Part I: Short Answer
Below are twenty short-answer questions; answer fifteen of them for two points apiece.
I will grade
ONLY fifteen; either designate the ones you want me to grade CLEARLY or else expect me to grade the FIRST fifteen without fear or favor.
1) In “Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian….” what does Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of
“The Star-Spangled Banner” mean to Victor?
2) Name ONE element that Kate Chopin’s two stories have in common and briefly describe what it tells us.
3) In As I Lay Dying , what is the significance of naming two of the brothers Cash and Jewel?
4) In “Sonny’s Blues”, briefly describe one reasonable possible meaning for the use of the Biblical reference to
“the cup of trembling” at the end of the story.
5) In “White Tigers”, why has the narrator’s American life been “a disappointment”?
6) In Always Coming Home , what is signified by the metaphor of the gyre?
7) In the poem “Daddy”, how does the rhyme scheme and rhythm contribute to the sense of the poem?
8) In “Hills Like White Elephants”, what is the significance of the only named character’s name?
9) In “Lullaby”, why is Ayah compared to a spider when she looks for her husband in the bar?
10) Briefly describe how Gloria Anzaldua feels about being a “mestiza”, a person of mixed heritage, language, and/or sexuality.

11) In The Crucible , Elizabeth Proctor believe she was “cold” to her husband; what reason does she give for being so?
12) In “Howl”, name TWO elements of sixties counterculture which the poem discusses.
13) Briefly explain what the title metaphor means in the essay “The Tools of the Master Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.”
14) BRIEFLY describe how the massacre at Wounded Knee came about.
15) In “Sweat”, name ONE thing which might lead us to connect Delia with Christ.
16) In As I Lay Dying , why doesn’t Dewey Dell get what she is seeking in Jefferson?
17) Briefly explain one figurative meaning for the cup of sour cream in “Skunk Hour.”
18) In “My Contraband”, give two BRIEF examples of how the power shifts back and forth between Miss Dane and “Robert.”
19) In “Nineteen Fifty-Five”, what does Gracie Mae do when Traynor gives her a new Cadillac?
20) In Always Coming Home , briefly explain how the Moon dance differs from the Sun dance.

Part II: Multiple Choice (yes, I still hate this kind of test. However, PRAXIS and GRE insist on judging your overall worth based on your ability to answer such questions, so have at it .) They generally test your reading skills, your critical vocabulary, and your recognition of style, so it’s important to read the passages presented carefully and consider your answers. For some, this is very easy; for others, it’s traumatic. Answer all five for three points each.
1 She cried a little that night after Arobin left her. 2 It was only one phase of the multitudinous emotions which had assailed her. 3 There was with her an overwhelming feeling of irresponsibility. 4 There was the shock of the unexpected and the unaccustomed. 5 There was her husband’s reproach looking at her from the external things around her which he had provided for her external existence. 6 There was Robert’s reproach making itself felt by a quicker, fiercer, more overpowering love, which had awakened within her toward him. 7 Above all, there was understanding. 8 She felt as if a mist had been lifted from her eyes, enabling her to look upon and comprehend the significance of life, that monster made up of beauty and brutality. 9 But among the conflicting sensations which assailed her, there was neither shame nor remorse. 10 There was a dull pang of regret because it was not the kiss of love which had inflamed her, because it was not love which had held this cup of life to her lips.
1) The event which precedes this passage is MOST likely to be
A) A marriage with someone the woman loves
B) An adultery with someone the woman loves
C) An adultery with someone the woman does not love
D) A rape by someone the woman does not love
2) Sentence 10’s description of “this cup of life” is an example of
A) Simile
B) Metaphor
C) Personification
D) Allusion
3) In achieving “understanding”, the character seems MOST likely to have understood
A) The beauty and brutality of her own sexual nature and desires
B)
The beauty and brutality of her partner’s nature and desires
C) The necessity to avoid extramarital sex in a good marriage
D) The necessity to avoid having sex with people she does not love
4) The point of the passage might BEST be summarized as
A) The character feels traumatized and damaged by what has occurred
B) The character feels shocked and horrified by what has occurred
C) The character feels superficially pleased by what has occurred
D) The character feels enlightened and emancipated by what has occurred
5) The author of this passage is MOST likely to be
A) Kate Chopin
B) Ursula Le Guin
C) Louisa May Alcott
D) Stephen Crane

Part III: Quotation Identification .
For any TEN of the following quotations, identify the AUTHOR, the TITLE of the work from which it is taken, and the general SIGNIFICANCE of the quotation (that is, that is, what event or situation does it refer to? Does it give us any crucial information or connotation?
Also, if applicable, who’s speaking, to whom, for what purpose? These are worth three points each.
1) She was a revelation in that dim, mysterious chamber; as white as the couch she lay upon. Her firm, elastic flesh that was knowing for the first time its birthright, was like a creamy lily that the sun invites to contribute its breath and perfume to the undying life of the world. The generous abundance of her passion, without guile or trickery, was like a white flame which penetrated and found response in depths of his own sensuous nature that had never yet been reached.
2) The tricks of slavery are like fleas hopping from a dead ground squirrel onto your skin; you have the plague before you know it. And all the tools of slavery have two edges.
3) But it is not enough to stand on the opposite river bank, shouting questions, challenging patriarchal, white conventions. A counterstance locks one into a duel of oppressor and oppressed; locked in mortal combat, like the cop and the criminal, both are reduced to a common denominator of violence.
4)
“Your father is dead,” he replied somberly. “Why should he go to Hades? You have it confused with another place that was abolished long ago.”
5) Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs! / They broke their backs lifting Moloch to
Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!/
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!/ Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
6) At twenty, I tried to die,/ To get back, back, back to you./ I thought even the bones would do. // But they pulled me out of the sack,/ And they stuck me together with glue. / And then I knew what to do. / I made a model of you,/ A man in black with a Meinkampf look/ And a love of the rack and the screw. / And I said, I do, I do.
7) The hound yelped. Answering yelps came from all over the countryside. Chickens cackled. Roosters crowed, heralding the bloodshot eyes of southern awakening.

8) They march on their soles up Main Street: / white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire / under the chalk-dry and spar spire / of the Trinitarian Church.
9) Our opposites are always robed in sexual sin, and it is from this unconscious conviction that demonology gains both its attractive sensuality and its capacity to infuriate and frighten.
10) I am she: I am he / whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes / whose breasts still bear the stress/ whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies/ obscurely inside barrels / half-wedged and left to rot / we are the halfdestroyed instruments / that once held to a course / the water-eaten log / the fouled compass
11) And I was yet aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside for us, hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.
12) Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.
13) It takes two people to make you and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.
14) She could see it descend out of the night sky: an icy stillness from the edge of the thin moon. She recognized the freezing. It came gradually, sinking snowflake by snowflake until the crust was heavy and deep. It had the strength of the stars in Orion, and its journey was endless.
15) Dear distress, and joy allied,/ Is my somber flesh and skin,/ With the dark blood dammed within/ Like great pulsing tides of wine/ That, I fear, must chafe the fine/ Channels of the chafing net/ Where they surge and foam and fret.
16) When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temple . . . A high cold star on a winter’s night is the word he feels that she says to him. Thereafter he knows the pathos of his situation.

Part IV.
Essay. Select ONE of the following questions to answer in a brief essay, for the final 25 points of the exam.
Unless you prefer to do this work in class, please type your essay and bring it to class when we meet for the final exam. I’m thinking 1-2 typed pages might be about right; try not to write another five-page special, but don’t just skim the surface, either.
1) Discuss the characteristics of the Postmodern literary period as exemplified in any ONE work we have read.
What about that work is (and, perhaps, isn’t) “postmodern”? How is the work a good poster child for the period?
2) Always Coming Home presents an imaginary future society which could be viewed as a Utopia—that is, an imaginary society meant to show how good things could be if we’d only let them, to explore other social and political arrangements, or to explore what we mean by “good.” Explain why you do, or why you don’t, think that the Valley and the Kesh are Utopian.
This discussion might involve some exploration of plausibility, whether people really could live like that; it should certainly touch how believable you find the implication that reduced sexual repression, reduced population, more support of the family, and more balanced gender relations could lead to a world without wars and with a viable economic and ecological balance. You might also, if you’re feeling lively, cast all this in the framework of a personal discussion: would you want to live there? why or why not? If you did, what would you do? What aspects of the culture would you want to explore?
3) Discus the treatment of sex in any two works we have read. What do these works say (and imply) about the values attached to sex, the way in which sex should or shouldn’t be had, and the effects of sex, sexuality, and gender roles upon one another? Chopin and Le Guin are obvious choices, but there are plenty of others out there.
4) Discuss the treatment of death in ANY TWO of the following works.
Discuss how it is presented, what it is taken to mean, how it affects characters, and any other fun aspects you can think of!
“The Open Boat”
The Crucible
“Design”
Always Coming Home
“Helen”
“Lullaby”
As I Lay Dying
“Daddy”
5) For the formalists among you: take any TWO poems we have read from one literary period, and compare their formal elements.
How does the poem’s form support the poem’s function in, for instance,
“Directive” and “Design”, or “Helen” and “Heritage”, or “Howl” and “Daddy”?
6) For As I Lay Dying fans: the book’s definitely a little weird, with its numerous narrators, their various unreliabilities, and the gradual unfolding of the events of the past. What do you think is the point? What does the book tell you about the family, or about narrative itself, that couldn’t be conveyed in a more traditional framework?