English Final Exam

3/5th Compromise

in order to create a compromise between Northern and Southern colonies at the Constitutional Convention, an agreement was reached that slaves would count 3/5 of a person each, for the purpose of determining congressional representation

Abolitionism

the movement to end slavery, led by such figures as Frederick Douglass. The Abolitionist movement in the United States grew stronger after an 1833 ban in British colonies made Canada slavery-free territory

Abstract language

in contrast to “concrete” language, “abstract” words tend to ideas that cannot be directly visualized, rather than things that have physical form

ACLU

The American Civil Liberties Union, a civil rights organization that fights to see constitutional protections preserved. It is structured as neither liberal nor conservative.
George Hanson in Easy Rider (played by Jack Nicholson) is an alcoholic who is also a lawyer for the ACLU.

Alliteration

The use of repeated hard-consonant sounds, for instance Bs, Ds, or Ts. “Diadems - drop - and Doges - surrender - ” (Dickinson #216).

Ambiguity

interpretations where two or more meanings are possible, in any poetry, writing, literature, or film content.

Anti-hero

A type in American movies that began to appear more frequently in the 1960s. The anti- hero has a flawed character and may even commit crimes, but is nevertheless a
sympathetic protagonist in a society that may display greater flaws or injustices.

Auteur

Pronounced oh-toor, this term takes its name from the French word for “author.” Movies are not single-authored works of art; dozens of artists and technicians are needed to
produce even a low-budget film. Film criticism has adopted the term “auteur” to describe a director whose films convey a signature style, so that one can speak of an “Alfred
Hitchcock film,” a “Quentin Tarrantino film” or a “Martin Scorcese film.” An “auteur” director brings a similar style, concerns, ways of editing, and overall vision to a film, and
may have role as writer or actor as well as director. Orson Welles is a classic example of an auteur filmmaker.

Assonance

The use of repeated vowel sounds in a poem. “And rowed him softer home - ”
(Dickinson #328).

Ballad metre

a meter where 4-beat lines alternate with 3-beat lines, as in the song “Amazing
Grace”: “Amázing gráce how sweét the sóund / That sáved a wrétch like mé.” Emily Dickinson frequently uses or plays off of this metre, common to church hymns. See #479, “Becáuse I cóuld not stóp for Déath - / He kíndly stópped for mé.”

Buddy movie

A familiar movie genre, where two characters (often but not exclusively male) both act as protagonists (though one is often more sympathetic than the other). Wyatt and Billy in Easy Rider were an early and influencial instance of this genre.

Cinematography

the photography in a film, usually overseen by the cinematographer. Particular visual features of a film are often owing to innovative cinematography, whether this be the
shots with both foreground and background in focus (depth of field) in Citizen Kane or the wide-angle landscape photography in real settings in the West of Easy Rider.

Concrete language

in contrast to “abstract” language, “concrete” words tend to things that can be directly visualized, rather than ideas that lack physical form. As an art form, poetry
much favors expression in concrete rather than abstract language

Congo Square

described by Harjo on p.21 of Crazy Brave, a historical gathering place in New
Orleans of Indians, Africans, and their "European friends, lovers, and families,” that was originally “a Southeastern Indian ceremonial ground.”

Conscience

an individual’s inner sense of virtue, ethics, and morality

Consciousness

– referring to the workings of an alert (conscious) mind; a person’s thought
• Novels in general, as a form, are the art form where one is most able to eavesdrop on
another human consciousness. We all have consciousness – our thoughts, feelings,
dreams, our selves – but it is invisible to the rest of the world. Novels, and fiction generally,
display consciousness, showing characters thinking and feeling.
• An example of Ethan Frome’s act of conscience – he won’t take advantage of the Hales
under false pretenses, to get money to run away with Mattie. A character may also act as
the conscience of the work, as George Hanson does in Easy Rider, standing for individuals’
rights in a conflicted world – and dying for it.

Cotton Gin

– this invention by Eli Whitney in 1794 made it faster to bring cotton to market by
removing the seeds by machine; as a result, cotton production increased and the number
of plantation slaves grew dramatically in the United States through the first half of the 19th
century.

Cross-cutting

– an editing technique of splicing back and forth between different shots, which may
be in different settings and different times. For instance, in a montage sequence in Citizen
Kane we see repeated shots of Charles and Emily, his first wife, back and forth in playful
and then angry arguments and finally in silence.

Cult of True Womanhood

– A social science term for the nineteenth century practice of defining
women as finding full expression in their lives through domestic life: homemaking, care of
children, and keeping the house a place of comfort and ease for men. Men endure battle
with the outside world through public engagement; women do not seek fulfillment in the
public sphere, but tend the home, to best preserve the home’s comforts for men.

Enjambment

– In lines in poetry where there is no end-punctuation and we read through to the next
line, the poet is said to have used “enjambment,” where the line-break creates the effect of
a pause where the grammar does not, in effect creating two ways of reading the lines.

Establishment shot

a shot which initially sets the scene of the plot action, as with the beginning of a movie.

Figurative language

language used to create meaning beyond the literal sense of the words; this term is a category that includes metaphor, symbolism, and imagery.

Fiction

a narrative that employs invented or created events, characters, or details. A short form of fiction is called a short story, while a book-length work of fiction is called a novel. A novella (like Ethan Frome) is a short novel.

Film Noir

a style of films begun in the 1940s featuring heavy use of shadows, low-lighting, and often using a detective-story plot. “Noir” is French for black, or dark. Citizen Kane is sometimes called the first film noir.

“Five Civilized Tribes”

As named in the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the major tribes of the Southeastern United States designated for removal West of the Mississippi – The Creek
(Muskoke), Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole.

Flicker (edit)

– An edit that is more complicated than a simple cut, often cutting back and forth or
incorporating close-up and long shots in quick succession. Borrowed from experimental
“flicker” films of the 1960s, this technique is used throughout Easy Rider.

Peter Fonda

– The actor who plays Wyatt in Easy Rider, he was part of a famous American acting
family that included his father Henry and his sister Jane.

Frame composition

– the artistic positioning, weighting, and balancing of objects in the shot frame.

Fugitive Slave Acts

– fugitive slave acts required northerners to return runaway slaves to southern owners. The first act was passed in 1793, and one with stronger provisions was renewed in
1850

Dennis Hopper

An actor who plays Billy in Easy Rider, he had a long career which began in the 1950s and continued into the 2000s, playing both sympathetic and evil characters, the
latter seen in Frank in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet

Image

word or words that create a picture in poetry. Effective poetry may employ surprising images – like, “My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun” (Dickinson #764).

Indian Removal Act

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 was signed into law by United States President Andrew Jackson. The law, as described by Congress, provided "for an exchange
of lands with the Indians residing in any of the states or territories, and for their removal west of the river Mississippi"

“Indian Territory”

Southern tribes resettled by the Indian Removal Act largely came here, with this the official name. After 1905, with the arrival of many whites after the discovery of large
oil deposits, this territory became the state of Oklahoma

Laszlo Kovacs

the Hungarian-born cinematographer for Easy Rider, one of the most important in Hollywood. His photography of the American West helped give the film its reputation as a
serious work of art

Linear/Non-linear

refers to how time and events handled in a plot, whether in a written or a movie narrative. In a linear narrative, events are described in the order they occurred in
time; an example of this would be The Narrative of Frederick Douglass. In a non-linear plot, such as in Citizen Kane, the plot elements are not revealed in sequence, but skip around in time

Metaphor

a comparison in non-literal language; an extended metaphor is a metaphor used frequently through the course of a work, helping shape the work.

Metre

the beats (or “un-stressed” syllables) in lines of poetry.

Mise en scène

the objects and setting creating the look and feel of a film. Can include sound, set design, make-up, and elements of cinematography, and whatever else give a movie its
particular “look”; everything on the screen in a movie, and including music as well. (Pronounced meez-on-senn.)

Montage

the French word for editing, this refers to fast-edited segments of a film where music and sound effects are also used, to create a set-piece within a film that tells a little story within a story, using shots from different times and places. Music video heavily use montage, and nearly all films have montage sequences within them, to tell parts of the
overall story

Narrator

the voice which speaks a text (not to be confused with the author). A 1st person narrator tells the story voiced by an “I,” in that character’s point of view, or perspective – the truth as that character sees it, or wishes it to be known. A 3rd person narration is voiced by “he,” “she,” it,” etc., not an “I’ or “you.” shot is particularly effective

Naturalism

a form of realism where characters are led toward bleak endings by forces larger than they can control determining their fates. Ethan Frome is considered a work of naturalism.

Novel

a unified, book-length work of fiction. A shorter novel (generally under 100 pgs.) is called a novella.

Omniscience

an all-knowing form of narration, not limited to the thoughts of a specific character; if the 3rd -person narrator knows only the thoughts of one character, this is known as “limited omniscience.”

Jack Nicholson

one of the most significant actors in American films of the last sixty years, mostly in “anti-hero” roles, such as in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Five Easy Pieces. His
supporting actor performance in Easy Rider takes over the heart of the movie and made him a star, even though he wasn’t on screen for the first half or the final quarter.

Paradox

a statement which appears contradictory, but is affirmed as true. “I like a look of agony...” (Dickinson #241); “Much Madness is divinest Sense” (#435).

Persona

an identity assumed by the poet that is not herself. For instance, the persona in Dickinson’s poem that begins, “A narrow Fellow in the Grass,” is a young boy, engaged in
activities not so proper for a young girl in the 1860s, like walking in a field without shoes.

Point of view

the perspective in narration; whose truth is being told.

Protagonist low-ang

the main character in a narrative (e.g., Ethan Frome, in the book, Ethan Frome). The term is used for film narrative as well (e.g., Charles Foster Kane).

Sequence

a succession of shots that form a unified segment of a film. When the sequence is fast and set-off from the regular editing of a film, it may be called a montage.

Shaman

a traditional healer in Native American or folk society, who uses herbs, rituals, and/or access to the spirit world, often through trances or altered states of consciousness. An
example of this type of healer is the Cherokee grandfather of Joy Harjo’s husband-to-be described on p.112 of Crazy Brave.

Shot

– a single, continuous action of the camera.
• Types of shot: Nearness to the objects being photographed yield a variety of types of shot:
Long shot, medium shot, close-up, extreme close-up, etc. If the camera focuses on two
characters side by side, it’s referred to as a two-shot; if characters are facing each other,
as in a typical conversation, shots of each are edited back and forth as each speaks. There
is also vocabulary to refer to how the shots are taken: from a rolling dolly, is a dolly shot (or
a tracking shot); from high above is a crane shot, etc. If the camera is placed low, for instance at the actor’s feet, facing upward (or even below the floor), this yields a low-angle shot. Different shots have different effect, and the low-angle shot is particularly effective for dramatizing larger-then-life, heroic qualities

Slant rhyme, or near-rhyme

Use of words that almost rhyme, but don’t. Readers in Emily Dickinson’s era though the poet might be trying to rhyme, but wasn’t a good enough poet to do so.

Slave Narrative

a unique, American literary genre beginning in the United States in the late 18th century, these are the first-hand stories of ex-slaves which both exposed the cruelties of
the slavery system and demonstrated the talents of their ex-slave authors, helping to refute the system. Including testimonials of former slaves collected in the 1930s, and written accounts like that of Frederick Douglass, there are some 6,000 slave narratives in total

Stanza

Units of poetic lines. Four lines is a “quatrain” type of stanza

Subjective camera

device in a film where a sequence reflects the point of view of a particular character. This is used throughout Citizen Kane, as different characters’ views of Kane’s life are expressed in different sections of the film

Symbolism

the use of a figure to represent a much larger meaning, or multiple meanings from different perspectives, subject to interpretation. The pickle dish in Ethan Frome means
different things to different characters, and can be argued as representing sexuality, visions of better times, or the fragility of a marriage, to give some examples. The “water monster” described by Joy Harjo in Crazy Brave is similarly multi-faceted and not reducible to just one meaning. Yet another example is “Rosebud,” the sled in Citizen Kane – Charles Kane doesn’t weep over its loss because he was a winter sports enthusiast!

Gregg Toland

Citizen Kane’s cinematographer, associated with the film’s extreme depth-of-field shots, made possible by lenses Toland designed, and with the extreme camera angles enabled by camera positionings at times below floor-level

Trail of Tears

the forced displacement, between 1830 and 1850, of approximately 60,000 people of the “Five Civilized Tribes," including the Cherokee and the Creek, travelling mostly on
foot and with no food or sustenance provided

Transcendentalism

This American spiritual movement was centered in New England, beginning in the late 1830s. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Congregationalist minister who quit the church
because of what he felt were empty formalities in church services. Transcendentalism saw “spirit” as potentially in all things, and particularly to be found in nature. “Nature” was the foundational essay Emerson wrote in 1837.

Kane seeks to turn his second wife, Susan Alexander Kane, into this kind of artist

	an actress
	an opera singer
	a painter
	a trapeze performer

opera singer

When Kane signs his "Declaration of Principles," the viewer is signaled that we can't trust these promises, by way of this visual clue

	Mr. Bernstein holds his nose
	Kane is in the middle of a three-shot
	Kane's face is in shadowy darkness
	Kane turns off a gas lamp

Kane's face is in shadowy darkness

A famous montage sequence shows Kane in a series of scenes seated at a breakfast table with whom?

	Susan Alexander
	Agnes Moorhead
	his mother
	Emily Monroe Norton

Emily Monroe Norton

This term was coined by French critics after World War II to describe heavily shadowed American films often shot with limited sources of light.

	film noir
	mise en scene
	sacre bleu
	montage

film noir

Charles Foster Kane wrecks a bedroom after Susan Alexander leaves him, stopping only upon finding this object

	a rosebud
	Susan's discarded wedding ring
	a snow globe
	an issue of The Chronicle newspaper

a snow globe

Seemingly every frame of Citizen Kane is filled with objects and sometimes these threaten to even push out the actors, like when Charles is given a trophy by the staff of the New York Enquirer, or when the immense mountains of statues and crates seem to leave the actors no room to move except out the door. This is the most expressive of which film term?

mise en scene

This author lived during the Civil War, but even so was the subject of a recent comedy-drama series on AppleTV.

Emily Dickinson

If a child was born as a result of relations between a slave and a free person on the early 19th century American South, what would the child’s status be?

If the mother was a slave, the child would be a slave.

'“ I release you, my beautiful and terrible

fear. I release you. You were my beloved

and hated twin, but now, I don’t know you

as myself.”

these are the words of:

Joy Harjo

Near the end of Easy Rider , Wyatt says, “We blew it.” Billy isn’t clear what he means, but the audience knows that in his heart Wyatt believes he should have done which of these things?

stayed at the commune in the Southwestern U.S.

Frederick Douglass says that these two things were most important in his becoming that man he was and refusing to remain enslaved. One was that he taught himself to read. What was the other?

He physically fought the slave breaker Covey, and, as a result, determined he would never be whipped again.

Ethan Frome won’t take advantage of Ned Hale by pleading a need for money when in fact he wants cash so that he may run away to the West with Mattie. This shows most particularly that Ethan has a strong sense of… what?

consciousness

The plot of Easy Rider is non-linear.

True/False

False

This work gives examples of the way rich interests exert control over media, even though it preceded by many years the term “fake news”.

Citizen Kane

Joy returns to Tulsa with her new husband, their son, his daughter from a previous relationship that she is now raising, and a mother-in-law who lives next door. Then things got really crazy when one day te mother-in-law pushes her way into Joy’s house and blows smoke on her from a cigarette, “witching” her with a Cherokee magic curse.

True/False

True

“I understood _________ when she said she was from Venus.” Fill in the blank with the name of Joy’s beautiful and terrorized friend from school.

Lupita

A positive new path emerges for Joy that saves her from negativity of her teenage years in Tulsa, just when things appear most bleak. What happens?

She is accepted at the Institute of American Indian Arts boarding school in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Joy’s mother has a great artistic talent, but her second husband frustrated her attempts to express herself. What was Joy’s mother’s talent?

singer-songwriter

In the midst of Joy Harjo’s difficulties living with an abusive stepfather, teenage confusions, and prejudices against her as an Indian, she identifies a reliable voice within herself that always points the right way, giving her needed direction. What does she call this voice?

the knowing

What phrase below is most synonymous with “querulous drone”, as it is used in Ethan Frome?

annoying whine

The final remark that "down there they're all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues" comes from this person's mouth -

Harmon Gow

Ruth Hale

Ethan Frome

Denis Eady

Ruth Hale

Who does the engineer see in the kitchen of the Frome house when he goes inside?

Ethan

Mattie

Zeena

All three of them

All three of them

In Chapter IX, Mattie and Ethan discuss the day they first began to feel something for each other, many months earlier, at Shadow Pond. All of these things happened on that earlier day except this one:

Mattie gave Ethan a cup of coffee brewed over an outdoor campfire.

Mattie was already at the church picnic when Ethan arrived late, wearing his working clothes.

Mattie lost her locket and Ethan was the one who spied it in the moss.

Ethan told Mattie that her hair smelled of the woods.

Ethan told Mattie that her hair smelled of the woods.

Ethan Frome decides to ask Andrew Hale for money for the lumber the second time, but changes his mind when this happens.

Ethan and Mattie see the sled and decide to run into the big elm.

Mrs. Hale tells Ethan she has sympathy for all his troubles.

Ethan decides Mattie will be "a poor man's wife."

Zeena convinces Ethan that he should let Mattie go and forget about her entirely.

Mrs. Hale tells Ethan she has sympathy for all his troubles.

Ethan finally stands up to Zeena when he tells her...

He doesn't like eating pickles or donuts.

He will drive Mattie to the train station himself.

He is going to leave her, to be with Mattie.

Mattie will be buried in the Frome graveyard.

He will drive Mattie to the train station himself.

What word goes in the blank in this stanza?

Inebriate of air - am I-And

__________ of Dew -

Reeling - thro' endless summer days -

From inns of molten Blue -

Debauchee

Devotee

Collector

Gardener

Debauchee

In the poem that begins "I heard a fly buzz - when I died -", who enters the room at "that last Onset"?

a Spider

my God

the King

red Death

the King

Why does the speaker of poem #241 "like a look of Agony"?

At least it does not Laugh

It quivers from the Forge

Because I know it's true

It looks just like a Frog

Because I know it's true

Question 3

What word is missing?

"Hope" is the thing with ___________

That perches in the soul

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

feathers

Wild Nights!

birdseed

thistledown

feathers

The subject of which poem below (listed by first line), does these actions: "He bit an Angleworm in half,"

"He drank a dew from a convenient grass," and "He glanced with rapid eyes that hurried all around"?

"A Bird came down the Walk"

"Much Madness is divinest Sense - "

"I taste a liquor never brewed - "

"I can wade Grief - "

"A Bird came down the Walk"