AMERICAN LIT 2
EXAM #2 (Final)
*You should spend 1-2 hours on exam. You may use your books but you may NOT receive assistance from friends, teachers, classmates, THE INTERNET, etc. However, you email me with any questions!
Short Answer/Short Essay Responses:
Answers should be about 2-3 full paragraphs! And, as always, support your answers with quotes from the text. Be specific!
Answer any six (6) of the following eight (8) questions and LABEL answers clearly. You may answer 1 extra question for extra credit!
1. What is the significance of fire to Abner Snopes?
2. Why is Nick so attentive to detail in “Big Two-Hearted River”?
3. Consider “The Swimmer” as a satire. What is Cheever ridiculing?
4. Raymond Carver has been called a minimalist. Find the definition in your book or the dictionary and then explain and compare or contrast Carver to another author we have read this semester. Be sure you have the literary definition of minimalist.
5. The characters in several stories feel alienated in both their adopted and native cultures. Consider this issue of “otherness” in Lahiri’s “The Third and Final Continent” and/or any other story.
6. Explain the significance of the title of a poem by Ginsberg, Sexton, Bishop, or Hughes and how it relates to the overall significance/theme/idea of the poem.
7. Consider the following statement by Joyce Carol Oates: “Sylvia Plath’s poems convince us when they are most troubled, most murderous, most unfair.” Explicate 2-3 passages (group of lines or a stanza) in different poems by Plath to argue in favor of or opposition to Oates’s statement.
8. Komunyakaa has some very personal poems. Compare the tone and balance of confession and reserve that you find in these poems, and also compare this group of poems, with personal or confessional poems you have encountered by Plath, Sexton, or Ginsberg.