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I. Identify the author and the title of the following passages(5).
a) Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wallpaper"
b) James Baldwin, "Sonny's Blues"
c) Edgar Allan Poe, "The Cask of Amontillado"
d) William Faulkner, "A Rose for Emily"
e) James Joyce, "Araby"
II. Explain the meaning of the following terms briefly(5).
a) Freytag's five-part pattern: a diagram to analyse the common pattern of the plot which is composed of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement.
b) oxymoron: a figure of speech that juxtaposes elements that appear to be contradictory.
c) allegory: An allegory is a narrative, whether in prose or verse, in which the
agents and actions, and sometimes the setting as well, are contrived by the
author to make coherent sense on the "literal," or primary, level of signification,
and at the same time to signify a second, correlated order of signification.
d) epiphany: a revelation of divine power, specifically, to the manifestation of Christ. 'moment of vision', 'moment of being', or 'glimpse'
e) antihero: a hero possessing traits that make him or her the opposite of a traditional hero difficult to like or admire.
III. Explain the significance of the following passage with reference to the given literary terms(10).
a) This is the very last past of "Sonny's blues", the denouement of Freytag's pattern of the plot. In this "resolution" part, the narrator come to recognizes the meaning of all the suffering Sonny has been going through, which induces the narrator to change his attitude towards Sonny and the black community itself Sonny and himself belong to. The narrator no longer patronizes Sonny with cynicism and repugnance towards the culture of the black people particularly the blues music Sonny has committed himself to. It is indeed an epiphanic recognition typically happening at the end of an initiation story, the narrator being the person initiated.
b)This description is presented at an earlier part of Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper." The narrator, also a protagonist of the story, is describing her husband John who is a physician of high standing trying to "cure" the narrator, his wife, with the so called "rest" cure. The narrator turns out to be an "unreliable narrator" because this judgement turns out to be untrue as the story unfolds itself disclosing that he is actually worsening his wife's psychotic symptom with his blind trust on the misguided treatment based upon the patriarchal culture of the contemporary medical science. The narrator is "unreliable" because her initial judgment such as the quoted passage above turns out to be untrue in the end on the one hand. On the other, the narrator is also unreliable because her madness is worsening as the story goes along. The narrator is entirely "unreliable" but the reader is gradually led to the truth that she is being driven to madness rather than being cured in the process of her establishing her own sense of identity at the price of her sanity.
c)This is the very first physical description of Emily, the heroine of "A Rose for Emily." Emily's feature, rather humorously presented here, is an important part of her characterization: her plumpness is figured as a corpse of a drowned person signifying that she is more like a dead person in reality without any real connection to the outside world that is changing very quickly. By such physical feature, we can easily associate Emily with the past that has long been gone. Her sparkling eyes, quite a contrast to the rest of her physical features, are described as uncannily vivid and animated, which implies that she is a woman of unscrutable mental power and indomitable authority.
d) This is the beginning of "A Rose for Emily" a spacial setting for the story. The description of Emily's house shows that it is absolutely deteriorated, decayed, and absolutely out of date which however sticks to its original location despite all the changes taking place around it. It is the only house that rejects all those changes both in physical and spiritual senses. In this respect, it presents itself a physical expression of Emily's existence that is also absolutely antiquated in the quickly transforming world. This is a perfect setting for the story of Emily who does not admit any change whatsoever taking place around herself in reality.
e) This is the very ending of "A Rose for Emily" "A long strand of iron-gray hair" is of course the proof that Emily not only killed Homer Baron at their wedding night but also she has kept the corpse in the wedding bed having been its sleeping partner until recently. It may have been the only way to keep Homer Baron beside her forever, which means that her murder was the only option left to her to freeze the flow of time. Denying the change and keeping her life just as it was was the only objective she had in her life. In this context, "iron-gray" color of her hair is an apt symbol of her life, the life that is absolutely beyond change.
IV. Explain the significance of the following passage with reference to the given context in which they are located(10).
a) This is presented at the restaurant scene where the narrator comes to listen the blues, Sonny's music, for the first time with an open mind. The narrator is beginning to recognize the significance that the blues music has for the black community.
b) This is a decisive moment in Montresor's evil plot to kidnap Fortunato to the crypt in the underground of his house. Montresor pretends to be worrying about Fortunato's health suggesting to stop their visit to the vault where a barrel of Amontillado allegedly bought by himself recently. But it was a malicious way of enticing him further inside the vault by stinging his rivalry with Luchresi at the very moment when his motivation to prove himself as a wine expert grew weak.
c) This scene is presented when the townspeople heard that Miss Emily had begun to go out with Homer Baron. This shows their contradictory attitude towards Emily. They were kind of happy with the fact that the Grierson family had ceased to be a noble family any more. But on the other, they wanted Emily to continue the tradition she had been representing, the very tradition they wanted to deny in reality, by not marrying a northerner.
d) This is a turning point at which the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" begins to move actively against John and Jennie who watches over her. The narrator wants to keep the presence of a crawling woman inside the wallpaper to herself. That is to say, she does not want to let them know that she is beginning to establish her own sense of identity as an independent person going beyond the conventional idea of gender differences prevalent in those days. But it also means that she begins to lose her sanity as a person in reality.
e) This self-confessional expressions come just after he made a promise to Mangen's sister that he would bring something for her from Araby he wanted to visit. The narrator accompanies his aunt to the local market to help her carrying the grocery, which is not particularly romantic setting for such a dreamy fancy. Nevertheless, he imagines himself a knight in a romance who is making an adventurous journey to bring back the Holy Grail whatever form it may take in his own romantic quest to Araby. This is the climax the boy's naive and innocent passion for a girl reached.
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