EL2.3.2: AMERICAN LITERATURE (ii): QUESTION BANK
TWO MARK QUESTIONS
POETRY
1. Frost’s classicism.
2. “After Apple Picking” provides a fine example of the union of opposites. How?
3. Frost’s definition of poetry.
4. How is Frost different from the English Romantic poets?
5. Frost’s language.
6. Ambivalent feelings of love and fear in “Daddy”.
7. Plath’s attitude to her father as revealed in “Daddy”.
8. Significance of the title “Lady Lazarus”.
9. Plath’s recollection of the Nazi years in Germany in “Lady Lazarus”.
10. The transformation Plath undergoes through her suicide attempt in “Lady
Lazarus”.
11. Visual imagery in “The Red Wheelbarrow”.
12. The conflict in the mind of the protagonist in “Sunday Morning”.
13. The cockatoo symbol in “Sunday Morning”.
14. The difference(s) between the poetry of Frost and Wordsworth.
15. Symbolism in Frost.
16. The games played by the boys in “Birches”.
17. The lady in “Sunday Morning”.
18. Symbols in “Apple Picking”
PROSE
1. The basic paradox in Donne’s poem, according to Brooks.
2. The essential difference between the language of science and the language of
poetry, according to Brooks.
3. The “underlying paradox” in Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘It is a beauteous evening…’.
4. The “paradoxical situation” in Wordsworth’s “Composed upon Westminster
Bridge”.
5. Brooks’ reasons for analyzing the poems of Wordsworth
6. The “raison d`etre of most Romantic paradoxes”, according to Brooks.
7. Irony, wonder and the paradox.
8. Irony and paradox in Pope and Gray.
9. The reasons for the poet employing metaphors in poetry and its effect.
10. The basic metaphor and paradox in Donne’s “Canonization”.
11. Brooks’ comments on the opening stanzas of Donne’s “Canonization”.
12. The Petrarchan love-metaphors in “Canonization”.
13. The multiple meanings of the word “dye” in “Canonization”.
14. Brooks’ analysis of the phoenix metaphor in “Canonization”.
15. The relationship between the language of religion and the language of poetry.
16. The relationship between Coleridge’s “imagination” and paradox.
17. Brooks’ comments on Shakespeare’s “Phoenix and the Turtle”.
18. “The Canonization” as a ‘well-wrought urn’.
19. Yoknapatahwa county.
20. Comment on the titles and narrators of the four sections of The Sound and the
Fury.
21. The relationship between Benjy and Caddy.
22. Quentin’s suicide.
23. The attitudes of the brothers to Caddy.
24. Benjy’s section.
25. The roles of the negro servants.
26. The narrator of The Invisible Man.
27. The invisible man/ the theme of invisibility.
28. The narrator’s experience at Liberty Paints.
29. The narrator’s experience at the Golden Day.
30. The affair of Jim Trueblood.
31. The character and role of Mr. Bledsoe.
32. The narrator’s clash with the Brotherhood.
33. The role of Brother Jack.
34. Ellison’s critique of communism in The Invisible Man.
35. The phonies in Catcher in the Rye, according to Holden.
36. Holden’s relationship with Phoebe.
37. Holden’s relationship with Jane Gallagher and Sally Hayes.
DRAMA
Emperor Jones
1. The significance of the silver bullet
2. The significance of the name Brutus Jones.
3. The significance of the opening scene in The Emperor Jones.
4. The predominant emotion in The Emperor Jones.
5. The significance of the tom-tom in The Emperor Jones.
6. The forest setting in The Emperor Jones
7. The character of Brutus Jones as revealed in Scene 1.
8. Major symbols in The Glass Menagerie
9. The significance of the forest scene in The Emperor Jones.
10. The relationship between Jones and Smithers.
Death of a Salesman
1. Expressionism in Death of a Salesman
2. The American Dream
3. Significance of the name ‘Willy Loman’
4. Stage setting in Death of a Salesman
5. Willy Loman’s profession
6. The Flute motif
7. The stocking motif
8. The father-son conflict
9. Symbolic function of the jungle
10. Theme of Death of a Salesman
11. Music in Death of a Salesman
12. Willy’s first encounter with Charlie.
13. Why Willy rejects Charlie’s job offer.
14. Why Willy feels he is “vital to New England”.
15. The Memory Scene in Death of a Salesman.
16. Stage direction in Death of a Salesman.
17. Willy Loman as a representative of everyman.
18. Expressionism in Death of a Salesman. Why Willy rejects Charlie’s job offer
19. Why Willy feels he is “vital to New England”
20. Biff and Happy
21. Linda Loman
22. How Ben and Charley function as opposites
23. Why Willy rejects Charlie’s job offer
FIVE MARK QUESTIONS
POETRY
1. Frost as a regional poet.
2. Theme of isolation in the poetry of Frost.
3. Major themes in the poetry of Frost.
4. Modernism in poetry.
PROSE
1. New Criticism
2. The Lost Generation.
3. The Southern novelists.
DRAMA
Emperor Jones
1. Expressionism
2. Expressionistic features of The Emperor Jones.
3. O’Neill’s style
4. The uniqueness of O’Neill’s plays.
5. Tom-tom beats in The Emperor Jones
Death of a Salesman
1. Miller’s dramatic technique
2. Various motifs used in “Death of a Salesman”
3. The symbolic function of flute music
4. The American Dream
5. Expressionism
6. Miller’s dramatic technique.
7. Symbolism in Death of a Salesman.
ANNOTATIONS
POETRY
1. Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
2. Dying
Is an art, like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.
3. Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
4. Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
5. Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
6. You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
7. May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love.
8. Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples; I am drowsing off.
9. Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep
PROSE
1. The comparison to the phoenix seems thus merely another outlandish one, the
most outrageous of all. But it is this most fantastic one, stumbled over apparently
in his haste, that the poet goes on to develop. It really describes the lovers best and
justifies their renunciation.
2. Thus, there is a certain awed wonder in Pope just as there is a certain trace of
irony implicit in the Wordsworth sonnets.
3. Donne accomplishes the modulation of tone by what may be called an analysis of
love-metaphor.
4. The most exciting thing that the poet can say about the houses is that they are
asleep.
5. Even the most direct and simple poet is forced into paradoxes far more often than
we thing, if we are sufficiently alive to what he is doing.
6. The tendency of science is necessarily to stabilize term, to freeze them into strict
denotations; the poet’s tendency is by contrast disruptive.
7. For the poet daringly treats profane love as if it were divine love. The
canonization is not that of a pair of holy anchorites who have renounced the world
and the flesh.
8. Deprived of the character of the paradox with its twin concomitants of irony and
wonder, the matter of Donne’s poem unravels into ‘facts’, biological, social, and
economic.
9. It is a great and illuminating statement, but is a series of paradoxes. Apparently
Coleridge could describe the effect of the imagination in no other way.
10. The history of poetry from Dryden’s time to our own might bear as its subtitle
‘The Half-Hearted Phoenix’.
DRAMA
Emperor Jones
1. For de big stealin’ day makes you Emperor and puts you in de Hall o’ Fame when
you croaks.
2. The blacks is ‘olding a bloody meetin’, ‘avin’ a war dance, getting their courage
worked up b’fore they starts after you.
3. No use’n fussin’, when I knows de game’s up I kisses it goodbye widout no long
waits.
4. You didn’ `ave no `igh and mighty airs in them days!
5. Gawd blimey! I only ‘opes I’m there when they takes ‘im out to shoot ‘im.
6. Ha’nts! You fool nigger, dey ain’t no such thing! Don’t de Baptist parson tell you
dat many time?
7. De fuss and glory part of it, dat’s only to turn de heads o’ de low-flung, bush
niggers dat’s here. Dey wants de big circus show for deir money. I gives it to ‘em
an’ I gits de money.
8. A man can’t take de pot on a bob-tailed flush all de time. Was I sayin’ I’d sit in
six months mo’! Well, I’se changed my mind den, I cashes in and resigns de job
of Emperor right dis minute.
Death of a Salesman
1. But it’s more than ten years now and he has yet to make thirty-five dollars a week.
2. I can park my car in any street in New England, and the cops protect it like their
own.
3. Your mind is overactive, and the mind is what counts, dear.
4. In the greatest country in the world a young man with such personal attractiveness
gets lost. And such a hard worker.
5. Everything I say there’s a twist of mockery on his face. I can’t get near him.
6. That’s why I thank Almighty God you’re both built like Adonises.
7. Walked into a jungle, and comes out, the age of twenty-one, and he’s rich.
8. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him.
9. He’s just a big, stupid man to you, but I tell you there’s more good in him than in
many other people.
10. A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man.
11. Lick the world! You guys together could absolutely lick the civilized world.
12. You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away – a man is not a piece of fruit!
13. The door of life is wide open!
ESSAY QUESTIONS
POETRY
1. The theme of isolation in Frost.
PROSE
2. “The Language of Paradox” as a typical New Critical text.
3. Brooks’ critique of Donne’s “Canonization”.
4. The narrative technique of The Sound and the Fury.
5. Disintegration and decadence in The Sound and the Fury.
6. Caddy as the locus of The Sound and the Fury.
7. Social criticism in The Invisible Man.
8. Invisibility in The Invisible Man.
9. Catcher in the Rye as a picaresque novel.
10. Catcher in the Rye as a coming of age novel.
DRAMA
1. Emperor Jones – A study on the rise of dictators.
2. Expressionistic techniques in The Emperor Jones.
Death of a Salesman
1. Miller explodes the American success myth in Death of a Salesman—Comment
2. Consider Death of a Salesman as a modern tragedy
3. Prove that Bill is actually the central character in the play
4. How much of Willy’s tragedy is caused by his own personality and how much is
the result of American society
5. Death of a Salesman is a blend of realism and expressionism—Explain
6. Consider Death of a Salesman as a commentary on American society
7. Discuss Miller’s handling of ‘illusion versus reality’ in Death of a Salesman