English 2204 / Summer 2007

Review for the Midterm Exam

To Study:

1.) Know these authors' names and a few "major" biographical and "writerly" facts about each one:

• Kate Chopin (2)

• Edgar Allan Poe

• Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Herman Melville

• Stephen Crane

• Charlotte Perkins Gilman

• Willa Cather

• Henry James

• William Faulkner

• Eudora Welty

2.) For each of the authors listed above, review the stories we read and know the following:

• Titles

• Major characters

• Settings -- times and places

• Narrators -- points of view

• Conflicts

• Themes

3.) Review the "Elements of Fiction" handout and pages 849-862 in The Art of the Short Story. Know these things:

• Plot -- esp. Freytag's Pyramid -- the five principal parts of the plot and what an "epiphany is

• Characterization -- protagonist/antagonist -- round/flat -- dynamic/static

• Points of View -- first/third -- omniscient/limited-omniscient/dramatic or objective (or "camera-eye")

• Setting --time and place / regionalism and local color

• Theme -- not just "conflict" ( ___ vs. ___ ) but also a STATEMENT of a major idea/moral/lesson/message in the story

4.) Know these literary time periods and a few "major" facts about each one -- also know which stories fit into which time period (and even which stories "overlap" more than one time period):

• Romanticism

• Realism

• Naturalism

5.) Know the "basics" about these critical approaches to literature:

• Reader-response criticism

• Historical criticism

• Psychological criticism

• Gender criticism

The Exam:

1.) Expect a fair amount of "identification" kinds of questions. For example:

• Matching authors' names to biographical facts and story titles
• Matching story titles to characters, settings, points of view, etc.
• Literary terms to definitions and/or examples
• Literary time periods to definitions and/or characteristics
• Characters to quotations
• etc.

2.) Expect some "short answer" questions. For example:

• What are the five parts of the basic plot structure ... and use examples from one story to illustrate each part.
• How are the three third-person points of view different from each other?
• How is the "colosseum scene" important in James' novella, Daisy Miller?
• etc.

3.) Expect a few "short essay" (one full paragraph) questions. For example:

• I might ask you to explain the romantic / realistic / naturalistic elements in a story.
• I might give you one quotation from each story we read. I would then ask you to identify each quotation by author and title and then explain how each quotation relates to a major them and the main character in each story.
• I might give you a quotation you haven't seen before -- perhaps a quotation by another writer or critic -- and ask you to respond to it using a story we've read.
• etc.