American Literature Final Exam

ModernStates Final Exam Questions

Which of the following best states the theme of Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat"?

Nature, though seemingly hostile, is actually indifferent to human beings.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle

thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to

love wisdom as to live according to its dictates a

life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity,

and trust.

I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but

I was terrified to find that they required to be

dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind

was all undusted still, and I threw them out the

window in disgust.

The sentences are taken from the opening pages of

Henry David Thoreau's Walden

Which of the following novels chronicles the experiences of an African American protagonist?

Invisible Man

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

The passage was written by

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Which of the following does NOT appear in a poem by Emily Dickinson? 

A rain-filled red wheelbarrow "beside the white chickens"

What early Romantic writer is known for the The Leatherstocking Series about the difficulties Native American faced in post-colonial America?

James Fenimore Cooper

Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as

lead, and to tend downwards with great weight

and pressure towards hell; and if God should let

you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly

descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf,

and your healthy constitution and your own care

and prudence, and best contrivance, and all your

righteousness, would have no more influence to

uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a

spider's web would have to stop a falling rock.

The passage above is an example of

Transcendentalism

If ever two were one, then surely we.

If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;

If ever wife was happy in a man,

Compare with me, ye women, if you can.

I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold

Or all the riches that the East doth hold.

My love is such that rivers cannot quench,

Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense.

Thy love is such I can no way repay,

The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray,

The while we live, in love let's so persevere

That when we live no more, we may live ever.

Which of the following best describes the poem's rhyme scheme?

aabbccddeeff

Ezra Pound's short poem "In a Station of the Metro" is considered a classic example of

Imagism

Which of the following writers was particularly important in the development of the short story as a literary form? 

Edgar Allan Poe

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

In the passage, which of the following best describes the speaker's attitude toward the very rich?

He thinks that he understands their psychology even though he has not shared their advantages.

At the end of The Awakening Edna Pontellier

walks into the sea and disappears

The extraordinary patience of things!

This beautiful place defaced with a crop of

suburban houses—

How beautiful when we first beheld it,

Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with

clean cliffs;

No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,

Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the

outcrop rockheads—

Now the spoiler has come: does it care?

Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people

are a tide

That swells and in time will ebb, and all

Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of

the pristine beauty

Lives in the very grain of the granite,

Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our

cliff. —As for us:

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;

We must unhumanize our views a little, and

become confident

As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

In lines 11-14, the discussion of "the people" emphasizes their

transience

The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter's mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.

The primary purpose of the passage is to

establish a setting

"Call me Ishmael" is the famous first line of what novel?

Moby Dick

What writer commonly depicted the fictional Yoknapatawpha in her/his work?

William Faulkner

All went well, until a platter was passed with a kind of meat that was strange to me. Some mischievous instinct told me that it was ham—forbidden food; and I, the liberal, the free, was afraid to touch it! I had a terrible moment of surprise, mortification, self-contempt; but I helped myself to a slice of ham, nevertheless, and hung my head over my plate to hide my confusion. I was furious with myself for my weakness. I to be afraid of a pink piece of pig's flesh, who had defied at least two religions in defence of free thought! And I began to reduce my ham to indivisible atoms, determined to eat more of it than anybody at the table. Alas! I learned that to eat in defence of principles was not so easy as to talk. I ate, but only a newly abnegated Jew can understand with what squirming, what protesting of the inner man, what exquisite abhorrence of myself. That Spartan boy who allowed the stolen fox hidden in his bosom to consume his vitals rather than be detected in the theft, showed no such miracle of self-control as I did, sitting there at my friend's tea-table, eating unjewish meat.

Why does the narrator call ham "forbidden food"?

She is Jewish and is not allowed to eat ham.

Which of the following writers was a part of the Harlem Renaissance?

Zora Neale Hurston

The extraordinary patience of things!

This beautiful place defaced with a crop of

suburban houses—

How beautiful when we first beheld it,

Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with

clean cliffs;

No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,

Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the

outcrop rockheads—

Now the spoiler has come: does it care?

Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people

are a tide

That swells and in time will ebb, and all

Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of

the pristine beauty

Lives in the very grain of the granite,

Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our

cliff. —As for us:

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;

We must unhumanize our views a little, and

become confident

As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

In line 10, the word "it" refers to

"This beautiful place" (line 2)

Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Henry James are commonly described by literary historians as

realists

All went well, until a platter was passed with a kind of meat that was strange to me. Some mischievous instinct told me that it was ham—forbidden food; and I, the liberal, the free, was afraid to touch it! I had a terrible moment of surprise, mortification, self-contempt; but I helped myself to a slice of ham, nevertheless, and hung my head over my plate to hide my confusion. I was furious with myself for my weakness. I to be afraid of a pink piece of pig's flesh, who had defied at least two religions in defence of free thought! And I began to reduce my ham to indivisible atoms, determined to eat more of it than anybody at the table. Alas! I learned that to eat in defence of principles was not so easy as to talk. I ate, but only a newly abnegated Jew can understand with what squirming, what protesting of the inner man, what exquisite abhorrence of myself. That Spartan boy who allowed the stolen fox hidden in his bosom to consume his vitals rather than be detected in the theft, showed no such miracle of self-control as I did, sitting there at my friend's tea-table, eating unjewish meat.

The narrator likens her situation to that of the Spartan boy in a well-known parable in order to illustrate her

ability to exercise restraint in uncomfortable circumstances

That minds are not alike, full well I know,

This truth each day's experience will show;

To heights surprising some great spirits soar,

With inborn strength mysterious depths explore;

Their eager gaze surveys the path of light,

Confest it stood to Newton's piercing sight.

Deep science, like a bashful maid retires,

And but the ardent breast her worth inspires;

By perseverance the coy fair is won.

And Genius, led by Study, wears the crown.

The "ardent breast" (line 8) serves to

further discovery

What African American writer spoke of the double-consciousness?

W.E.B. Du Bois

"I would prefer not to" is a statement often made by a character in which of the following?

“Bartleby the Scrivener"

When we Chinese girls listened to the adults talk-story, we learned that we failed if we grew up to be but wives or slaves. We could be heroines, swordswomen. Even if she had to rage across all China, a swordswoman got even with anybody who hurt her family. Perhaps women were once so dangerous that they had to have their feet bound....

My mother told [stories] that followed swordswomen through woods and palaces for years. Night after night my mother would talkstory until we fell asleep. I couldn't tell where the stories left off and dreams began, her voice the voice of the heroines in my sleep....

At last I saw that I too had been in the presence of great power, my mother talking-story.

In the passage above, the discussion of "talk-story" helps to express the speaker's

sense that storytelling was a way that her mother transmitted strength

Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,

Who after birth didst by my side remain,

Till snatched from thence by friends, less

wise than true,

Who thee abroad, exposed to public view,

Made thee in rags, halting to th' press

to trudge,

Where errors were not lessened (all

may judge).

At thy return my blushing was not small,

My rambling brat (in print) should

mother call,

I cast thee by as one unfit for light,

Thy visage was so irksome in my sight.

In line 1, "offspring" most probably refers to the author's

book of poems

Which one of the following was not a Fireside poet?

Margaret Fuller

There is one point at which the moral sense and the artistic sense lie very near together; that is, in the light of the very obvious truth that the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer. In proportion as that mind is rich and noble, will the novel, the picture, the statue, partake of the substance of beauty and truth. To be constituted of such elements is, to my vision, to have purpose enough. No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind; that seems to me an axiom which, for the artist in fiction, will cover all needful moral ground: if the youthful aspirant take it to heart, it will illuminate for him many of the mysteries of "purpose."

The central argument of the passage is that

a creative work reflects the intelligence of the artist

John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath depicts

the plight of dispossessed farmers who migrate to California

Bigger Thomas is the central character in

Richard Wright's Native Son

This poet also wrote in prose and was important in the advancement of lesbian issues and social justice:

Anne Sexton

BEHOLD her stretched upon the mournful

bier!—Behold her silently descend to the

grave!—Soon the wild weeds spring afresh

round the little hillock, as if to shelter the

remains of betrayed innocence—and the friends

of her youth shun even the spot which conceals

her relicks.

SUCH is the consequence of SEDUCTION, but

it is not the only consequence.

The first paragraph of the passage provides an example of which of the following figures of speech?

Apostrophe

The House Behind the Cedars and The Marrow of Tradition, two novels addressing difficulties faced by upwardly mobile African Americans in the South during the late nineteenth century, were both written by

Charles W. Chesnutt

Nathaniel Hawthorne's Blithedale Romance satirizes which literary and cultural movement?

Progressivism

Besides, what could they see but a hideous and

desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild

men—and what multitudes of them they knew

not. Neither could they as it were, go up to the

top of Pisgah to view from this wilderness a

more goodly country to feed their hopes; for

which way soever they turned their eyes (save

upward to the heavens) they could have little

solace or content in respect of any outward

objects. For summer being done, all things stand

upon them with a weather-beaten face, and the

whole country, full of woods and thickets,

represented a wild and savage hue.

The passage above is from

William Bradford's The History of Plimouth Plantation

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle

thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to

love wisdom as to live according to its dictates a

life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity,

and trust.

I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but

I was terrified to find that they required to be

dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind

was all undusted still, and I threw them out the

window in disgust.

The phrase "the furniture of my mind was all undusted still" can best be paraphrased by which of the following?

I had not examined my ideas and beliefs.

Who wrote Life in the Iron-Mills about the ills of factory labor?

Rebecca Harding Davis

Which of the following writers was known for his novels about Americans confronting European society?

Henry James

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. . . . It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

The sentence beginning "He who would gather immortal palms . . . " is best interpreted to mean which of the following?

Anyone who wishes to achieve greatness must examine society's fundamental values.

What author won the National Book Award three times, the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize for his writings about the Jewish American experience after World War II?

Saul Bellow

Who wrote about the Bible salesman who stole Joy's prosthetic leg up in the barn loft?

Flannery O'Connor

Which of the following authors wrote Ragged Dick, a best-selling novel that chronicles a young man's rise from poverty and obscurity to wealth and social prominence and that led to a popular series of similar rags-to-riches stories?

Horatio Alger

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. . . . It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

The philosophy expressed in the passage is best paraphrased by which of the following statements?

Society and individuality are at odds, so those seeking to be individuals must define their own terms for living.

That minds are not alike, full well I know,

This truth each day's experience will show;

To heights surprising some great spirits soar,

With inborn strength mysterious depths explore;

Their eager gaze surveys the path of light,

Confest it stood to Newton's piercing sight.

Deep science, like a bashful maid retires,

And but the ardent breast her worth inspires;

By perseverance the coy fair is won.

And Genius, led by Study, wears the crown.

Line 3 is distinctive for its use of

alliteration

my mamma moved among the days

like a dreamwalker in a field;

seemed like what she touched was hers

seemed like what touched her couldn't hold,

she got us almost through the high grass

then seemed like she turned around and ran

right back in

right back on in

The poem makes use of all of the following EXCEPT

satire

Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs are best known as

Beat writers

Mary Rowlandson is best known for her:

captivity narrative

Which of the following poets is best known for sonnets that combine a traditional verse form with a concern for women's issues?

Gertrude Stein

When Yankies, skill'd in martial rule,

First put the British troops to school;

Instructed them in warlike trade,

And new manoeuvres of parade,

The true war-dance of Yankee reels,

And manual exercise of heels;

Made them give up, like saints complete,

The arm of flesh, and trust the feet,

The excerpt of the above poem, M'Fingal was written by

John Trumball

Which of the following writers is often credited with inventing the genre of the "detective story"?

Edgar Allan Poe

Make me, O Lord, thy Spining Wheele

compleate.

Thy Holy Worde my Distaff make for mee.

Make mine Affections thy Swift Flyers neate

And make my Soule thy holy Spoole to bee.

My Conversation make to be thy Reele

And reele the yarn thereon spun of thy Wheele.

The passage above is notable chiefly for

a literary conceit

The short story collection The Golden Apples was written by which of the following writers?

Sherwood Anderson

If ever two were one, then surely we.

If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;

If ever wife was happy in a man,

Compare with me, ye women, if you can.

I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold

Or all the riches that the East doth hold.

My love is such that rivers cannot quench,

Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense.

Thy love is such I can no way repay,

The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray,

The while we live, in love let's so persevere

That when we live no more, we may live ever.

The poem was written by

Anne Bradstreet

Which of the following was a writer of feminist essays and Utopian novels who achieved widespread recognition with the publication of her fictionalized account of depression and mental breakdown?

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The extraordinary patience of things!

This beautiful place defaced with a crop of

suburban houses—

How beautiful when we first beheld it,

Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with

clean cliffs;

No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,

Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the

outcrop rockheads—

Now the spoiler has come: does it care?

Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people

are a tide

That swells and in time will ebb, and all

Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of

the pristine beauty

Lives in the very grain of the granite,

Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our

cliff. —As for us:

We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;

We must unhumanize our views a little, and

become confident

As the rock and ocean that we were made from.

The poem is written in which verse form?

Blank verse

Which of the following cities is Carl Sandburg noted for celebrating?

Chicago

What Mohegan Native American was a Christian minister and wrote A Short Narrative of My Life?

Samson Occom

The title character of Henry James's Daisy Miller finally

dies as the result of a night visit to the Colosseum

Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,

Who after birth didst by my side remain,

Till snatched from thence by friends, less

wise than true,

Who thee abroad, exposed to public view,

Made thee in rags, halting to th' press

to trudge,

Where errors were not lessened (all

may judge).

At thy return my blushing was not small,

My rambling brat (in print) should

mother call,

I cast thee by as one unfit for light,

Thy visage was so irksome in my sight.

"My rambling brat" (line 11) is an example of

personification

That minds are not alike, full well I know,

This truth each day's experience will show;

To heights surprising some great spirits soar,

With inborn strength mysterious depths explore;

Their eager gaze surveys the path of light,

Confest it stood to Newton's piercing sight.

Deep science, like a bashful maid retires,

And but the ardent breast her worth inspires;

By perseverance the coy fair is won.

And Genius, led by Study, wears the crown.

The rhyme scheme in the excerpt is

aabbccddee

When Yankies, skill'd in martial rule,

First put the British troops to school;

Instructed them in warlike trade,

And new manoeuvres of parade,

The true war-dance of Yankee reels,

And manual exercise of heels;

Made them give up, like saints complete,

The arm of flesh, and trust the feet,

The rhyme scheme of this excerpt is

aabbccdd

Which of the following statements summarizes Booker T. Washington's message in a wellknown speech delivered in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1895 and later included in his autobiography, Up From Slavery?

Progress for both the African American and the White communities requires cooperation in developing commercial and industrial opportunities.

What American writer is known for "word portraits" or "sketches" that connect art to writing?

Gertrude Stein

Which of the following is the first-person narrator of Harper Lee's 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird?

Scout

"I wish that you were my sister, I'd teach you to have some confidence in yourself. The different people are not like other people, but being different is nothing to be ashamed of.... Other people are . . . one hundred times one thousand. You're one times one! They walk all over the earth. You just stay here. They're common as—weeds, but—you—well, you're Blue Roses."

In the passage above from Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, the term "Blue Roses" is a metaphor for the young woman's

shyness and sensitivity

my mamma moved among the days

like a dreamwalker in a field;

seemed like what she touched was hers

seemed like what touched her couldn't hold,

she got us almost through the high grass

then seemed like she turned around and ran

right back in

right back on in

Lines 1–4 suggest that the speaker viewed the mother as

indomitable

Place the name of each of these Colonial era figures beside the British colony with which he is most closely associated. Winthrop, Williams, Smith; Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Virginia

Winthrop - Massachusetts Bay

Williams - Rhode Island

Smith - Virginia

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. . . . It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

The passage is excerpted from

Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Self-Reliance"

Characters with the last names of Snopes, Compson, and Sartoris figure prominently in the fiction of

Flannery O'Connor

Who wrote Nature and headed the Transcendentalist movement?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Who wrote "The Way to Wealth" that has many popular expressions we use today?

Benjamin Franklin

All of the following are writers of the Colonial era EXCEPT

Margaret Fuller

The history of mankind is history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

The statement above represents a deliberate rewriting of which important political text?

The Declaration of Independence

The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter's mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.

The tone of the passage would best be described as

portentous

A demand for politcal, civic, and educational equality is voiced in The Souls of Black Folk by

W.E.B. Du Bois

What adjective below does not describe the type of novel Tom Sawyer is?

Epistolary

The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter's mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.

In the passage, the word "gray" is an example of

a motif

At the end of Flannery O'Conner's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," the grandmother does which of the following?

She dies after being shot by an escaped convict, the Misfit.

The title of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man refers to the fact that the narrator

has the sense that no one really sees him as an individual

Place the name of each of the following writers beside the region that figures most prominently in her writing. Flannery O’Connor, Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather; The Great Plains, The Deep South, New England

Flannery - Deep South. Sarah - New England. Willa - Great Plains

In "The Art of Fiction", Henry James says

the author should be absent from the work and be objective

What play is about a Connecticut family's life that ends in Mary's drug addiction and Edmund's fate to tuberculosis?

Long Day's Journey into Night

Which one of the following was not considered a mainstream confessional poet?

Allen Ginsburg

The King and the Duke in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are

confidence men

BEHOLD her stretched upon the mournful

bier!—Behold her silently descend to the

grave!—Soon the wild weeds spring afresh

round the little hillock, as if to shelter the

remains of betrayed innocence—and the friends

of her youth shun even the spot which conceals

her relicks.

SUCH is the consequence of SEDUCTION, but

it is not the only consequence.

The passage would best be described as an example of

Postmodernism

All of the following were written by Toni Morrison EXCEPT

The Bluest Eye

The primary contrast in the poem is between

nature and humankind

Michael Wigglesworth wrote what famous text, the longest poem of the Colonial Period?

The Day of Doom

Lines 7–8 ("My love … recompense.") are best paraphrased by which of the following?

My love for you is all-consuming and can only be satisfied by your loving me in return.

Which of the following writers, born into a family of New England ministers, achieved popular success with an abolitionist novel?

Harriet Beecher Stowe