Question

story on mid term examination

Answer 1

hey mate..

The Mid-term Examination will cover all of the assignments (except for those specified as recommended only) on Parts 1 and 2 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 two parts to the Mid-Term.   Each is described in more detail later on in this prep sheet.

In each answer, whether shorter or longer, you will be expected to show familiarity with certain critical concepts and, of course, with the work under discussion.

Here are the works you need to be familiar with for the Mid-Term Exam except that you will not be writing on the story you focused on in Essay #1.  (You can therefore spare yourself the effort of reviewing that story for this exam.)

Ambrose Bierce's "The Moral Principle and the Material Interest"
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 and II).

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.)