American Literature Final: Study Guide
Passage Identification: For each of the following passages, identify the speaker and the audience. This is a sampling of what will be on the test. Some are completed for you, others you’ll have to look up!
1. “Your wife doesn’t love you,” said XXXXX quietly. “She’s never loved you. She loves me.”
Speaker:
Audience:
2. “I want you and Daisy to come over to my house,” he said. “I’d like to show her around.”
Speaker:
Audience:
3. “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”
(chapter 6)
Speaker:
Audience:
4. “That God damned coward!” he whispered. “He didn’t even stop his car.”
Speaker:
Audience:
5. “Doesn’t her husband object?”
“Wilson? He thinks she goes to see her sister in New York. He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive.”
First Speaker: Nick Carraway
Audience:
6. “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.”
Speaker:
Audience: The Reader
7. “I raised him up out of nothing, right out of the gutter. I saw right away he was a fine appearing gentlemanly young man and when he told me he was an Oggsford I knew I could use him good.”
Speaker:
Audience:
8. “If you want anything just ask for it, old sport,” he urged me. “Excuse me, I will rejoin you later.”
Speaker:
Audience:
9. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”
Speaker: Nick Carraway
Audience: The Reader
10. . "I hope she'll be a fool — that's the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool . . . You see, I think everything's terrible anyhow . . . And I know. I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.”
Speaker:
Audience:
Part Two: Multiple Choice. Review your notes and homework from Gatsby. In particular, be able to answer these questions and/or know these terms…
Know these symbols/motifs (what they represent!) and how Fitzgerald uses them in Gatsby:
The colors White, Blue, Red/Pink, and Grey.
The Eyes of T.J. Eckelburg The Weather Clocks/Time
The Green Light Geography (esp East vs. West)
The Valley of Ashes Houses Water
Be able to define/understand the literary terms:
Irony Symbolism
Paradox Imagery Allusion
Imagery Foreshadowing
1. How is Gatsby a “Modernist” text? Review your PowerPoint notes!
(Hint: Some things to consider: themes (esp re: The American Dream), tone, fragmented style, subjective narration)
2. What sort of “style” is Ernest Hemingway famous for?
What about William Faulkner? (consult your notes!)
3. What is the name of the famous Modernist poem by T.S. Eliot? What part of The Great Gatsby did it inspire?
4. How is Fitzgerald’s actual life similar to that of Nick Carraway? What does he have in common with Gatsby? Also, what do Zelda and Fitzgerald’s lives have in common with those of Daisy and Tom Buchanan?
5. What does Fitzgerald have to say about The American Dream in Gatsby? What is “The American Dream”?
6. How does each main character’s story end? What does this say about how Fitzgerald feels about life and/or the Roaring 20s, if anything?
7. According to The Great Gatsby, how does one’s past influence one’s present identity? Can we ever escape the past? Can we recreate it?
A Room Of One’s Own
1. What are the two things that Virginia Woolf argues a woman needs to succeed as an artist?
2. How does Woolf use the analogy of Shakespeare’s sister? What happens to her?
3. Why is AROO considered an early (and important) feminist text?
4. What is the first barrier that women face when they want to become writers? Hint: Woolf discusses this at length in the opening chapter – she externalizes it by placing herself at Oxford.