English 320: The Short Story (Spring 2002)
General Prep Sheet
for the Mid-Term Examination
[Note: If you print off this prep
sheet for use off-line, remember that anything that shows up
as underlined is not being singled out for special emphasis,
but represents a link that you can follow-up only by going
back online and clicking on it.]
The Mid-term Examination will cover all of the assignments
(except for those specified as recommended only) on Part 1 of the Course Schedule.
Page references below are to our text, Kennedy & Gioia's An
Introduction to Literature (8th Ed.) When you print
out a copy of this prep sheet, remember that anything underlined
here is a link, which you have to click on while you're on-line,
in order to access the document to which it is linked.
There are three parts to the Mid-Term. Each is described
in more detail later on in the Detailed
Prep Sheet for the Mid-Term Exam..
In each answer, whether shorter or longer, you will be
expected to show familiarity with certain critical concepts and,
of course, with the relevant details of the work under discussion.
Here are the works you need to be familiar with for the
Mid-Term Exam.
- Thurber's "The
Owl Who Was God"
- the Brothers Grimm, "Godfather
Death" (also available here)
- Sigmund Freud's explanatory parable of the rowdy in the lecture
hall
- Freud's parabolization of the folk tale
the horse of Schilda.
- the anecdote
about the Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu
- Kate Chopin's "The
Story of an Hour" (also pp. 573-575)
- Chopin's "The Storm" (pp. 112-116)
- John Updike's "A & P" (pp. 14-19)
- William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" (pp. 28-35)
- Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart."
(pp. 36-39)
- James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" (pp. 40-62)
- Eudora Welty's "Why I Live at the P.O." (pp. 63-72)
- Katherine Anne Porter's "The Jilting of Granny
Weatherall" (pp. 80-87)
- Alice Walker's story "Everyday Use" (pp. 88-94)
- Isaac Bashevis Singer's "Gimpel the Fool"
(pp. 96-106)
- Jack London's "To Build a Fire" (pp. 117-128)
- T. Coraghessan Boyle's "Greasy Lake" (pp. 128-136)
Once you have made some provisional decisions about which
stories you want to focus on for the first three sections, you
will want to see whether the editors' questions following these
stories might offer useful inroads for your purposes. The
same goes for the various study guides on the web that were
linked to from the Course Schedule (Parts I).
The critical concepts you should try to show familiarity with
on this exam are the following. In the list below I have given links to some
rather extensive discussions of some of these notions in the
Glossary of Critical Concepts on our course web site. But
you should first review the introductory and
concluding pointers
the editors of our text provide in their sections on
- "Fable, Parable, and Tales" (pp. 4, 4-5, 6, 7-8);
- "Plot" (pp. 11-12 & 20-21);
- "The Short
Story" (pp. 12-13);
- "Point of View" (pp. 22-27 & 75);
- "Character" (pp. 77-80 & 107-08); and
-
"Setting" (pp. 109-111 & 152-53).
Then review
the stories listed above in the light of their discussions.
When you have decided on the questions want to focus on preparing for your
longer answers, you can then go to the more detailed treatments of the
relevant concepts in our web glossary. (Don't forget,
though, that a very important resource to exploit should be the
discussion that develops on these stories on our class Message
Board.)
- the distinction between chronicle and plot
- elements of plot
- structural features
- exposition
- precipitating incident
- complication / rising action
- suspense
- foreshadowing
- crisis
- climax
- falling action: conclusion / resolution / dénouement
- similarities and between traditional fables and tales on
the one hand and a "short story" (in the modern
sense) on the other. Among the notions that we
might need to have recourse to in articulating the
distinguishing features of these genres are:
- primacy of focus
- on incident ==> tales
- on moral or prudential wisdom ==> fables, parables.
- Features tending to distinguish fables from parables include:
- plot: fanciful vs. plausibly realistic.
- Often the plot of a short stories is often organized
around an epiphany.
- the situation examined in a short story
confronts us with an initiation
story.
- main characaters: anthropomorphized animals or
natural beings/forces vs. human beings
- conveyance of moral: explicit statement vs.
suggestive implication
- kinds of parables, in turn
- Illustrative example
- Allegorical translation
- on character, and especially on
complexity of character (short story)
- details of psychological and
social repression
- [How is psychological
repression distinct from
social (e.g., political)
repression? What
elements do the two have
in common? How can
they reinforce each
other?]
- the unconscious (as a
noun concept)
- narrative means
- allegory vs. realism: which predominates in the short story?
- summary vs. scene: which has come to predominate in the
short story?
- the possibilities at stake in an author's choice of point
of view in narrating a story. What are the
different options, what "games" do they make
possible, and what readers have to be alert to in tuning
into these games and carrying out the reader's role in
the playing of them? (In particular, when should we
be on the lookout for innocent or unreliable narrators,
or for an unreliable central consciousness?)
- participant narrator (also known as first-person narrator)
- narrator a minor character
- marginal participant in the
action
- an observer of the action on the
scene (sharing the time and place
with the action) but not
participating in the action
- narrator a major character or central
participant (even protagonist)
- non-participant narrator. Here there is a
continuous range of possibilities, within which
the following categories may claim our
attention.
- omniscient narrator (Note that interior monologue and
stream of consciousness are special possibilities
of "omniscience" that in practice,
especially in short stories, will almost always
be limited to selective omniscient windows).
- broadly omniscient narrator (seeing into
the thoughts and feelings of any and all
of the characters)
- selectively omniscient narrator (whose
telling is also sometimes referred to as
"limited omniscient" narration)
- narrator affording an inside view
of one major character
- narrator affording direct access
to the inner experience of a
single minor character
- objective narrator (abstaining from
giving direct information on the interior
life of any characters, and presenting
only externally observable details of
their behavior)
- concepts important for articulating choices authors make
regarding characterization
- ways in which setting (cultural-historical it may be, or
physical) can enter into the situations that engage our
interest, by
- helping to form character, or
- setting up a predicament under which character can
display itself, or
- functioning symbolically to illuminate action or
character.
Your job is not to define these terms in the abstract
("fill in the blank"), or to match them with
definitions. Rather you should be able to apply them
appropriately.
- You will encounter questions that incorporate one or more
of these terms. Obviously you cannot frame a
suitable answer to the question without understanding the
concepts involved, and recognizing what features of the
particular story you're discussing fall under it.
- In general, too, you will not be asked just to identify
some feature of the story that falls under a particular
concept, but to explain something of the significance of
this feature in the overall working of the story.
This shows your awareness of the point of
being acquainted with the concept.
- For example: while you should indeed be
able to identify the climactic moment of each
story [a what question], and to
explain what about it makes it function that way,
you should be ready to say something about so
what? You might spell out some
particular implication at stake in this
dramatically emphasized moment that supports (say
how) the larger theme, or reason for being, of
the story as a whole.
- For any story you would want to be able to
describe story's point of view. But you
would also want to be able to say something
specific about how the author's choice of that
point of view contributes something important to
the overall effect or theme of the story.
(You might do this be imagining some apparently
close equivalent point of view and then figuring
out what would happen if were chosen instead.)
- For any character -- but certainly for any
character crucial in the main action of the plot
-- we want to reflect on whether that character
changes in some important way in the course of
the action. But we want to use what we come
to notice, under this curiosity, to take us
further into the heart of the story: how
are these facts about the character important in
shaping the particular kind of experience the
author evidently wants to invite us to "try
on," or in raising the issues the story
evidently is designed to invite us to think
about?
- In a bonus section, I will also present you with a statement or two that
exhibit a conceptual confusion involving one or more
notions. You should be able to explain, briefly but
accurately, what is nonsensical about the formulation
given.
You will write 2 short
essays (at 25 points apiece) and 5 short answers (at 10 points apiece).
(There also will be a couple of optional bonus questions at the end.) One
of your longer essays will be a take-home assignment. The other you will
write in-class.
You can
find a good deal of detailed information on what to
expect on Part II on the Detailed
Prep Sheet for the Mid-Term Exam.
You may wish to review the criteria I will be using
in evaluating your essays (both in-class and take-home). You can find a
succinct statement of these here
and a more detailed explanation here. |
On our exams and in our essays, students are acting under
Kansas State University's provisions regarding Academic Honesty and Plagiarism.
An important point in these provisions is that instructors may
spell out what degree of collaboration is permitted among
students on specific assignments. For
this exam, you are positively encouraged to use the class Message
Board to help each other in thinking through the facts and issues
that are relevant to any of the questions on this prep sheet.
Good luck! I hope to be able to participate in an active
discussion on our Message Board!