Essays
The essays this all term have been about what topic?
What is writing (or the writing life)?
The kind of narrator in Poe's "A Tell-Tale Heart"
What is an unreliable narrator?
"We Real Cool" utilizes of this poetic device to emphasize the pronoun and thereby collective action of the seven pool players.
What is enjambment?
"Intellectuals, people who read and questioned, were suspect. A book in your hands might as well have been contraband"
What is "I, Too, Sing America" by Julia Alvarez
______ means thinking about thinking: the ability to self-regulate ones thoughts.
What is metacognition?
The name of Alexander Chee's professor
Who is Annie Dillard?
The boy's name in the Hughes story "Thank You, Ma'am"
Roger
Part for the whole, a poetic device of Pinsky's poem, "The Shirt". It's also what we use when we refer to "white collar" and "blue collar" to refer to the shirt as a symbol of someone's station.
What is synecdoche?
"The trouble came when I decided to be dangerously ambitious"
What is "Surrendering" by Ocean Vuong
This approach offers the overlap between a piece of literature and real-world or past events.
What is NEW HISTORICISM?
This is the country where Julia Alvarez's family is from.
In "Recitatif" by Toni Morrison, Roberta and Twyla disagree on what happened to this third character
Who is Maggie?
"Here, Bullet" is a poem by this veteran of war/ poet.
Who is Brian Turner?
Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children.
What is "Good Bones" by Maggie Smith
These are four of the six elements of fiction.
character
plot
setting
point of view
theme
style
What Eliot was referring to when he said, "It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour."
"Hills Like White Elephants" features two characters known by the names "The American" and this nickname, which is also the name of a dance type.
What is Jig?
"A Small, Needful Fact" uses hedging, a characteristic of which READING LEVEL, on the part of the speaker such has the two instances in the lines below to frame the speaker's lack of certainty in the wake of his subject's, Eric Garner's, death:
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
What is rhetorical/ linguistic?
The title and author of the following quote (on exam day, you'll also need to state the significance)
"Strife came to us that fall. At least that's what the paper called it."
What is "Recitatif" by Toni Morrison?
This is the kind of literary criticism where you are necessary for completing the meaning of a story or poem though you didn't write it. Contemporary authors would credit it with the letters they get telling them what should happen in the next iteration of a story or novel.
What is READER RESPONSE
The Whitmanic poem that gave rise to Hughes and Alvarez.
What is "I Hear America Singing"
Morrison never identifies either character's race in "Recitatif"; this is how READER RESPONSE THEORY fills in that gap.
Readers might assume which character is white and which is black though Morrison herself never states the distinction; this filling in the blank shows more about the reader's assumption than the story itself.
"American Sonnet to My Past and Future Assassin" is a sonnet, sure, but it also demonstrates this type of self-referential poem about writing itself.
What is ARS POETICA?
_____________ returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this.
What is "The Colonel" by Carolyn Forche
The literary movement from 1900-1945 between the two World Wars.
What is MODERNISM (or the MODERNIST MOVEMENT)?