lets a character sound like a person who happens to speak beautifully. It sounds like speech while remaining verse

7. What is strange about who delivers the play's theology?
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   The devil does. The most accurate and most moving account of damnation comes from the character sent to procure Faustus's soul, and Mephistopheles does not lie at any point. The play's clearest moral statement is placed in the mouth of its tempter. The tempter gives the truest account, and never lies

8. What does the honesty of the warnings remove?
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   The easiest account of the play. Faustus is warned truthfully by an eyewitness to heaven and proceeds anyway, so his damnation cannot be blamed on deception or on a trick in the contract. Whatever explanation an essay offers has to account for a man who was told the truth and did not attend to it. Any reading that blames deception

9. How does the final scene use time?
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   It converts the play's running time into the character's remaining life. "One bare hour to live" is spoken in an hour the audience is also living through, and the clock strikes on stage as it strikes in the fiction. Faustus then orders the spheres to stop moving, commanding exactly the power he contracted for and never obtained. Stage time and the character's last hour are the same hour

10. State the play's actual judgment on Faustus.
    Show the full solution

    Not that ambition is punished but that the ambition was never real. His opening speech wants everything and what he buys is entertainment: conjured grapes, tricks on a pope, a vision of Helen. The play shows every wasted year, and the tragedy is the distance between what he asked for and what he did with it. He wanted everything and spent it on party tricks

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

1. Define a soliloquy and distinguish it from an aside.
   Show the full solution

   A speech made alone, revealing thought; an aside is a brief remark unheard by others on stage

2. When was Hamlet written?
   Show the full solution

   About 1600

3. How many soliloquies does Hamlet have?
   Show the full solution

   Seven

4. What does Hamlet call death?
   Show the full solution

   The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns

5. Who is hidden during the speech?
   Show the full solution

   Claudius and Polonius, with Ophelia positioned as bait

6. What does the absence of the first person singular establish?
   Show the full solution

   That the speech is philosophical rather than personal. Hamlet uses infinitives and the first person plural and never says "I", so he is posing a question about anyone rather than announcing a decision about himself. Whether that abstraction is his way of avoiding his own case is a genuine question the play leaves open. The question is about anyone, not about himself

7. Defend "take arms against a sea of troubles".
   Show the full solution

   It is usually called a mixed metaphor and a fault. It is better read as accurate: you cannot fight a sea, and the resistance Hamlet is imagining is futile. The image conveys the hopelessness of the option in the act of proposing it, which is more precise than a coherent metaphor would have been. The impossibility of the image is the point

8. Where is the turn, and what does it do?
   Show the full solution

   At "But that the dread of something after death". Two options have been weighed and a third consideration arrives that settles the matter, which is the structure of a syllogism reaching an unwelcome conclusion. The "but" redirects the entire argument in the middle of a line, and the verse registers the swerve. A third consideration arrives and decides the question

9. What is odd about "no traveller returns"?
   Show the full solution

   Hamlet spoke to his father's ghost in act one. The line either forgets that or refuses to count it, and both readings are productive: a man who has met a returning traveler and says none return is either not thinking about his own life or has decided the ghost proved nothing. The play does not resolve it. He has met a ghost, and the line does not count it

10. What does the soliloquy achieve as a dramatic form?
    Show the full solution

    It lets an audience watch a mind work rather than hear a position announced. The evidence is syntactic: the questions, the long qualification, the conjunction that redirects the argument mid-line. Earlier drama gave characters fixed positions to declare; Shakespeare gives them thought that arrives at somewhere they did not start. Thinking happens in front of the audience, in the syntax

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

1. Name four conventions of revenge tragedy.
   Show the full solution

   A ghost, a delay, feigned madness, a play within the play, a final bloodbath

2. Why does Hamlet doubt the ghost?
   Show the full solution

   Because the devil has power to assume a pleasing shape

3. What is the Mousetrap for?
   Show the full solution

   To obtain grounds more relative than the ghost's word

4. Why does Hamlet spare Claudius at prayer?
   Show the full solution

   Because killing him at prayer would send him to heaven

5. What does Claudius say after Hamlet leaves?
   Show the full solution

   That his words fly up but his thoughts remain below

6. Why is the Mousetrap an experiment rather than a trick?
   Show the full solution

   It has a hypothesis, a manipulation and an observable outcome, and Hamlet arranges for Horatio to watch Claudius independently so the observation is not his alone. He stages a murder resembling the alleged one and predicts a reaction. That is a controlled test, which is why the delay preceding it is method rather than hesitation. It has a hypothesis, a test and an independent observer

7. Explain why the delay is rational.
   Show the full solution

   He is asked to kill an anointed king on supernatural testimony from a source that may be a devil working to damn him. Acting immediately on that evidence would be reckless rather than heroic, and the play makes the epistemological problem explicit in Hamlet's own words. The question is what would count as sufficient proof. The evidence is a ghost that might be a devil

8. What does the prayer scene's structure achieve?
   Show the full solution

   It gives the audience information the character lacks. Hamlet reasons carefully that a man dying at prayer goes to heaven, sheathes his sword and leaves, and two lines later Claudius says the prayer failed. The play's most tightly reasoned decision is shown to be wrong by a speech the reasoner is not present for. His best reasoning is refuted after he has left

9. How do Hamlet's other actions test the delay theory?
   Show the full solution

   He stabs through a curtain within a second of hearing a noise, killing Polonius, and at sea he rewrites a commission so two former friends are executed without shrift. Whatever the delay is, it is not general irresolution: the man is capable of instant and ruthless action when he is not required to be certain. He acts instantly elsewhere, and ruthlessly

10. State the defensible conclusion about the delay.
    Show the full solution

    It is a problem about evidence and about this particular act rather than a character trait. Hamlet acts instantly where certainty is not required and slowly where the act demands it, which is coherent rather than flawed. An essay taking that line can account for Polonius, for the voyage and for the prayer scene together, which a temperament explanation cannot. It is specific to an act that requires certainty

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

1. When was Macbeth written?
   Show the full solution

   About 1606, shortly after the Gunpowder Plot

2. Name five of the play's image patterns.
   Show the full solution

   Blood, clothing, sleep, darkness, children

3. What does equivocation mean?
   Show the full solution

   Telling the truth in a form that misleads

4. What does Macbeth say he has murdered?
   Show the full solution

   Sleep

5. How does Angus describe Macbeth's title in act 5?
   Show the full solution

   As a giant's robe on a dwarfish thief

6. What does the clothing pattern argue across the play?
   Show the full solution

   That kingship is a role with a shape and a man who takes it by murder does not grow into it. Macbeth calls a new title borrowed robes in act 1, before he has done anything wrong, and by act 5 the garment is a giant's robe on a dwarfish thief. The pattern delivers a verdict that no character ever states as a proposition. The role has a shape the usurper never fills

7. Analyze the reversal in the Neptune passage.
   Show the full solution

   An ocean cannot wash the hand clean; the hand will instead turn the ocean red. The expected quantities are reversed, so one man's guilt is made larger than the sea. The image refuses the ordinary consolation of scale, in which a small stain is lost in a large volume of water. The hand stains the ocean rather than the ocean cleaning the hand

8. Why are "incarnadine" and "making the green one red" placed together?
   Show the full solution

   A Latinate polysyllable is followed by five monosyllables of plain English saying the same thing. The repetition in a lower register is what a man does when the grand statement has not relieved him, so the second line registers that the first one failed. Shakespeare stages the failure of eloquence inside eloquence. The plain restatement shows the grand phrase did not help

9. Trace blood from act 1 to act 5.
   Show the full solution

   In act 1 the captain's report makes blood a mark of valor, with Macbeth unseaming a rebel. In act 2 it will not wash off. In act 3 it walks in as Banquo's ghost. In act 5 it is on Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking hands. The same substance travels from honor through guilt to madness without ever being redefined explicitly. Valor, then guilt, then haunting, then madness

10. State the method an image-pattern essay uses.
    Show the full solution

    Choose one pattern, find its first appearance, find its last, and describe what changed in between. That structure produces a whole essay with a claim, a sequence of evidence and a developmental argument. It is available in every Shakespeare play and is clearest in Macbeth, which is short enough to trace completely. First appearance, last appearance, and what changed

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

1. Name three metaphysical poets.
   Show the full solution

   Donne, Herbert, Marvell

2. Define a conceit.
   Show the full solution

   An extended and surprising comparison developed at length

3. What was Johnson's complaint about the metaphysicals?
   Show the full solution

   That heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together

4. What image does "A Valediction" use?
   Show the full solution

   A pair of drawing compasses

5. What position did Donne hold from 1621?
   Show the full solution

   Dean of St Paul's

6. Why does the compass conceit hold up under testing?
   Show the full solution

   Because each claim is a real property of the instrument. The fixed foot does move when the other moves, it does lean as the drawing leg travels, and it does straighten as the circle closes. Three physical facts each carry an emotional meaning without strain, so the comparison becomes more accurate the longer it runs. Every emotional claim matches a real property of the object

7. What does the geometry contribute that the image alone does not?
   Show the full solution

   A compass draws a circle, which is closed and ends where it began. The instrument's purpose guarantees the traveler's return, so the poem's consolation is built into the object rather than merely asserted by the speaker. The argument is delegated to a piece of equipment. The circle's closure guarantees the return

8. Answer Johnson's objection using this poem.
   Show the full solution

   Nothing here is yoked by violence. Every property Donne uses is a genuine property of a compass, and the comparison gets more exact as it is extended rather than less. Johnson's charge describes weak metaphysical writing accurately and fails against the strongest examples, which is worth saying in those terms rather than simply disagreeing. The comparison strengthens as it extends, so no violence is needed

9. What does "Death, be not proud" do as an opening?
   Show the full solution

   It addresses Death directly and insults it, dropping the reader into the middle of an argument whose beginning was never heard. Donne's openings are dramatic in this way throughout: a voice is already speaking to someone, already contradicting something, and the poem's work is to justify a position already taken. It begins mid-argument, addressing and insulting its opponent

10. What structure do Donne's poems share, and why?
    Show the full solution

    An abrupt address, a counterintuitive proposition and an extended proof. He was trained in law and later preached for a living, so the form of a Donne poem is the form of a case: assert, develop, and close by having established something the reader would have denied at the start. The shape of a legal or homiletic argument

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

1. When was Paradise Lost published, and in how many books?
   Show the full solution

   1667 in ten books, revised to twelve in 1674

2. What verse form does Milton use, and how did he defend it?
   Show the full solution

   Blank verse, defended in a preface attacking rhyme as bondage

3. State the poem's declared purpose.
   Show the full solution

   To justify the ways of God to men

4. What did Blake say about Milton?
   Show the full solution

   That he was of the Devil's party without knowing it

5. Name three features of the grand style.
   Show the full solution

   Latinate syntax, long periodic sentences, inverted word order, epic simile

6. What does the delayed main verb accomplish?
   Show the full solution

   It holds a great deal in suspension. The reader must carry disobedience, the fruit, death, woe and the loss of Eden for five lines before the verb "Sing" arrives, and the effort of holding them is part of the poem's scale. Latinate syntax imported into English forces a reader to work at the rate the poem sets. It makes the reader hold the whole subject before the verb arrives

7. Why does the poem announce its ending in the first sentence?
   Show the full solution

   Because suspense is not the point. The opening includes both the fall and the redemption by "one greater Man", so the reader knows the outcome before the poem begins. What the poem offers instead is the experience of watching a known catastrophe arrive, which is how epic has worked since Homer. The interest is in the process, not the outcome

8. How does the poem refute "the mind is its own place"?
   Show the full solution

   By putting the refutation in Satan's own mouth. In book 4 he says "Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell", three books after claiming the mind can make a heaven of hell. The boast of interior sovereignty is answered by the speaker who made it, which is more damaging than any narrator's comment. Satan himself says he carries hell with him

9. Assess "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven" in context.
   Show the full solution

   It is a rationalization spoken by someone who has just lost a war and needs to hold an army together. Quoting it as the poem's position ignores the speaker's situation and his audience entirely. The line is magnificent and it is also a commander improvising morale out of a catastrophe. A defeated commander improvising morale

10. State the most defensible position on the Satan problem.
    Show the full solution

    That the poem makes Satan attractive on purpose, so the reader experiences the appeal of rebellion and then watches it curdle through the degradation from archangel to toad to serpent to hissing snake. On that reading Blake is right about the effect and wrong about the intention, which accounts for both the power of book 1 and the structure of the remaining eleven. The appeal is deliberate, and the poem spends eleven books spending it

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

1. Define a heroic couplet.
   Show the full solution

   Two rhymed, usually end-stopped lines of iambic pentameter

2. What does end-stopped mean?
   Show the full solution

   The sense closes with the line

3. Define antithesis and zeugma.
   Show the full solution

   Antithesis sets two things against each other; zeugma joins unlike things to one verb

4. Name four neoclassical values.
   Show the full solution

   Order, balance, decorum, respect for the ancients

5. What does wit mean in this period?
   Show the full solution

   Intelligence and aptness, not humor

6. How does the first couplet's grammar exclude a middle position?
   Show the full solution

   "Drink deep, or taste not" offers two options across a caesura and nothing between them. The first line warned that a little learning is dangerous, and the second line's syntax makes a little learning grammatically unavailable. The form enacts the exclusion the content recommends. The either-or removes the little learning the couplet warns about

7. Analyze the paradox about drinking.
   Show the full solution

   Shallow draughts intoxicate and large ones sober, which reverses the ordinary fact about drinking. The rhyme forces "brain" and "again" into relation so the two claims arrive as a pair, and the reversal registers as wit rather than as error. The couplet makes the paradox feel demonstrated rather than asserted. It reverses the literal fact, and the rhyme makes the reversal land

8. What does the dancing comparison concede?
   Show the full solution

   That ease is the product of training. Those who move most easily have learned to dance, so what looks natural is the result of labor. Pope applies this to writing while demonstrating it in lines whose apparent effortlessness is the most worked thing on the page. Apparent naturalness is achieved by training

9. Why does Pope write "seem an Echo" rather than "be"?
   Show the full solution

   Because the effect is an illusion produced by craft. Sound cannot actually be meaning, and a poet who claimed it could would be making a mystical rather than a technical claim. "Seem" keeps the rule inside the domain of skill, which is the same concession the dance comparison made two lines earlier. It is an effect of craft, not a natural identity

10. Why did the Romantics reject this form?
    Show the full solution

    Because a form designed to make statements feel finished is the wrong instrument for a poetry about process, doubt and feeling. The couplet does not merely carry neoclassical values of order and proportion; it performs them, so keeping the form would have meant keeping the argument. The Lyrical Ballads preface attacks precisely this. Closure is the wrong effect for a poetry of process

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

1. When was The Rape of the Lock published?
   Show the full solution

   1712, expanded in 1714

2. What occasioned the poem?
   Show the full solution

   A young man cutting a lock of a young woman's hair, and the family quarrel that followed

3. Define a mock epic.
   Show the full solution

   Epic conventions applied to a trivial subject

4. What replaces the gods in this poem?
   Show the full solution

   The sylphs

5. Define bathos.
   Show the full solution

   The drop from the elevated to the trivial

6. Analyze the zeugma in the Queen Anne couplet.
   Show the full solution

   One verb, "take", governs counsel and tea, two things of entirely different weight, so the grammar asserts that the court treats governing and refreshment as equivalent activities. The rhyme of "obey" with "tea" completes the joke by pairing sovereign authority with a beverage. Pope never states the criticism; the syntax does. One verb equates governing with refreshment

7. What does the list of pairs establish?
   Show the full solution

   Not that chastity and a china jar are equal but that Belinda's world treats them as equal. Pope is describing a system of values rather than endorsing one, and the accumulation of five pairs in five lines makes the observation impossible to dismiss as a single joke. That her society values them equally, not that they are

8. Why does the trivial item take the rhyme position?
   Show the full solution

   Because the couplet's strongest emphasis falls at the line's end. Honor comes first and brocade takes the rhyme, so the meter gives its weight to the dress. The poem's judgment is delivered by prosody rather than by statement, which is the most characteristic thing about Pope's technique. Emphasis falls at the rhyme, so the meter weights the trivial

9. Why is the mock epic not an attack on epic?
   Show the full solution

   Because the form is used at full strength and taken seriously. Pope's invocation, arming, journey and battle are competently executed epic machinery, and the comedy comes from the subject they are applied to. Mocking epic would require making the conventions ridiculous, which the poem never does. The conventions are used properly; only the subject is small

10. State the poem's actual target.
    Show the full solution

    A leisured society that has given a clever young woman nothing to lose except her reputation and her ornaments. The satire is affectionate toward Belinda and merciless about the world she lives in, and an essay that reads it as an attack on her, or on women generally, has the poem backwards. The society, not Belinda

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

1. When did Johnson publish his Dictionary, and what was its method?
   Show the full solution

   1755; defining words by quoting actual usage

2. When was Gray's Elegy published?
   Show the full solution

   1751

3. What form does the Elegy use?
   Show the full solution

   The heroic quatrain, ABAB in iambic pentameter

4. What is graveyard poetry?
   Show the full solution

   The mid-century mode that made melancholy a respectable subject

5. What does sensibility mean in this period?
   Show the full solution

   Refined feeling treated as a virtue

6. What do the gem and the flower argue?
   Show the full solution

   That worth is independent of recognition. A gem in an unreached cave and a flower blooming unseen are both valuable and neither is diminished by the absence of a witness. That is a direct challenge to the assumption running from Beowulf's lof to Pope's reputation that fame is the measure of a life. Worth does not depend on being seen

7. Why name Hampden, Milton and Cromwell specifically?
   Show the full solution

   They are seventeenth-century figures whose names carry precise historical weight, so imagining the village dead as unrealized versions of them makes the claim historical rather than sentimental. A general statement that some of them might have been great would be a platitude; three named men turn it into a proposition. Named historical figures make the claim specific rather than sentimental

8. What does "some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood" concede?
   Show the full solution

   That obscurity prevented harm as well as achievement. Gray is honest enough to say the unrecognized life avoided the crimes along with the glory, which keeps the poem from being a simple lament for wasted talent. The concession is what makes the argument survive scrutiny. Obscurity prevented the crimes as well as the greatness

9. Why does the quatrain suit this poem better than a couplet?
   Show the full solution

   ABAB delays closure by two lines, so the stanza holds a thought in suspension instead of snapping it shut. A poem about lives that were never completed is badly served by a form built to make statements feel finished, and Gray's small formal change carries a large part of the effect. It delays closure, which suits a poem about what was never finished

10. State the transition these two writers document.
    Show the full solution

    Both keep the eighteenth century's forms and turn them toward loss, obscurity and private feeling. Johnson finishes a great public work and writes about the people who did not live to see it; Gray writes an elegy for people history did not record. The Romantics inherited this subject rather than inventing it, and changed the verse it was written in. Old forms turned toward loss and private feeling

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

1. When did Lyrical Ballads appear, and when the preface?
   Show the full solution

   1798; the preface added in 1800

2. What subject does Wordsworth choose, and why?
   Show the full solution

   Low and rustic life, because the passions are less restrained there

3. Give the full definition of poetry from the preface.
   Show the full solution

   The spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, taking its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity

4. What is poetic diction?
   Show the full solution

   The stock phrases the eighteenth century had accumulated

5. How does Wordsworth describe the poet?
   Show the full solution

   A man speaking to men

6. What objection does the rustic-life claim invite?
   Show the full solution

   That rural people are not in fact more emotionally direct, and that Wordsworth is idealizing a class he observed rather than belonged to. Coleridge made this objection at length in Biographia Literaria, which is worth citing because it shows the disagreement was internal to the movement rather than imposed later. That it idealizes a class, an objection Coleridge made

7. Describe the four stages of the full definition.
   Show the full solution

   Feel powerfully; recollect in tranquillity; contemplate the memory until the tranquillity disappears; write while an emotion kindred to the original is present. That is a deliberate process with a waiting period in it, which is almost the opposite of writing in the grip of a feeling. Feel, wait, recollect, contemplate until the feeling returns

8. What does "kindred to" concede?
   Show the full solution

   That the emotion present during composition is similar to the original rather than identical. Wordsworth is precise about the fact that a poem contains a manufactured feeling resembling a real one, which is a strikingly unsentimental thing for the founding document of Romantic poetry to say. The composing emotion resembles the original; it is not it

9. What does "a man speaking to men" reject?
   Show the full solution

   The poet as a separate order of being with privileged access to truth. It is a democratic claim about authority, and it matches the argument about language: if the poet is an ordinary person, poetry should use ordinary words. The two positions are the same position stated twice. Poetic authority as a special order of being

10. Why is it worth noting that the preface is carefully reasoned?
    Show the full solution

    Because a document arguing for spontaneity is itself a structured argument: a premise about where passion is clearest, a conclusion about subject matter, a corollary about language, a staged definition of composition, and a claim about the poet's standing. The manifesto's form contradicts the caricature of Romanticism as the abandonment of thought. The case for spontaneity is made by rigorous argument

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

1. When was Tintern Abbey published?
   Show the full solution

   1798, in Lyrical Ballads

2. Name four features of the conversation poem.
   Show the full solution

   Blank verse, a specific place, a silent listener, a return to the opening

3. How long has the speaker been away?
   Show the full solution

   Five years

4. Who is the silent listener?
   Show the full solution

   Dorothy Wordsworth

5. What is a spot of time?
   Show the full solution

   A remembered moment that nourishes the mind afterward

6. What does the triple repetition of "five" accomplish?
   Show the full solution

   It makes the absence feel longer than the arithmetic. Winters are called long and summers are not, so naming the same interval three times with increasing weight measures the time emotionally rather than numerically. The poem's first gesture is to show that felt duration and counted duration differ. It measures the interval emotionally rather than numerically

7. Why define memory by a negative comparison?
   Show the full solution

   Because it forces the reader to imagine the alternative. Saying the landscape has not been to him as it would be to a blind man's eye makes the reader construct the case where memory did nothing, and only then supply what actually happened. The definition arrives with its opposite already in the reader's mind. The reader must first imagine memory failing

8. Analyze "felt in the blood, and felt along the heart".
   Show the full solution

   Not thought and not recalled but felt, twice, in two bodily locations. The two prepositions, in and along, describe the memory as circulating rather than stored, so a claim about sentiment becomes a claim about the body. A reader can deny that a memory is beautiful and cannot easily deny having been physically affected by one. Memory is described as circulating in the body

9. Name the three stages the poem describes.
   Show the full solution

   The boy's animal appetite for the place, the young man's passionate and thoughtless love of it, and the adult who hears in it the still, sad music of humanity. Each stage loses something the previous one had, which is what makes the poem an argument rather than a description. Appetite, passion, then thought

10. State the poem's real argument.
    Show the full solution

    Compensation. The immediate rapture is gone and what replaces it is a thinking relation to other people, and Wordsworth insists this is an exchange rather than a decline. Whether the reader believes the insistence is where the essays are written, since the poem protests its own consolation more than once. That what age takes is repaid by what it gives

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

1. What was the division of labor in Lyrical Ballads?
   Show the full solution

   Coleridge took the supernatural, Wordsworth the ordinary

2. Quote Coleridge's phrase for poetic faith.
   Show the full solution

   Willing suspension of disbelief for the moment

3. What does that suspension require from the writer?
   Show the full solution

   A semblance of truth sufficient to procure it

4. Describe the ballad stanza.
   Show the full solution

   Four lines alternating four and three stresses, rhyming ABCB

5. What reason does the poem give for killing the albatross?
   Show the full solution

   None

6. Why is the ballad stanza the right choice here?
   Show the full solution

   A ballad is what an unlettered sailor would sing, and it carries no authorial voice, so the poem arrives with the authority of something remembered rather than composed. The archaic spelling and the marginal gloss extend the same effect, presenting the text as a recovered document rather than a new poem. It gives the poem the authority of folk memory

7. Analyze the repetition in "Day after day, day after day".
   Show the full solution

   The line uses its whole length to say one thing twice, which is what stalled time feels like. The verse stops advancing because the ship has stopped moving, so the reader experiences the becalming as a property of the poem rather than as information about the plot. The line stops moving because the ship has

8. What does "a painted ship upon a painted ocean" remove?
   Show the full solution

   Depth. Both ship and sea are painted, so the world becomes a surface, and a painting contains no actual water, which is exactly the next stanza's subject. The metaphor and the plot agree with each other, which is why the image is more than decorative. It flattens the world, and a painting holds no water

9. How does the poem earn its supernatural events?
   Show the full solution

   By supplying verifiable physical suffering first: thirst, shrinking boards, a punishing sun, a sea that cannot be drunk. That is the "semblance of truth sufficient" Coleridge's theory demands, and the reader who has accepted the thirst will extend poetic faith to the ghost ship and the reanimated crew. Real physical detail buys credit for the impossible

10. What problem does the closing moral create?
    Show the full solution

    It is far too small for the poem. A bird is killed for no stated reason, two hundred men die, a dice game decides a fate, and the lesson offered at the end is to love all creatures. Wordsworth complained the poem had no moral, and the tidy one supplied does not cover what the reader has seen. Writing about that gap is the analysis. The stated lesson does not cover the poem's events

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

1. When did the two books appear?
   Show the full solution

   Innocence in 1789, Experience in 1794

2. What does the subtitle call them?
   Show the full solution

   The two contrary states of the human soul

3. How were the books produced?
   Show the full solution

   Engraved, printed and colored by Blake himself

4. What did Blake write about contraries?
   Show the full solution

   That without contraries there is no progression

5. Whom does the Experience sweeper name as beneficiaries?
   Show the full solution

   God, his Priest and King

6. Where does the irony sit in the Innocence poem?
   Show the full solution

   Between the child's conclusion and the facts the poem has already supplied. He is sincere: he rose in the dark, the morning was cold, he went to work, and then he says that those who do their duty need not fear harm. The reader does the arithmetic, and the child never does, which is why the poem is unbearable rather than satirical. Between the sincere maxim and the facts around it

7. What mechanism does the Experience sweeper identify?
   Show the full solution

   That visible cheerfulness is read as evidence of wellbeing. Because he is happy and dances and sings, his parents conclude they have done him no injury. He has described exactly how the appearance of contentment licenses the people causing the harm, which is a sophisticated observation from a child in a chimney. Appearing happy is taken as proof of not being harmed

8. Analyze "make up a heaven of our misery".
   Show the full solution

   "Make up" means both construct and fabricate, so the line says the institutions build their heaven out of the children's suffering and also that the heaven is invented. One phrase carries an economic accusation and a theological one, and naming God, Priest and King in sequence makes the accusation institutional rather than personal. It means both built from and invented

9. What can each speaker see that the other cannot?
   Show the full solution

   The Innocence child cannot see the exploitation and can genuinely comfort his friend. The Experience child sees the system exactly and can comfort nobody, including himself. Each has what the other lacks, which is why Blake calls the states contrary rather than right and wrong. One can comfort and not see; the other sees and cannot comfort

10. What does the meter contribute?
    Show the full solution

    Both poems use the simple measures of hymns and nursery rhymes, so poems about child labor arrive in the meter children are sung to sleep with. The form is in direct conflict with the content, and a large part of the effect comes from that friction rather than from anything either speaker says. Nursery-rhyme meter carrying an account of child labor

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

1. Define an ode.
   Show the full solution

   A long lyric addressed to a subject, in an elevated register

2. When did Keats write the great odes?
   Show the full solution

   Spring 1819

3. Define negative capability.
   Show the full solution

   Remaining in uncertainty without any irritable reaching after fact and reason

4. What is synaesthesia?
   Show the full solution

   Describing one sense in the terms of another

5. What two words reverse the poem's attitude to the urn?
   Show the full solution

   Cold Pastoral

6. Explain the claim about unheard melodies.
   Show the full solution

   An imagined perfection beats an actual performance because nothing can disappoint it. A melody never played cannot be played badly, cannot end, and cannot fail to match what the listener wanted. The paradox states the poem's whole problem in two lines: what is never realized is never spoiled, and also never happens. What is never performed can never disappoint

7. Test the consolation offered to the Bold Lover.
   Show the full solution

   It works only if the lover is not there to experience the waiting. "For ever wilt thou love" is simultaneously a promise and a sentence, and if the figure has any interior at all then eternal near-approach is a torment rather than a gift. The consolation requires the thing being consoled to be incapable of feeling it. It only helps if he cannot experience the waiting

8. What does counting the negatives reveal?
   Show the full solution

   Never, never, cannot, not, never: the consoling stanza is built almost entirely from denials. The syntax undercuts the comfort the content offers, so a reader hearing the stanza receives reassurance and refusal at the same time. Keats's form is arguing against his own speaker. The comforting stanza is made of denials

9. What does "Cold Pastoral" do?
   Show the full solution

   It reverses four stanzas of increasing intimacy in two words. The urn has been addressed as a bride, a foster-child and a historian, and is now called cold, which is what marble is and what the frozen lovers are. The poem turns on its own object at the moment it has run out of ways to admire it. It withdraws, naming the urn by its actual temperature

10. State a defensible position on the final lines.
    Show the full solution

    That the urn's statement is the wisdom available to an object with no experience of loss. Who speaks the last line and a half is genuinely unresolvable, since the punctuation differs across the surviving printings. But the poem has spent five stanzas showing what permanence costs, so the maxim is something the speaker has been offered rather than something he has concluded. It is the urn's wisdom, offered to a speaker who knows better

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

1. Who are the second generation of Romantics?
   Show the full solution

   Byron, Shelley and Keats

2. What does Shelley call poets?
   Show the full solution

   The unacknowledged legislators of the world

3. What occasioned The Mask of Anarchy?
   Show the full solution

   The Peterloo massacre of 1819

4. Describe the Byronic hero.
   Show the full solution

   Proud, guilty, isolated and attractive

5. Where and when did Byron die?
   Show the full solution

   Missolonghi, 1824, supporting Greek independence

6. What does the narrative distance in "Ozymandias" argue?
   Show the full solution

   Shelley reports a traveler who describes a sculptor's work bearing a king's words: four removes between the reader and Ozymandias. The king's voice survives only as a quotation inside a stranger's anecdote, so the poem's structure demonstrates its claim. Power reaches the present as hearsay. Power survives only as hearsay at four removes

7. How does the setting change the inscription's meaning?
   Show the full solution

   "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair" was a boast about scale, addressed to rival kings. Standing in an empty desert beside a shattered face, it becomes accurate for the opposite reason: any mighty reader should indeed despair, at the prospect of their own works. The poem never states the reversal. It stays true and its reason inverts

8. Who is the poem's real subject?
   Show the full solution

   The sculptor. His hand mocked the passions and his reading of the king's face is the only thing that survived, so the artist legislated the tyrant's reputation for three thousand years and the tyrant got no say. That is A Defence of Poetry's claim about unacknowledged legislators, demonstrated in fourteen lines. The sculptor, whose judgment outlasted the king

9. What does the meter of The Mask of Anarchy decide?
   Show the full solution

   Its audience. Short trochaic lines with insistent rhyme are close to a marching chant, so the poem is built to be shouted by a crowd rather than read in a study. That is a formal decision with a political purpose, and it explains why the poem was not published until 1832. It is written to be chanted by a crowd

10. Analyze "shake your chains to earth like dew" and the last line.
    Show the full solution

    Chains are heavy and dew is weightless, so the simile asserts the restraint is lighter than it feels, which is what a crowd must believe before it acts. The closing line, "Ye are many, they are few", is five monosyllables stating a plain arithmetical fact as a political argument, and it was still being quoted at demonstrations two centuries later. It makes the restraint weightless, then states a fact as an argument

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

1. What years does the Victorian period cover?
   Show the full solution

   1837 to 1901

2. What did Lyell publish, and when?
   Show the full solution

   Principles of Geology, 1830 to 1833

3. When did the Origin of Species appear?
   Show the full solution

   1859

4. What is the higher criticism?
   Show the full solution

   Historical scholarship applied to the Bible

5. Name the three Reform Acts by date.
   Show the full solution

   1832, 1867 and 1884

6. Why does the dating of In Memoriam matter?
   Show the full solution

   Because it shows Victorian doubt predates Darwin. The poem was written from 1833 and published in 1850, at least nine years before the Origin, and its source is geology rather than biology: "from scarped cliff and quarried stone". The fossil record had already established mass extinction before any theory explained it. Doubt arrived with geology, before Darwin

7. Describe the two-stage argument in Tennyson's stanzas.
   Show the full solution

   The first consoles: nature discards individuals but preserves the type, so loss has a purpose. The second withdraws the consolation, because the rocks testify that a thousand types are gone. Tennyson offers the available comfort and then destroys it with evidence, in eight lines. Consolation offered, then removed by the fossil record

8. What does personifying Nature achieve?
   Show the full solution

   It grants her the capacity for caring in the same sentence that denies she exercises it. "I care for nothing" is only devastating if the speaker could have cared, so the personification supplies the indifference with something to be indifferent about. Crane makes the same move in "The Open Boat" forty years later. Indifference needs a capacity for care to be felt

9. Analyze the register of Darwin's final sentence.
   Show the full solution

   "Grandeur", "breathed", "most beautiful and most wonderful": a scientific conclusion presented in the vocabulary of the psalms. The passive "breathed" leaves room for a creator without requiring one, and the whole sentence answers an objection Darwin expects, at the last possible moment in the book. Biblical vocabulary answering an anticipated objection

10. State the period's characteristic shape.
    Show the full solution

    A confident public surface with a specific anxiety beneath it, working in both directions. Tennyson's great poem of faith contains the century's bleakest stanza, and Darwin's materialist book ends with something close to a doxology. Neither writer is simply what their reputation says. Public confidence with private doubt, in both directions

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

1. Who was Arthur Hallam, and when did he die?
   Show the full solution

   Tennyson's friend, dead in 1833 at twenty-two

2. Describe the In Memoriam stanza.
   Show the full solution

   ABBA in iambic tetrameter

3. How many sections does the poem have?
   Show the full solution

   133

4. When was Ulysses written and published?
   Show the full solution

   Written 1833, published 1842

5. When did Tennyson become Laureate?
   Show the full solution

   1850

6. What does the opening of Ulysses establish about the speaker?
   Show the full solution

   He calls his wife aged, his subjects savage and his own laws unequal, which is three insults in three lines delivered by the man responsible for all three. His dissatisfaction is with his own duties, so the poem's famous energy is a king's argument for abandoning his post. He is contemptuous of the obligations he is leaving

7. Analyze "hoard, and sleep, and feed".
   Show the full solution

   Three monosyllabic verbs of animal maintenance, listed flatly with no differentiation. The contempt is in the flatness rather than in any adjective: Ulysses describes his people's entire existence in six syllables, and the shortness is the judgment. Three flat monosyllables reduce a people to maintenance

8. Hold both readings of the last line.
   Show the full solution

   "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield" is genuinely stirring, built from four separate infinitive pushes, and it has been quoted on war memorials for a century and a half. It is also the conclusion of a speech by a man abandoning his wife, his son and his kingdom. Tennyson wrote it within weeks of Hallam's death as a poem about continuing, and the ambivalence records what continuing costs. Inspiring, and spoken by someone deserting his post

9. What does the ABBA stanza do across 133 sections?
   Show the full solution

   The outer rhyme closes over the inner pair, so each stanza shuts. A poem made of 133 sections of shutting stanzas closes over and over without ever concluding, which is an exact formal image of grief that keeps completing a thought and finding another one waiting. It closes repeatedly without ever concluding

10. Read "'Tis better to have loved and lost" in its stanza.
    Show the full solution

    Tennyson does not say it is true. He says "I hold it true" and that he feels it "when I sorrow most", so the consolation is reported as a practice maintained under pressure rather than stated as a fact established. Quoted alone the line is a platitude; in its stanza it is a man describing what he makes himself believe. He reports holding it, not that it is true

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

1. Name the four features of a dramatic monologue.
   Show the full solution

   One speaker who is not the poet, a silent listener, a specific moment, unintended revelation

2. When was the poem published?
   Show the full solution

   1842, in Dramatic Lyrics

3. Who is the listener?
   Show the full solution

   An envoy negotiating the duke's next marriage

4. What is the duke's stated complaint?
   Show the full solution

   That she ranked his nine-hundred-year-old name with anybody's gift

5. What is the last object he points out?
   Show the full solution

   A bronze of Neptune taming a sea-horse

6. How does the poem establish its situation without narration?
   Show the full solution

   Entirely through what the duke says and what he assumes his listener already knows. A portrait, a curtain only he draws, a previous wife, a visitor being shown around: none of it is stated and all of it is inferable. The reader reconstructs a scene from one side of a conversation. The reader reconstructs it from one side of a conversation

7. Why does learning the listener's identity late change the poem?
   Show the full solution

   Because it retroactively converts reminiscence into negotiation. Everything already said was addressed to a man arranging the duke's next marriage, so the account of the last wife's faults is a specification of what the next one should avoid. The boasting is a warning. It turns reminiscence into a warning about the next wife

8. What does the duke's refusal to "stoop" reveal?
   Show the full solution

   That he expected gratitude proportional to rank and could not bring himself to say so. He explains at length that telling her would have been beneath him, which means he killed a woman rather than have a conversation. The admission is offered as evidence of his dignity. He killed her rather than explain himself

9. Why is the euphemism more damning than a confession?
   Show the full solution

   A confession would make him a murderer. "I gave commands; then all smiles stopped together" contains no verb of killing and no object, which makes him a man for whom having a wife killed is not the sort of thing one specifies. The casualness establishes something worse than the act. It shows the act is beneath his notice

10. What does the closing bronze add?
    Show the full solution

    Another artwork, another male figure controlling a female creature, mentioned casually on the way downstairs and named as cast for him. The poem ends by showing that the duchess behind the curtain was one item in a collection, and that the duke has learned nothing and is about to acquire another wife. It repeats the pattern and shows nothing has changed

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

1. When was the poem published?
   Show the full solution

   1836

2. Under what heading did it appear?
   Show the full solution

   Madhouse Cells

3. How does the speaker kill her?
   Show the full solution

   He strangles her with her own hair

4. Give the rhyme scheme.
   Show the full solution

   ABABB

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

   "And yet God has not said a word!"

6. What does the opening establish before anything happens?
   Show the full solution

   That this narrator reads intention into things that have none. The wind is sullen, it tears elm-tops "for spite", and it does "its worst to vex" the lake: motive, malice and purpose assigned to weather. Everything he later says about Porphyria's wishes arrives with that habit already demonstrated. That he attributes intention to things that have none

7. What does the ABABB scheme contribute?
   Show the full solution

   Four lines pair off and a fifth is left over, matching only by repetition, so every stanza contains an extra thing that does not belong. It is a very quiet piece of design, and it means the poem's form is always slightly unresolved while its speaker is entirely certain. Every stanza has a leftover line that does not pair

8. Analyze "I found a thing to do".
   Show the full solution

   Not decided, not resolved: "found" presents the murder as a discovery, something already available that he happened to locate. The verb removes agency from the sentence describing the most deliberate act in the poem, which is exactly the grammatical move a person makes when they do not intend to own an action. "Found" turns a decision into a discovery

9. Where is the only doubt in the poem, and how is it handled?
   Show the full solution

   "No pain felt she; I am quite sure she felt no pain." He says it twice and the second time insists on his own certainty, which a certain man would not need to do. It is the single place where his confidence cracks, and he repairs it by adding emphasis rather than evidence. The repeated claim about pain, patched with emphasis

10. Why is "he is mad" an inadequate reading?
    Show the full solution

    Because madness is a label rather than an analysis, and the speaker's reasoning is internally consistent throughout: she wanted to be his, she could not be permanently, he made her permanently, and heaven did not object. Every step follows from the last. The only false step is the first, which is the premise that any romantic poetry trains a reader to accept. The reasoning is consistent; only the first premise is false

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

1. When was Dover Beach written and published?
   Show the full solution

   Written about 1851, published 1867

2. What was Arnold's profession?
   Show the full solution

   A school inspector, for thirty-five years

3. Who is invoked as having heard the same sound?
   Show the full solution

   Sophocles, on the Aegean

4. What does the poem's last image describe?
   Show the full solution

   A darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night

5. What did Arnold's criticism propose as a replacement for religion?
   Show the full solution

   Culture

6. What does the word "Listen!" accomplish?
   Show the full solution

   It switches the poem from sight to sound in one word. Six lines of settled visual beauty precede it, and everything after is heard rather than seen. The sense that delivers the poem's argument is the one the reader has to be instructed to use. It moves the poem from seeing to hearing

7. Analyze "begin, and cease, and then again begin".
   Show the full solution

   Three phrases separated by commas, with the last repeating the first, so the line performs the wave's return rather than describing it. A reader experiences the cycle in the syntax, which is why the poem's argument about endless recurrence needs no statement at this point. The line enacts the cycle it describes

8. Why is the grating roar of pebbles the right sound?
   Show the full solution

   Because it is the one noise the sea makes that is neither soothing nor grand. Arnold could have used the roll of surf or the boom of a storm and chose an unpleasant mechanical grinding, so the poem's central sensation is irritating rather than sublime. The thesis is built from the least poetic thing available. It is the sea's least consoling, least grand noise

9. What does the tide metaphor offer that a simpler image would not?
   Show the full solution

   Duration, and possibly return. Faith is not gone but ebbing, with a "long, withdrawing roar", so the loss is a process with a length rather than an event. A tide also comes back, which is either a hope Arnold declines to develop or an irony he expects the reader to catch, and both readings hold. Loss as a long process, in an image that also returns

10. State the poem's proposal rather than its despair.
    Show the full solution

    If the world has neither joy nor love nor light nor certitude, then fidelity between two people is not consolation but construction: the only thing left that can be made rather than found. The poem shrinks from the history of belief to two people in a room, and the darkling plain is the setting for that proposal rather than a conclusion replacing it. Fidelity as the one thing that can still be made

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

1. Why did Hardy stop writing novels?
   Show the full solution

   Jude the Obscure, 1895, was badly received

2. Define situational irony.
   Show the full solution

   The outcome is the opposite of what the arrangement promised

3. What is "The Convergence of the Twain" about?
   Show the full solution

   The sinking of the Titanic, 1912

4. What is the date of "The Darkling Thrush"?
   Show the full solution

   31 December 1900

5. What did Hardy call his position?
   Show the full solution

   Evolutionary meliorism

6. What does the stanza shape of the Titanic poem do?
   Show the full solution

   Two short lines and one roughly twice as long, rhyming AAA, so each stanza widens suddenly at the end. It is often read as the silhouette of a ship, and whether or not Hardy intended that, the repeated widening enacts the convergence: two small things and then one large event, thirty-three times. It widens at each stanza's end, enacting the collision

7. Analyze "the intimate welding of their later history".
   Show the full solution

   Welding is a shipyard word, so the collision is described in the vocabulary of the ship's own construction, and "intimate" makes it a union rather than an impact. The disaster is presented as a completion of a process begun in the yards, which removes the accident from the account entirely. Shipyard vocabulary makes the wreck a completion

8. What has Hardy removed from the event?
   Show the full solution

   Contingency. Nothing in the poem suggests the iceberg could have been avoided, and the two objects are described growing in parallel, prepared for each other, with the same verb. There is no moment at which anything could have gone differently, which is situational irony at its coldest. Any possibility that it could have gone otherwise

9. Why does Hardy specify the thrush's condition before it sings?
   Show the full solution

   Frail, gaunt, small and blast-beruffled: four descriptors establishing that this bird has the least reason of anything in the poem to be hopeful. The joy is then unaccountable rather than natural, which is the whole point. A healthy bird singing would be weather; this one is a problem. So the joy is unaccountable rather than natural

10. Read the last two lines precisely, and state Hardy's position.
    Show the full solution

    "Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew / And I was unaware": the hope belongs to the bird, the speaker does not have it, and "some" concedes he cannot identify it. Three qualifications in fourteen words. He reports a hope he does not share and cannot name, held by something less equipped than he is, and declines to claim or deny it. That refusal is why he rejected the label of pessimist. He reports a hope he neither shares nor denies

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

1. What two serial formats were used?
   Show the full solution

   Monthly shilling numbers and weekly magazine parts

2. How long was a monthly number?
   Show the full solution

   Thirty-two pages

3. Which novel established the monthly format?
   Show the full solution

   Pickwick Papers, 1836

4. What was the three-volume novel sold to?
   Show the full solution

   Circulating libraries

5. How many times does "fog" appear in the opening of Bleak House?
   Show the full solution

   Thirteen

6. Why does serialization produce subplots?
   Show the full solution

   Because a large cast must keep circulating so no thread goes cold across a month. A reader waiting four weeks needs the characters they care about to appear, and a single plotline could not sustain nineteen installments. The multiplicity readers often call sprawl is a structural requirement of the format. A month between parts means no thread can go cold

7. What does the fog repetition accomplish for a serial reader?
   Show the full solution

   It installs an atmosphere firmly enough to persist for nineteen months. A reader picking up number eight in October remembers the fog without being reminded, so the novel's central image needs no reintroduction. The repetition that looks excessive on a single page is calibrated for a two-year reading experience. It fixes the image for a reader returning monthly

8. Why is the physical fog introduced before the legal one?
   Show the full solution

   So the metaphor is established before it is applied. Two pages of actual London fog precede any mention of the Court of Chancery, which means the reader already has the sensation of being unable to see when the novel names the institution that produces it. The vehicle arrives before the tenor. The sensation is installed before the institution is named

9. What does weekly publication do to characterization?
   Show the full solution

   It forces speed. Hard Times ran weekly and is Dickens's shortest novel, and Gradgrind arrives complete in twenty words: "Facts" three times in three sentences, capitalized. Speed buys instant legibility and costs subtlety, and that trade is a consequence of the schedule rather than a failure of skill. Characters must arrive complete, which costs subtlety

10. State the analytical move this lesson teaches.
    Show the full solution

    Name the format, name what it required, then show the specific technique the writer developed in response. That structure converts a fact about publishing into an argument about form, and it is the difference between complaining that Victorian novels are long and explaining why they are shaped as they are. Format, requirement, then the technique it produced

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

1. When was Hard Times serialized, and to whom is it dedicated?
   Show the full solution

   1854, dedicated to Thomas Carlyle

2. Name the three books of the novel.
   Show the full solution

   Sowing, Reaping, Garnering

3. What does Sleary's circus stand for?
   Show the full solution

   Fancy, against Gradgrind's fact

4. Name three of the novel's meaningful names.
   Show the full solution

   Gradgrind, Bounderby, M'Choakumchild, Sleary

5. How does Gradgrind address Sissy Jupe?
   Show the full solution

   As girl number twenty

6. What does the self-correcting first sentence argue?
   Show the full solution

   That the town's actual color cannot be stated directly, because industry has interposed itself between the object and its description. Dickens states a fact, withdraws it, and replaces it inside one sentence, so the syntax performs the pollution rather than reporting it. The sentence's self-correction is the pollution

7. Analyze the serpents of smoke.
   Show the full solution

   Smoke that trails "for ever and ever" and "never got uncoiled" is unnatural motion: a snake moving perpetually without ever completing the movement. The image makes ceaseless industrial activity a form of stasis, which is the novel's argument about Coketown compressed into one clause. Perpetual motion that achieves nothing

8. Why is "squarely pointing with his square forefinger" clumsy on purpose?
   Show the full solution

   Because Gradgrind is composed of right angles and the prose is too. Repeating a word and its adverb in one clause is a fault in most writing and here it reproduces the character's rigidity at the level of the sentence. The style is doing characterization that the description would otherwise have to assert. The prose is as rectangular as the man

9. What do the three words "girl number twenty" establish?
   Show the full solution

   The entire critique of Gradgrind's educational philosophy. He addresses a child by her position in a register, then asks "who is that girl" in the third person while pointing at her, so she is present and discussed as absent. That is what treating people as data does, demonstrated before any argument is made. A person addressed as an entry in a register

10. State the question worth arguing about Dickens's method.
    Show the full solution

    Whether the schematic method serves the case. It makes the critique vivid and impossible to misunderstand, and it also means Dickens is arguing against a caricature of utilitarianism rather than against Mill. Both halves are true, and an essay should say so rather than defending the characters as realistic or dismissing them as cartoons. Vividness bought at the cost of arguing against a caricature

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

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

   1847, as Currer Bell

2. Name the three Bell pseudonyms.
   Show the full solution

   Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell

3. What is a bildungsroman?
   Show the full solution

   A novel of formation, following a protagonist to a settled self

4. Name the novel's five settings.
   Show the full solution

   Gateshead, Lowood, Thornfield, Moor House, Ferndean

5. Quote the novel's most famous direct address.
   Show the full solution

   "Reader, I married him."

6. What does Jane's list of four disadvantages accomplish?
   Show the full solution

   It concedes the entire case against her before she makes her argument. Poor, obscure, plain and little, named in order without softening, leaves a reader inclined to dismiss her with nothing left to say, because she has said it first and more precisely than they would have. It concedes the case against her before she argues

7. Why is the counterfactual the strongest move in the speech?
   Show the full solution

   Because it concedes that her position depends on circumstances rather than on merit. With beauty and wealth she would have made leaving as hard for him as it is for her. She is not claiming equality of worth but pointing out that worth is not what is being measured, which is a far more difficult argument to answer. It shows worth is not what is being measured

8. Analyze the syntax of "Reader, I married him."
   Show the full solution

   Not "we were married" and not "he married me": Jane is the grammatical subject of her own marriage. In 1847 a woman was the object of a marriage in almost every sense the law recognized, so putting her in the subject position is a claim about agency made by word order alone. She is the subject of the sentence and of the marriage

9. What does the recurring address to the reader assert?
   Show the full solution

   That the story has a teller who is choosing what to include. "Reader" appears throughout the book, making the narration a performance Jane controls, which is the exact opposite of the position the novel describes women as occupying. The address is an argument about authority delivered as a mannerism. That Jane controls the telling

10. What makes the novel's narration worth analyzing?
    Show the full solution

    The gap between the child who experienced Gateshead and Lowood and the adult who is telling it. The narrator judges, selects, addresses and withholds, so tracking what the adult voice does to the child's material is where the essays are. Summarizing the plot discards the only thing that is actually complicated about the book. The distance between the child's experience and the adult's telling

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

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

   About 1910 to 1939

2. What date did Woolf give for the change in human character?
   Show the full solution

   In or about December 1910

3. Name modernism's two characteristic methods.
   Show the full solution

   Fragmentation and allusion

4. Who promoted imagist principles, and when?
   Show the full solution

   Ezra Pound, in 1913

5. What does stream of consciousness move the novel toward?
   Show the full solution

   What is being thought rather than what happens

6. What does Tennyson's stanza assume?
   Show the full solution

   A direction. One God, one law, one element and one far-off divine event, with the whole creation moving toward it: four repetitions of "one" and a universe with a destination. After 130 sections of doubt the poem arrives at a claim that existence has a purpose it is traveling toward. That the universe is going somewhere

7. What does Eliot's third line break?
   Show the full solution

   Three things at once: the meter, which had been almost conventional; the register, which drops from evening sky to operating theater; and the promise of the title, which said love song. Three expectations are withdrawn in a single line and the poem has barely begun. The meter, the register and the title's promise

8. What has happened to the simile as a device?
   Show the full solution

   It has stopped clarifying the subject and started characterizing the observer. "Etherised upon a table" explains nothing about an evening sky and reveals a great deal about a man who reaches for that comparison. The shift from illuminating the object to exposing the perceiver is the whole of modernist imagery. It now reveals the observer, not the subject

9. Why is the war an insufficient explanation on its own?
   Show the full solution

   Because Woolf dates the change to December 1910, four years before it began, and the movement was already answering Victorian confidence in both prose and verse. The war accelerated and confirmed a break that had other causes, including new physics, new psychology and the exhaustion of nineteenth-century forms. The break was already under way by 1910

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

    For each text, ask what has been withheld and what the reader must supply. Eliot withholds connection, Conrad withholds a judgment, Woolf withholds a plot, and Yeats withholds a system the reader is not required to believe. The work transferred to the reader is what makes the writing modernist. Ask what is withheld and who has to supply it

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

1. Over what years did Yeats publish?
   Show the full solution

   1889 to 1939

2. Describe the early style.
   Show the full solution

   Celtic Twilight: dreamy, mythological, heavily adjectival

3. Who worked as his secretary from 1913?
   Show the full solution

   Ezra Pound

4. What event gave him a public subject?
   Show the full solution

   The Easter Rising of 1916

5. In which collection does "Sailing to Byzantium" appear?
   Show the full solution

   The Tower, 1928

6. What is characteristic of the early poem's diction?
   Show the full solution

   The nouns arrive pre-decorated. Small cabin, nine bean-rows, bee-loud glade: the coinage is beautiful, atmospheric and imprecise, and the syntax is inverted into a biblical cadence with "I will arise and go now". Every choice softens rather than specifies. Pre-decorated nouns and inverted, biblical syntax

7. Analyze "That is no country for old men" as an opening.
   Show the full solution

   Seven monosyllables, a flat declarative, and a full stop before the line ends. Nothing is decorated, the sentence breaks mid-line, and the poem opens by rejecting a place rather than yearning toward one. It is the exact structural opposite of "I will arise and go now". Flat, monosyllabic, and stopped mid-line

8. What does "a tattered coat upon a stick" achieve?
   Show the full solution

   It names a scarecrow without using the word, and it is concrete, unbeautiful and exact. A man in his sixties is describing himself with an image drawn from a field rather than from myth, and the early Yeats had no vocabulary capable of it. An exact, unflattering self-description drawn from an object

9. Compare the verbs in the two passages.
   Show the full solution

   Early: arise, go, build, have, live, all gentle and all in the future tense. Late: caught, neglect, clap, sing, present and active, and "caught" is violent. The early poem is entirely about what will be done and the late one about what is happening, which is a difference measurable by counting. Gentle future verbs against active present ones

10. What does Yeats's development prove about modernism?
    Show the full solution

    That a style can be transformed without abandoning form. Diction, syntax and subject changed completely while rhyme and stanza stayed, so the hardness and concreteness associated with modernism did not require free verse. Yeats is the direct counter-example to the assumption that the two came together. Modernist hardness did not require free verse

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

1. When was the poem written and published?
   Show the full solution

   Written 1919, published 1920

2. What is a gyre?
   Show the full solution

   Yeats's image of history as interpenetrating cones

3. What book sets out the system, and when?
   Show the full solution

   A Vision, 1925

4. What is Spiritus Mundi?
   Show the full solution

   A shared reservoir of images available to everyone

5. What punctuation ends the poem?
   Show the full solution

   A question mark

6. Why does the falcon image describe distance rather than rebellion?
   Show the full solution

   The bird spirals outward until it cannot hear the falconer, so the relation fails because the orbit grew too wide rather than because the falcon disobeyed. That is a much more disturbing account of how order ends: nobody rebelled, and the connection simply stopped reaching. Nothing rebelled; the connection stopped reaching

7. What does the semicolon in line three require of the reader?
   Show the full solution

   "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" joins two independent statements with no causal word between them, so the reader decides whether the centre fails because things fell apart or the reverse. The poem supplies the two facts and withholds the relation, which is the modernist procedure applied to punctuation. The reader supplies the causal relation

8. Why does "mere anarchy" mislead modern readers?
   Show the full solution

   Because "mere" here has its older sense of pure or unmixed rather than the modern sense of trivial. The anarchy is undiluted, not slight, and a reader importing the current meaning gets the line exactly backwards. It is the clearest case in the poem for checking a word's date. "Mere" means pure, not trivial

9. Analyze "slouches".
   Show the full solution

   Not strides and not comes. Slouching is slow, graceless and unhurried, so the arriving thing is both inevitable and entirely uninterested in the prophecy it fulfills. One verb makes the apocalypse indifferent, which is far worse than making it malevolent. It makes the arrival inevitable and uninterested

10. Why is A Vision optional for reading this poem?
    Show the full solution

    Because everything that works in the poem is legible without it: the falcon, the widening spiral, the two kinds of people, the unhurried arrival, the unanswered question. The gyre explains where Yeats got the shape and does not explain why the poem still functions for readers who have never heard of the system. Its survival in ordinary use is the evidence. The images work without it, which is why the poem survives

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

1. When was Prufrock published?
   Show the full solution

   1915, collected 1917

2. Where is the epigraph from?
   Show the full solution

   Dante's Inferno

3. Define the objective correlative.
   Show the full solution

   A set of objects that evokes an emotion without naming it

4. What are the women talking of?
   Show the full solution

   Michelangelo

5. What does Prufrock say he is not?
   Show the full solution

   Prince Hamlet

6. What does the Michelangelo rhyme accomplish?
   Show the full solution

   A four-syllable Italian name rhymed with a monosyllable is a comic rhyme, placed in a poem that is not funny. The effect is of cultured conversation heard at a distance and slightly mocked by the person overhearing it, and the women who "come and go" are moving without arriving. The speaker is outside the room in every sense but the physical. A comic rhyme places the speaker outside the conversation

7. Why is "Do I dare?" unanswerable?
   Show the full solution

   Because it has no object either time it is asked. A question with no content cannot be answered, so repeating it produces motion without progress, and the line's structure is the paralysis it describes rather than a report of it. This is the whole poem in one line. It has no object, so it cannot be resolved

8. What does the bald spot do to the passage?
   Show the full solution

   It interrupts a meditation on time and courage with a trivial physical detail, in the rhyme position, three lines after "Do I dare". That is exactly what happens in the mind being described, and the rhyme sequence dare, stair, hair tracks the deflation from courage through furniture to a receding hairline. The trivial detail interrupts the large question, as it does in the mind

9. Analyze the Hamlet sequence.
   Show the full solution

   He denies being Hamlet, which nobody suggested, accepts a smaller role, and then reduces it twice more, ending at "the Fool". Self-deprecation performed at length is still a performance, and a man who spends five lines arranging his own insignificance is thinking about himself continuously. The modesty is the vanity. Sustained self-deprecation is still self-absorption

10. Why must the overwhelming question stay unnamed?
    Show the full solution

    Because a specified question could be asked and answered, and the poem would end. The paralysis requires that the thing not be sayable, so every attempt to identify it as a proposal, a confession or a request makes the poem smaller. The absence is structural. Naming it would make it answerable and end the poem

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

1. When was The Waste Land published?
   Show the full solution

   1922

2. Who cut it, and by how much?
   Show the full solution

   Ezra Pound, by roughly half

3. How many sections does it have?
   Show the full solution

   Five

4. What replaces transition in the poem?
   Show the full solution

   Juxtaposition

5. Quote the poem's account of its own method.
   Show the full solution

   "These fragments I have shored against my ruins"

6. What does the opening line answer?
   Show the full solution

   Chaucer, who begins the English tradition with April's sweet showers bringing flowers and sending people on pilgrimage. Eliot opens with April as the cruellest month, so the tradition's first image of hope is inverted in five words. A reader who has done unit 1 receives that as an argument about six hundred years. Chaucer's April, inverted

7. What do the three participles accomplish?
   Show the full solution

   Breeding, mixing, stirring end three consecutive lines, so each spills into the next and nothing completes. The syntax refuses the closure the heroic couplet spent the eighteenth century providing, and the reader is kept in continuous unfinished motion from the poem's first sentence. They keep every line unfinished

8. Why does the London Bridge passage work without Dante?
   Show the full solution

   Because the effect of the juxtaposition is available to any reader. "I had not thought death had undone so many" attached to a commuter crowd under brown fog makes the city a place of the dead, whether or not the reader recognizes the line from the Inferno. The allusion enriches and the effect does not depend on it. The collision works whether or not the source is recognized

9. What is wrong with an essay that traces every allusion?
   Show the full solution

   It produces a bibliography rather than a reading. Identifying that a line comes from Dante or Wagner or the Upanishads says nothing about what the poem does with it, and the analysis is in the collision between a source and its new setting. Sources are evidence, not conclusions. Naming sources is not reading the juxtaposition

10. Analyze "shored against my ruins".
    Show the full solution

    Shoring means propping up, and ruins are already ruined, so the speaker is bracing a collapse that has already happened with pieces of other things. The poem is therefore not a broken whole but an assembly offered as the only structure available after the whole has gone, and the difficulty a reader experiences is the condition the poem is about. Propping an existing collapse with borrowed pieces

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

1. When was Heart of Darkness serialized and published?
   Show the full solution

   Serialized 1899, published as a book 1902

2. What was Conrad's first language?
   Show the full solution

   Polish

3. What is the historical subject?
   Show the full solution

   The Congo Free State, held personally by Leopold II

4. Define delayed decoding.
   Show the full solution

   Giving the sensation before the explanation

5. What did Achebe argue, and when?
   Show the full solution

   In a 1975 lecture, that Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist

6. What does the opening sentence about London establish?
   Show the full solution

   That England was itself a dark place, under Rome. Before any African setting appears, the reader is told that the civilized and the dark are positions in time rather than properties of peoples, which is a genuinely radical framing for 1899 and is placed first for that reason. Civilization is a position in time, not a property

7. State the difficulty in the sentence about conquest.
   Show the full solution

   It names the racial basis of conquest exactly, "a different complexion or slightly flatter noses", and evaluates the result as "not a pretty thing when you look into it too much". The observation is precise and the evaluation is enormously inadequate, and "too much" concedes that looking at all is optional. Both halves are Marlow's. Exact observation with grossly inadequate evaluation

8. Explain the arrows passage as technique.
   Show the full solution

   Marlow sees little sticks, notices they are whizzing, and only then identifies them as arrows, so the sensation arrives before the interpretation. That is delayed decoding, and it puts the reader in the instant of perception rather than in the summary afterward. Conrad is doing in 1899 what modernist fiction would be praised for in the 1920s. Sensation first, then identification, as perception works

9. What does the frame narrative accomplish?
   Show the full solution

   It puts every judgment at two removes: Marlow speaks on a boat and an unnamed listener repeats it, with his own reactions included. The novella can therefore present Marlow's views without endorsing them, and the reader is always aware that what they have is one man's account as remembered by another. It presents Marlow's views without endorsing them

10. State an honest position on Achebe's objection.
    Show the full solution

    The frame creates distance and does not create a counter-voice. No African character in the book speaks at length or is named, so the structure that complicates Marlow leaves Achebe's central objection standing. An essay should hold both the sophistication of the technique and the absence it does not repair, rather than using one to dismiss the other. The frame distances Marlow and supplies no African voice

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

1. When was Mrs Dalloway published, and when is it set?
   Show the full solution

   Published 1925; set on a Wednesday in June 1923

2. Define free indirect discourse.
   Show the full solution

   Third-person narration carrying a character's own words and judgments

3. What divides the day?
   Show the full solution

   The chimes of Big Ben

4. Who is Septimus Warren Smith?
   Show the full solution

   A shell-shocked veteran who never meets Clarissa

5. Where do the two plots meet?
   Show the full solution

   At the party, when Clarissa hears of his death

6. How does the second sentence enter Clarissa's mind?
   Show the full solution

   "For Lucy had her work cut out for her" is Clarissa's reason in Clarissa's phrasing, delivered in the third person with no "she thought" and no quotation marks. The narration has moved inside a character without announcing it, which is free indirect discourse doing its work in the novel's second sentence. Her reason, in her words, in the third person

7. Why does Woolf need this technique?
   Show the full solution

   Because quotation marks would separate the thinking from the world. Free indirect discourse lets a sentence about doors and hinges be simultaneously a description and an interior, which is how a mind actually experiences a morning: the world and the thought about it arrive together and undivided. It keeps thought and world in the same sentence

8. Analyze "fresh as if issued to children on a beach".
   Show the full solution

   "Issued" belongs to rationing or the army and is applied here to a morning given out to children. The comparison is Clarissa's rather than the narrator's, and it dates her precisely: this is 1923, five years after a war, and the vocabulary of supply has entered how a woman describes a pleasant day. A wartime word applied to a summer morning

9. What does the Big Ben refrain accomplish structurally?
   Show the full solution

   It supplies the connection plot would otherwise provide. The same sentence returns throughout, heard by different characters in different states, so people who never meet are joined by having heard one clock. The novel is built out of simultaneity rather than causation. It joins characters by simultaneity rather than by plot

10. What replaces plot in this novel?
    Show the full solution

    A day, a set of shared public events, and movement between minds that never learn about each other. Clarissa hears of Septimus's death at her party, from strangers, at second hand, and that is the only junction between the book's two halves. Complaining that nothing happens describes the method rather than criticizing it. A day, shared events, and unannounced movement between minds

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

1. When was Dubliners published?
   Show the full solution

   1914

2. How are the stories arranged?
   Show the full solution

   By childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life

3. Define an epiphany in Joyce's sense.
   Show the full solution

   A sudden spiritual manifestation occasioned by something ordinary

4. What word appears on the first page and names the theme?
   Show the full solution

   Paralysis

5. What did Joyce call his style?
   Show the full solution

   Scrupulous meanness

6. Why must the trigger of an epiphany be trivial?
   Show the full solution

   Because a sufficient cause would make the story about the cause. In Araby nothing has gone wrong except a delay and a disappointment, and the closing sentence reports anguish, anger and a total judgment on the boy's character. The disproportion is the form: an ordinary occasion produces a complete recognition. A sufficient cause would make the story about the event

7. What does the vocabulary of "driven and derided by vanity" reveal?
   Show the full solution

   Two passive participles and an abstract noun, in a register no boy possesses. The sentence therefore belongs to an adult narrator remembering rather than to the child experiencing, which is the story's quiet structure and is never announced. The distance between the two is where the story's judgment lives. An adult narrator is remembering, not a boy speaking

8. What distinguishes an epiphany from a climax?
   Show the full solution

   A climax changes the situation and an epiphany does not. The boy in Araby is still in the same street with the same life, and the story ends on the recognition rather than on any consequence. That is why the collection's theme is paralysis: the characters see clearly and remain exactly where they were. Nothing follows from it

9. Analyze the sound of the last sentence of "The Dead".
   Show the full solution

   "Falling faintly... and faintly falling" reverses the phrase, carries s and f sounds across the clause, and slows the rhythm toward the last four words. The prose enacts the descent it describes, and the reversal makes the snow seem to fall twice, which is as close as English gets to a sound continuing after a sentence ends. The reversed phrase and slowing rhythm enact the snowfall

10. What does Gabriel's epiphany consist of?
    Show the full solution

    That his wife loved a boy who died at seventeen, that he has never felt anything comparable, and that this is neither a betrayal nor a crisis but a fact about his life. The recognition arrives complete and nothing follows from it, and the snow that closes the story falls on all the living and the dead without distinguishing. A complete recognition of his own limitation, with no consequence

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

1. When did Brooke write his sonnets, and when did he die?
   Show the full solution

   1914, before combat; he died of infection in 1915

2. Where did Owen meet Sassoon?
   Show the full solution

   Craiglockhart hospital, 1917

3. What does Owen's draft preface say?
   Show the full solution

   That the poetry is in the pity, and he is not concerned with poetry

4. Define pararhyme.
   Show the full solution

   Matching consonants with different vowels, as in escaped and scooped

5. Translate the Horace line and say what Owen calls it.
   Show the full solution

   It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country; he calls it the old Lie

6. What is missing from Brooke's sonnet?
   Show the full solution

   Any physical detail of war. There is no wound, no noise, no enemy and no fear, and the body becomes English soil. It is a poem about dying written by a man who had not yet seen anyone die, and the Petrarchan form is the most decorous container available. Every physical fact about war

7. How does Sassoon's register work as a weapon?
   Show the full solution

   He writes in a rhymed, competent, almost jaunty measure and uses it to accuse his own side's staff of sending men to die from safety. The mismatch between the tune and the accusation is the attack: the poem sounds like light verse and reads like a charge sheet, which is harder to dismiss than a lament. A jaunty measure carrying a direct accusation

8. Analyze Owen's opening similes.
   Show the full solution

   Old beggars under sacks, knock-kneed, coughing like hags: young soldiers described entirely in the vocabulary of aged poverty. Every trace of the heroic is removed in a line and a half, and the comparison chosen is one a recruiting poster could never accommodate. The refutation begins before any argument is made. Young men described as aged paupers

9. Work "froth-corrupted lungs".
   Show the full solution

   Froth is the pulmonary oedema produced by gas, so the word is medically exact. "Corrupted" means both damaged and putrefying, and carries a moral charge as well as a clinical one. A single compound holds an accurate observation and a judgment, which is Owen's characteristic move throughout. Clinical accuracy and a moral word in one compound

10. What do the three poets show together?
    Show the full solution

    Brooke uses the available language, Sassoon turns it against the people deploying it, and Owen names the central phrase a lie and prints it in Latin so readers must translate their own inheritance. Read in order, the sequence is the dismantling of a vocabulary over four years rather than a judgment on one naive man. A vocabulary being dismantled by the people using it

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

1. What is the third term in a comparison?
   Show the full solution

   The question both texts answer

2. Why is similarity alone not a finding?
   Show the full solution

   Because it establishes nothing an essay can argue

3. What is the productive pattern for a pairing?
   Show the full solution

   A shared problem with different solutions

4. How do influence and analogy differ?
   Show the full solution

   Influence requires evidence of contact; analogy does not

5. How should a pairing be tested?
   Show the full solution

   By drafting the conclusion first and discarding it if it is obvious

6. Why reject Wordsworth and Coleridge on nature?
   Show the full solution

   They are too close. The two collaborated on one book, shared a theory of poetry and lived in the same valley, so an essay comparing them would be a list of agreements. A comparison needs the texts to be different enough that the difference costs something to explain. They agree too much to produce an argument

7. Why reject Beowulf and Mrs Dalloway?
   Show the full solution

   There is no third term. The only shared property is the language, so no question is answered by both, and the essay would have to invent a question and then spend its length justifying the pairing rather than arguing anything. Distance alone is not a reason to compare. No shared question, so nothing to compare about

8. Why reject Brooke and Owen on war?
   Show the full solution

   The conclusion is obvious. Everyone knows that Owen saw combat and Brooke did not, so the essay would restate the received view at length without adding to it. A pairing whose answer is already common knowledge gives evidence nothing to do. The answer is already the received view

9. What makes Pope and Eliot a working pair?
   Show the full solution

   Both apply an inherited elevated register to modern social life with no heroic action available, and both put a man in a drawing room who does not act. The shared problem is real and the solutions differ: Pope keeps the register as an external standard, and Eliot's speaker has internalized it as self-accusation. That difference is an argument. A shared problem answered two different ways

10. State the test for a comparison worth writing.
    Show the full solution

    The conclusion would be false of either text alone. If the claim can be established from one poem, the second is decoration, and if it cannot be established from either, the pairing has produced something neither could yield. That is the definition of a comparison that has earned its structure. Neither text alone could support the conclusion

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

1. Are period labels contemporary or retrospective?
   Show the full solution

   Retrospective, with modernist as a partial exception

2. What does a label describe?
   Show the full solution

   A tendency, not a rule

3. Why is explaining by label circular?
   Show the full solution

   The label was derived from the practice it is used to explain

4. What is the legitimate use of a period label?
   Show the full solution

   Orientation: telling a reader what conventions were available

5. Give an example of a writer who straddles a boundary.
   Show the full solution

   Hardy, publishing poems in 1928 while called a Victorian

6. Rewrite: "Dickens's novels are long because he was a Victorian."
   Show the full solution

   They are long and full of subplots because they were sold in monthly thirty-two-page numbers across nineteen months, which required each installment to end on a hook and no thread to go cold for four weeks. The revision names a format and its requirements, which is checkable, where the label was not. Name the serial format and what it required

7. Rewrite: "Eliot writes in fragments because he is a modernist."
   Show the full solution

   He writes in fragments because he is claiming that no continuous account of the postwar world is available, and because juxtaposition transfers the work of connection to the reader. That is a claim about purpose and technique rather than about membership in a category derived from the practice itself. Name the purpose and the effect on the reader

8. Rewrite: "Wordsworth writes about ordinary people because Romanticism valued the common man."
   Show the full solution

   He writes about them because the preface of 1800 argues that the essential passions are less restrained in low and rustic life, a premise Coleridge later disputed in Biographia Literaria. The revision cites a document and an objection, so the claim can be checked and contested. Cite the preface's stated premise and the objection to it

9. What do all three replacements have in common?
   Show the full solution

   Each substitutes a format, a purpose or a stated argument for a category, and each replacement is checkable where the label was not. The general move is to ask what specific condition the label is standing in for, and then to write that instead. They replace a category with a checkable condition

10. Why are boundary-straddling writers useful for comparative essays?
    Show the full solution

    Because they show the boundary is a convenience. Hardy published poems in 1928 and is called a Victorian; Yeats began in 1889 and is called a modernist. A writer who does not fit forces the essay to explain by conditions rather than by membership, which is exactly what a strong comparison does anyway. They force explanation by condition rather than by category

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

1. Name two databases holding literary criticism.
   Show the full solution

   JSTOR and Project MUSE

2. What should be read before a full article?
   Show the full solution

   The abstract

3. Name four critical approaches.
   Show the full solution

   Formalist, historicist, feminist, postcolonial

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

   An argument from the primary text

5. How should a study guide be used?
   Show the full solution

   As a lead, never as a citation

6. Why search at three widths?
   Show the full solution

   Because a single phrasing finds only what happens to be phrased that way. "Rape of the Lock mock epic" is narrow, "mock heroic modern poetry" is conceptual, and "Pope Eliot influence" crosses periods, and each surfaces different scholarship. Research is several searches at different widths rather than one lucky one. One phrasing finds only what matches it

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

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

8. Why does the edition matter for a play?
   Show the full solution

   Because the texts differ substantially. The first quarto, second quarto and folio of Hamlet are not the same play, so which edition a critic uses changes what is available to quote and sometimes what a scene means. An essay should name its edition for that reason, not as a formality. Different editions of Hamlet are different texts

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

   A checkable point about the text. If a critic writes that Prufrock never refers to a literary figure and the poem contains the Hamlet passage, the claim is factually wrong and a student may say so. Disagreement grounded in what the page contains is always permitted, whatever the critic's standing. A verifiable claim the text contradicts

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

    Name the critic, state the claim in its strongest form, quote the passage that contradicts it, and say what follows for your own argument. Misstating the critic's position first makes the paragraph worthless even when the conclusion is right, and announcing disagreement without citing it is not an argument at all. Name, state fairly, quote, then draw the consequence

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

1. Name the three structures.
   Show the full solution

   Block, alternating, integrated

2. What does block structure do?
   Show the full solution

   Treats one text fully, then the other, then compares

3. What organizes an integrated essay?
   Show the full solution

   The argument, with either text appearing where the claim needs it

4. What should the introduction state?
   Show the full solution

   The third term, not a summary of each text

5. What should the conclusion state?
   Show the full solution

   What the pairing produced that neither text alone could show

6. Why is block structure weak?
   Show the full solution

   Because the comparison is postponed to the end. In an eleven-paragraph essay the argument occupies two paragraphs and the other nine are two separate summaries, and the reader must hold four paragraphs of one text in memory while reading four of the other. Most of the length does no comparative work. The comparison occupies a fraction of the essay

7. What is the risk of alternating structure?
   Show the full solution

   Predictability and false weighting. Every section takes the same shape, text A then text B, so the essay becomes mechanical, and the sections tend to end up equally sized even when one point matters far more than another. It is reliable rather than strong. It becomes mechanical and weights points equally

8. Why is integrated structure strongest?
   Show the full solution

   Because the paragraphs are organized by the argument rather than by the texts, so each one advances a claim and calls on whichever poem it needs. The weighting follows the importance of the points rather than a template, and the reader is never asked to store evidence for later use. Paragraphs advance claims and call on either text as needed

9. What does integrated structure demand?
   Show the full solution

   A thesis clear enough to organize everything. Without one the structure becomes a jumble, since nothing dictates what belongs in which paragraph. That is why block structure remains the safe choice for a student who has not yet settled the argument, even though it is the weakest of the three. A thesis firm enough to dictate every paragraph

10. Why should the introduction not summarize the texts?
    Show the full solution

    Because the reader needs the question before they need the plot. Stating the third term, what happens to an elevated register applied to modern social life, tells them what to look for, and summary delivered first is information they cannot yet use. Plot belongs where the argument requires it. The reader needs the question before the material

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

1. Name six units of close reading.
   Show the full solution

   Diction, syntax, sound, imagery, meter, form

2. Define diction and syntax.
   Show the full solution

   Word choice, and sentence structure

3. When is a quotation set as a block?
   Show the full solution

   When it runs over four lines

4. How is a line break marked in a run-on verse quotation?
   Show the full solution

   With a slash

5. What makes two passages matched?
   Show the full solution

   They are short, genuinely parallel, and both analyzable

6. Analyze the syntax of Pope's line.
   Show the full solution

   Two parallel clauses joined by "or", with the serious term first and the trivial one in the rhyme position, so the meter's strongest emphasis falls on the brocade rather than the honor. The equivalence belongs to Belinda's society and the couplet's weighting is how Pope reports it without stating it. Parallel clauses with the meter weighting the trivial

7. Analyze Eliot's verb.
   Show the full solution

   "Measured out" is a pharmacist's or a cook's phrase, exact and small, applied to a life, and the instrument named is a coffee spoon. The speaker performs the reduction himself, supplying both the observation and the metaphor in the first person, with no external voice required. A small precise verb, applied by the speaker to his own life

8. What makes the comparative sentence comparative?
   Show the full solution

   It names a shared operation, the pairing of a life with a trivial object, and locates the difference in who performs it: Pope judges from outside and Eliot's speaker judges himself. The difference is the argument, and a sentence that stated only the similarity would have nothing to prove. It names the shared operation and locates the difference

9. Why is the quotation-to-analysis ratio important?
   Show the full solution

   Because ten words supporting a paragraph of analysis does ten times the work of two block quotations followed by a sentence of commentary. Long quotations occupy the space where the argument should be, and a reader cannot tell which part of a four-line block the writer meant. Four words analyzed for three sentences is the right shape. Short quotations carry more argument per line

10. Why is a comparison built from summaries weak?
    Show the full solution

    Because it is an assertion with examples attached rather than an argument from evidence. Summary states what a text is about and cannot show how it works, so any claim about technique, tone or effect is left unsupported. In literary study the evidence is the language, and summary discards it. Summary cannot support claims about how a text works

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

1. Name the three parts of a literary argument.
   Show the full solution

   Claim, evidence, warrant

2. How many warrants does a comparative paragraph need?
   Show the full solution

   Three: one per text and one for the juxtaposition

3. What is false equivalence?
   Show the full solution

   Treating two things as parallel when they are not

4. What is the usual counterargument to a comparison?
   Show the full solution

   That the pairing is arbitrary

5. What should be done with a genuine disanalogy?
   Show the full solution

   Concede it, rather than pretending the texts fit perfectly

6. What does the comparative warrant have to answer?
   Show the full solution

   Why the difference between the two texts matters. It is not enough to establish that Pope judges from outside and Eliot's speaker judges himself; the paragraph must say what follows from that, which here is that the standard's location has changed rather than its content. What follows from the difference

7. What happens to a paragraph missing its third warrant?
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   It becomes two good close readings sharing a page. The reader has to construct the comparative argument themselves, and different readers will construct different ones, so the paragraph proves nothing in particular. It is the commonest failure in comparative writing and the easiest to fix. It is two readings, not a comparison

8. State the arbitrariness objection at full strength.
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   Two centuries and a change of genre separate the poems, no evidence of influence has been offered, and a satirical mock epic and a modernist dramatic monologue are doing fundamentally different jobs. Any two texts can be made to share an abstraction if the abstraction is loose enough. Stated weakly, this objection cannot be answered convincingly. Distance, genre difference, and no evidence of contact

9. How is the objection conceded without surrender?
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   By stating plainly that the essay claims no influence and that Eliot's poem is not a satire, and that the comparison is analogical, resting on a shared formal situation rather than a line of descent. Conceding the factual content of the objection while denying its conclusion is stronger than disputing facts a reader can check. Grant the facts and restate the comparison as analogical

10. How does the concession become the argument?
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    Because the same formal situation producing opposite effects two centuries apart is precisely what makes the pair informative: a technique is not a fixed quantity, and what a mock-heroic register does depends on whether the reader still has somewhere to stand. The distance the objection complained of is the finding. The distance the objection names is what the essay is about

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

1. How is prose cited?
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   By author and page, with no comma and no "p."

2. How is poetry cited?
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   By line, with "line" or "lines" in the first citation

3. How is verse drama cited?
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   Act, scene and line separated by periods

4. When does a verse quotation become a block?
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   At four or more lines

5. How are two works by one author distinguished?
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   By a short title in the citation

6. Why must poetry be cited by line rather than page?
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   Because a page number is an accident of the book and a line number belongs to the poem. A reader with a different edition cannot find evidence cited by page, whereas line 107 of The Rape of the Lock is line 107 in every printing. The citation exists to let a reader check you. Line numbers are stable across editions; pages are not

7. Why does the first poetry citation include the word "lines"?
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   So the reader knows the numbers are not pages. After that the unit is established and bare numbers are unambiguous, which keeps the parentheses short in an essay that will contain dozens of them. The rule trades one word of clarity at the start for brevity throughout. It establishes the unit so later citations can be bare

8. Write the citation for two run-on lines of verse.
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   Eliot's evening is "spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table" (lines 2-3). A slash with a space on either side marks the line break, the quotation stays inside the sentence, and the parenthesis precedes the period. Three lines may run on this way; four require a block. A spaced slash marks the break, and the citation follows

9. Why does the edition entry do real work for a play?
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   Because the texts of Hamlet differ substantially between the first quarto, the second quarto and the folio, so a reader checking 3.1.81 in a different edition may find a different line or none at all. Naming the edition is what makes an act-scene-line citation verifiable rather than approximate. Different editions of a play number different lines

10. Give the order of the MLA core elements.
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    Author, title of source, title of container, other contributors, version, number, publisher, publication date, location. Every entry is these nine in that order, skipping what does not apply, which is why one procedure handles a poem in an anthology, an article in a journal and a format nobody has invented yet. Author, source, container, contributors, version, number, publisher, date, location

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

1. What does the capstone require?
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   A comparison of two texts from different units, eight to twelve pages, four to eight secondary sources

2. Name the four weeks of the plan.
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   Question, research, draft, revise

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

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

5. When is the introduction written?
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   Last

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 their most careful hours on material that leaves the essay. Structure decides which sentences survive

7. What should each reverse-outline sentence state?
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   What the paragraph claims, not what it discusses. "This paragraph is about Prufrock's self-description" is a topic; "Eliot's speaker performs the reduction Pope performs on his characters" is a claim. Only the second form lets a reader see whether the essay has an argument or a sequence of subjects. Its claim, never its topic

8. Why is there a dedicated pass for comparative warrants?
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   Because the missing third warrant is the commonest failure in comparative writing and it is invisible while drafting. Finding every paragraph that contains both texts and confirming there is a sentence saying what their difference establishes is what distinguishes a comparative essay from two essays interleaved. It is the failure that makes the essay stop being comparative

9. What does the source pass check?
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   Every quotation word by word against the original, every line number and act-scene-line reference, 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 a source meant rather than what it said, which is why the pass is mechanical and done with the sources open. Wording, references, and the two-way citation match

10. Why is rewriting the introduction last the most effective move?
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    Because the argument usually improves while drafting, so the essay ends up arguing something the first draft did not know it would argue. Writing the introduction after the body means it can state the third term accurately and promise exactly what the essay delivers, which repairs the commonest structural complaint a reader has. It can promise what the finished essay actually does