Study Guide for the
Honors Midterm Exam

This exam will cover all the texts of this semester, including the Summer Reading text. It will be composed of multiple choice questions; matching quotations, matching characters, and matching images, and two essays.

Look at the semester's study guides, power points, and study the exams and quizzes (on file in classroom), but more than anything, look back at the texts themselves, familiarizing yourself with key passages, details, and themes. Make sure you have a full set of notes from the semester, and get any missed days' notes from your fellow students.

To study for the essays, look over the major periods of the semester (highlighted in lavender on your syllabus) and decide what the major themes and issues of those periods were as we discussed them in class. The essays will require of you a sense of the literary history as well as the social-historical contexts of individual works; a command of the details of the works—names, places, important images, etc.; and a concise as well as precise writing style.

Study notes
Copy this list into a word file and fill in details from the sources noted above:

Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) (late Modernist)

Prayer of the First Night Male Shooting Chant Evil (First People)

Iroquois Creation Story (First People)

Bradstreet "The Author to Her Book" and "Contemplations" (Puritan)

Edwards "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (Puritan)

Franklin The Way of Wealth and "Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America" (Founder)

Jefferson Notes on the State of Virginia (Founder)

Emerson "Nature" and "Self-Reliance" (Transcendentalism)

Fuller Summer on the Lakes (Transcendentalism)

Thoreau "Resistance to Civil Government" and Walden (Transcendentalism)

Douglass Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Abolition, Slave Narrative)

Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Abolition, Slave Narrative, Sentimental Fiction)

Whitman Song of Myself (late Transcendentalist)

Hawthorne "Rappaccini's Daughter) (American Gothic Romanticism)

Poe "Ligeia" (American Gothic Romanticism)

Dickinson poetry (Romantic poet)

Essays (40%)
In preparing for the essays, look back at your other exams to see what you need to review—argument versus statement and examples with specificity and detail. You will not get the prompts ahead of time.  You should, however, be prepared with a knowledge of the structure of the essay. One of the essays will be a comparison essay and one will treat one work only.

The structure of a comparative essay is as follows:

1) introduction paragraph with thesis argument,
2) body paragraph one on the first point about the first work of literature in your line of argument,
3) body paragraph two on the point of contrast between your first work and your second work in your line of argument
4) conclusion if time (it won't hurt you if you don't get to the conclusion. Just write "did not finish").

Note: it’s common for students to say the two works are exactly alike. That’s not possible. A work written by an ancient Greek writer will be quite unlike a work written by an Elizabethan English writer. Take historical and literary context seriously as you formulate your thesis. Use one work as the sort of standard and the other work to which you’ll contrast it as the variation on the standard.