Contemporary Literature Fall Final Review
What we have read…
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“Hills Like White Elephants”—Ernest Hemingway
“Sticks”—George Saunders
“Emergency”—Denis Johnson
“Cathedral”—Raymond Carver
“Brownies”—ZZ Packer
“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”—Joyce Carol Oates
“Going Out for a Walk”—Max Beerbohm
“Ounce More to the Lake”—E.B. White
“Dream Children: A Reverie”—Charles Lamb
“Say Yes”—Tobias Wolfe
Class Topics:
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Annotations
Literary Terms (see handout)
Grammar
Figures of Speech (see handout)
Style and Syntax
Imitation
Essential Questions:
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How is writing an expression of self and an attempt to convey truth?
What makes good writing? How do words evoke an emotional response? And what does good
writing do for me?
What is worth writing?
What is the value of literature and language in today’s society?
Who am I?
To Practice:
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8.
Do Hacker comma exercises and review grammar quiz.
Memorize the comma rules and know the information on the Basic Grammar Rules handout.
Know the editing marks.
Study the figures of speech worksheet and identify figures of speech in the 3 personal essays we
read.
Study the sentence imitations and practice imitating sentences.
Memorize the definitions of literary terms and be able to define them using a reading (like on the
literary terms quiz)
Study notes on the importance of paragraphing, sentence length, sentence variety, and sentence
euphony.
Prepare for the essay by reviewing our readings from throughout the year. Know what happened
in the stories.
Practicing Figures of Speech:
Match the figure of speech from the word bank with the corresponding example:
Parallelism
Antithesis
Anastrophe
Parenthesis
Apposition
Asyndeton
Polysyndeton
Alliteration
Epistrophe
Climax
Climax
Oxymoron
Paradox
Anaphora
Onomatopoeia
Ellipsis
1._______________ But the essence of that ugliness is the thing which will always make it beautiful.—
Gertrude Stein, “How Writing is Written”
2._______________ …and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish
from the earth.—Abraham Lincoln
3._______________ Progress is not proclamation nor palaver. It is not pretense nor play on prejudice. It
is not the perturbation of a people passion-wrought nor a promise proposed.—Warren G. Harding
nominating William Howard Taft in 1912
4._______________ My days have crackled and gone up in smoke.—Francis Thompson, “The Hound of
Heaven”
5._______________ Perhaps this is the most important thing for me to take back from beach-living:
simply the memory that each cycle of the tide is valid, each cycle of the wave is valid, each cycle of a
relationship is valid.—Anne Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea
6._______________ There is a sort of dead-alive hackneyed people about…—Robert Louis Stevenson,
“An Apology for Idlers”
7._______________ And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the cattle
according to their kinds and everything that creeps upon the ground according to its kind. And God saw
that it was good.—Genesis, I:24-25
8._______________ Rich, famous, proud, a ruling despot Pope might be—but he was middle class!—
V.S. Pritchett
9._______________ Why should white people be running all the stores in our community? Why should
white people be running the banks of our community? Why should the economy of our community be in
the hands of the white man? Why?—Speech by Malcolm X
10.______________ Renounce my love, my life, myself—and you.—Alexander Pope, “Eloisa to
Abelard”
11._______________ John Morgan, the president of the Sons of the Republic, could not be reached by
phone.—Student paper
12._______________ Those who have been left out, we will try to bring in. Those left behind, we will
help to catch up.—Richard M. Nixon, Inaugural Address, January 10, 1969
13._______________ We must now hope that Mr. Moynahan will devote his next decade to those four or
five more novels which will banish his vacillations and uncertainties, purge his unneeded influences, and
perfect his native gifts for language, landscape, and portraiture.—L.E. Sissman, The New Yorker
14._______________ All that remained for the moment was to decide where I would go to graduate
school, and that question was settled—the “snobs” had been right—by a Kellett Fellowship and then a
Fulbright Scholarship to boot.—Norman Podhoretz, Making It (1967)
15._______________ Kant, we may suppose, was more startled by Hume’s apparent destruction of all
basis for philosophical certainty; Reid, by the remoter consequences to morality and theology.—Sir Leslie
Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876)
Answers:
1. Paradox
2. Asyndeton
3. Alliteration
4. Onomatopoeia
5. Epistrophe (though it could be anaphora too)
6. Oxymoron
7. Polysyndeton
8. Anastophe
9. Anaphora
10. Climax
11. Apposition
12. Antithesis
13. Parallelism
14. Parenthesis
15. Ellipsis