Final Exam Review

Question 1

Edith Wharton

Answer 1

• Wrote “Roman burning”
• dealing with questions of women and class
• Early writer of the Gilded age

Question 2

Realism of the late 19th century

Answer 2

• rejects sentimentality
• “literature is to cultivate a taste for the distasteful” (Ambrose Bierce)
• endeavor to see things as they are, not as they ought to be
• William Dean Howells: “Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.”
• take life as it is
• asserts that it represents objective “truth”
• includes regional dialects
• similar to, but different from naturalism

Question 3

Jack London

Answer 3

• Realism

- “To Build a Fire” and “What Life Means to Me”

Question 4

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Answer 4

• Noir sentimentalism
• “The Yellow Wall-paper”
• has aspects of realism, gothic, and sentimentalism
• has revealing narration, an “ugliness,” macabre and strangeness, an ancient or “haunted” house, and a manic narrator
• there’s something wrong in a realistic space

Question 5

Willa Cather

Answer 5

• My Antonia
• a frame story about the frontier and the land
• discusses gender not he frontier, along with class and social customs
• works as a Christian myth

Question 6

Modernism

Answer 6

Roots

• cultural exhaustion
• skepticism of authority and government

Features:

• Self-reflective
• Fragmentary
• Emphasis on the image as opposed to the subject or speaker
• “A poem should not mean, but be.”

Question 7

Robert Frost

Answer 7

A nature poet, but more focused on the way nature can be over-bearing.
Not affirmative or expressive
-“Mending Wall,” “After Apple Picking,” and “Fire and Ice”

Question 8

Langston Hughes

Answer 8

A key figure during the Harlem Renaissance
“The Negro Speaks of Rivers”
Heartens to racial identities of the past, things that run deep

Question 9

Harlan Renaissance

Answer 9

1920s

1. Balance between politics and art
2. Literary experiment and verisimilitude
3. Racial intolerance

Question 10

Carl Sandburg

Answer 10

“Chicago”

“Fog”

Question 11

Zona Neale Hurston

Answer 11

“How It Feels to Be a Colored Me”
Focuses on the individual over the community
Not a sense of racial inheritance
Optimistic rather than melancholic and not preoccupied with slavery
Resists carrying the past

Question 12

William Faulkner

Answer 12

“Barn Burning”
Long sentences that trail from one thought to the next
Either incredibly descriptive or vague
Fragmentary 
Speaking to a frightened world 
The way history defines the South

Question 13

William Carlos Williams

Answer 13

“The Red Wheelbarrow”

“This is Just to Say”

Question 14

H.D

Answer 14

“Oread”

“Leda”

Question 15

E.E Cummings

Answer 15

“In Just”
“O sweet spontaneous”
“next to of course god American i”

Question 16

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Answer 16

• More of a realism writer
• “Babylon Revisited”
• Rise and fall of decadence
• Gatsby

Question 17

Iceberg Theory

Answer 17

Coined by Hemingway
A theory of prose
Omit the things you know, leaving only 1/8 prose out of the water
The dignity of the writing is due to 1/8 above the water
A Freudian way of seeing the world

Question 18

Ernest Hemingway

Answer 18

“Hills Like White Elephants”
Withholds the main focus in order to draw you in
Simple, short sentences
Strings of “ands”
Leaves it up to the reader to organize
Competitor with Faulkner

Question 19

Wallace Stevens

Answer 19

“Sunday Morning”
A woman skipping church and is in a dream-like state that leads her to Palestine
Post Christian Paganism
Do you really want death conquered?