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Introduction to English Literature(35576-01)
Midterm Exam
April 28, 2017
I. Identify the author and the title of the following passages(3).
1. James Baldwin, "Sonny's Blues"
2. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper"
3. William Faulkner, "A Rose for Emily"
II. Explain the meaning of the following terms briefly(12).
1. Unreliable narrator: A narrator whose account of events appears to be faulty, misleadingly biased, or otherwise distorted, so that it departs from the 'true' understanding of events shared between the reader and the implied author.
2. Antihero: a hero possessing traits that make him or her the opposite of a traditional hero difficult to like or admire.
3. Freytag's five-part pattern:
1) Exposition: setting the scene. The writer introduces the characters and setting, providing description and background.
2) Rising Action: the story builds and gets more exciting.
3) Climax: the moment of greatest tension in a story. This is often the most exciting event. It is the event that the rising action builds up to and that the falling action follows.
4) Falling Action: events happen as a result of the climax and we know that the story will soon end.
5) Denouement: (a French term, pronounced: day-noo-moh) the ending. At this point, any remaining secrets, questions or mysteries which remain after the resolution are solved by the characters or explained by the author.
4. Canon: a group of works of "recognized artistic value"
III. Explain the significance of the following passage with reference to the given context in which they are located(20).
1. This passage is located almost at the end of the story "Sonny's Blues" where the narrator, watching for the first time Sonny playing in public, finally comes to understand what the blues music is like. Listening and watching their performance, the narrator begins to realize what the blues meant to them, how they communicate through music, and the way in which they make themselves a real community in which they learn from each other how to stand the hard reality that would be very difficult to bear with otherwise. The narrator's realization makes an epiphany happening in the narrator's mind, which is the beginning of his final reconciliation with Sonny.
2. This passage is located at near the end of the story "The Yellow Wallpaper". The narrator, being told not to stain the clothes with yellow smooches by Jennie, her sister-in-law and nurse, begins to believe that Jennie pretends not knowing what has been going on in her room, that is, her secret efforts to liberate the woman imprisoned within the wallpaper. This is of course only the fantasy developed by the narrator, which is a clear evidence that she is losing her sanity very seriously. At the same time, however, it is the moment when the narrator makes up her mind firmly that she would resist with more determination those "treatments" given by her husband and his sister in the name of "rest cure" even though it means that she cannot recover from her mental disorder. It is the climax of the story where the narrator declares her determination to fight against the patriarchal violence inflicted upon herself even at the expense of her sanity.
3. This passage is located in a later part of the story "The Cask of Amontillado" where Montresor abducts Fortunato by fraud into the catacomb of his own house with an intention of burying him alive there. "The masons" mentioned by Fortunato is referring to the freemasons, a secret society of nobility, the membership of which would be an ultimate token for a genuine aristocrat. Fortunato wanted to confirm the social status of Montresor once again to see whether Montresor was a person he could trust. It was in fact a critical moment for Montresor because his swindle could have been detected. But Montresor presented "a trowel" as the "sign" an improvisation to equivocate the question from Fortunato. It also show clearly how self-centered he was because he deliberately took "the masons" as the real masons, not the members of a secret society, making an irony understood only by himself. But Fortunato was too stupid and too drunk to recognize such a cruel irony.
4.This passage is from an earlier part of the story "A Rose for Emily" where the father-daughter relationship of Grierson family is explained. Emily's father was such a man of absolute authority in his family that Emily was always in control of her father even in her own marriage business. The townspeople thought that her failure to get married in time was mainly due to her father's anachronistic idea of social hierarchy. No man, from his point of view, had been high enough in his social class to be a good match for his daughter Emily even though the whole system of social hierarchy had already been disrupted by then. That Emily was left alone as a spinster after her father had died made the townspeople feel sorry for her on the one hand. On the other, however, they were happy to find that their unspoken criticism of Grierson's aristocratic arrogance turned out to be true as far as Emily is concerned. This passage shows the townspeople's ambivalent attitude towards the downfall of the Grierson family of which Emily's lonely life as a spinster was a living reminder.
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