GRE Subject Test: Literature in English : Literary Analysis
Study concepts, example questions & explanations for GRE Subject Test: Literature in English
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Example Questions
Example Question #1 : Literary Analysis Of British Prose
There was a contention as far as a suit (in which, piety and dignity, religion and estimation, were mingled) which of the religious orders should ring to prayers first in the morning; and it was determined, that they should ring first that rose earliest. If we understand aright the dignity of this bell, that tolls for our evening prayer, we would be glad to make it ours, by rising early, in that application, that it might be ours as well as his, whose indeed it is. The bell doth toll for him, that thinks it doth; and though it intermit again, yet from that minute, that that occasion wrought upon him, he is united to God.
The bell mentioned in the passage can best be understood to refer to __________.
The bell rung in the morning to wake people from their sleep
The Liberty Bell
The bell rung to announce Mass
The bell rung to announce the end of Lent
The bell rung to announce a death
The bell rung to announce a death
The bell in this sermon is that which was traditionally rung to announce a death. Even if you weren't familiar with this piece or aware of the practice of ringing a bell to announce a death, the description of the bell's hearer as being united with God should be enough to clue you into the fact that the poem is concerned with mortality.
Adapted from "Meditation XVII" in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, and Severall Steps in My Sicknes by John Donne (1624)
Example Question #1 : Literary Analysis
"What is the People?"
And who are you that ask the question? One of the people. And yet you would be something! Then you would not have the People nothing. For what is the People? Millions of men, like you, with hearts beating in their bosoms, with thoughts stirring in their minds, with blood circulating in their veins, with wants and appetites, with passions and anxious cares, with busy purposes and affections for others and a respect for themselves, and a desire of happiness, and a right to freedom, and a will to be free. And yet you would tear out this mighty heart of a nation, and lay it bare and bleeding at the foot of despotism: you would slay the mind of a country to fill up the dreary aching void with the old, obscene, drivelling prejudices of superstition and tyranny: you would tread out the eye of Liberty (the light of nations) like 'a vile jelly', that mankind may be led about darkling to its endless drudgery, like the Hebrew ---------- (shorn of his strength and blind), by his insulting taskmasters: you would make the throne every thing. and the people nothing, to be yourself less than nothing, a very slave, a reptile, a creeping, cringing sycophant, a court favorite, a pander to Legitimacy - that detestable fiction, which would make you and me and all mankind its slaves or victims.
Who is the character referred to in the underlined simile?
Moses
Samson
Cain
Oedipus
Samson
The explanation in parenthesis ("shorn of his strength and blind") is key here. The book of Judges in the Christian Bible tells the story of Samson who was given supernatural strength by God, but was later betrayed by a woman, Delilah, who cut off his hair where his strength resided (he was "shorn of his strength") and handed him over to his enemies, who gouged out his eyes.
Cain and Moses are not associated with blindness, and while Oedipus, according to Greek myth, did gouge his eyes out, he is not a "Hebrew" character.
Passage adapted from "What is the People?" by William Hazlitt (1817)
Example Question #2 : Literary Analysis
"What is the People?"
And who are you that ask the question? One of the people. And yet you would be something! Then you would not have the People nothing. For what is the People? Millions of men, like you, with hearts beating in their bosoms, with thoughts stirring in their minds, with blood circulating in their veins, with wants and appetites, with passions and anxious cares, with busy purposes and affections for others and a respect for themselves, and a desire of happiness, and a right to freedom, and a will to be free. And yet you would tear out this mighty heart of a nation, and lay it bare and bleeding at the foot of despotism: you would slay the mind of a country to fill up the dreary aching void with the old, obscene, drivelling prejudices of superstition and tyranny: you would tread out the eye of Liberty (the light of nations) like 'a vile jelly', that mankind may be led about darkling to its endless drudgery, like the Hebrew ---------- (shorn of his strength and blind), by his insulting taskmasters: you would make the throne every thing. and the people nothing, to be yourself less than nothing, a very slave, a reptile, a creeping, cringing sycophant, a court favorite, a pander to Legitimacy - that detestable fiction, which would make you and me and all mankind its slaves or victims.
Passage adapted from "What is the People?" by William Hazlitt (1818)
The underlined phrases all feature which of the following?
Onomatopoeia
Hyperbole
Alliteration
Synecdoche
Alliteration
The phrases all feature the repetition of words that begin with the same letter for rhetorical effect--that is, alliteration.
There is no hyperbole (exaggeration that is not meant to be taken literally), not even in "millions of men." The people of England did number in the millions when Hazlitt was writing.
Synecdoche (a trope where the part represents the whole or vice versa) and onomatopoeia (words that imitate the sound they describe) are also absent.
Passage adapted from "What is the People?" by William Hazlitt (1817)
Example Question #1 : Literary Analysis
"What is the People?"
And who are you that ask the question? One of the people. And yet you would be something! Then you would not have the People nothing. For what is the People? Millions of men, like you, with hearts beating in their bosoms, with thoughts stirring in their minds, with blood circulating in their veins, with wants and appetites, with passions and anxious cares, with busy purposes and affections for others and a respect for themselves, and a desire of happiness, and a right to freedom, and a will to be free. And yet you would tear out this mighty heart of a nation, and lay it bare and bleeding at the foot of despotism: you would slay the mind of a country to fill up the dreary aching void with the old, obscene, drivelling prejudices of superstition and tyranny: you would tread out the eye of Liberty (the light of nations) like 'a vile jelly', that mankind may be led about darkling to its endless drudgery, like the Hebrew ---------- (shorn of his strength and blind), by his insulting taskmasters: you would make the throne every thing and the people nothing, to be yourself less than nothing, a very slave, a reptile, a creeping, cringing sycophant, a court favorite, a pander to Legitimacy - that detestable fiction, which would make you and me and all mankind its slaves or victims.
What is a more contemporary synonym for the underlined word ("sycophant")?
Opposition researcher
Bag man
Yes-man
Spin doctor
Yes-man
A "sycophant" is someone who flatters the people in power for personal gain. "Yes-man" would be a more contemporary synonym. Note that Hazlitt goes on to provide a synonym ("court favorite").
Passage adapted from "What is the People?" by William Hazlitt (1817)
Example Question #1 : Literary Analysis
"What is the People?"
And who are you that ask the question? One of the people. And yet you would be something! Then you would not have the People nothing. For what is the People? Millions of men, like you, with hearts beating in their bosoms, with thoughts stirring in their minds, with blood circulating in their veins, with wants and appetites, with passions and anxious cares, with busy purposes and affections for others and a respect for themselves, and a desire of happiness, and a right to freedom, and a will to be free. And yet you would tear out this mighty heart of a nation, and lay it bare and bleeding at the foot of despotism: you would slay the mind of a country to fill up the dreary aching void with the old, obscene, drivelling prejudices of superstition and tyranny: you would tread out the eye of Liberty (the light of nations) like 'a vile jelly', that mankind may be led about darkling to its endless drudgery, like the Hebrew ---------- (shorn of his strength and blind), by his insulting taskmasters: you would make the throne every thing and the people nothing, to be yourself less than nothing, a very slave, a reptile, a creeping, cringing sycophant, a court favorite, a pander to Legitimacy - that detestable fiction, which would make you and me and all mankind its slaves or victims.
The author of the passage quoted also wrote which of the following works?
The Sacred Wood and The Waste Land
Table Talk and Liber Amoris
The Rambler and A Dictionary of the English Language
On the Sublime and Reflections on the Revolution in France
Table Talk and Liber Amoris
The passage is from an 1817 essay by William Hazlitt, author of Table Talk (a collection of essays) and Liber Amoris (an account of a tragic love affair).
With its call for liberty for "millions of men," the essay is an explicit critique of the conservative philosophy of Edmund Burke, who wrote On the Sublime and Reflections on the Revolution in France.
The Rambler and A Dictionary of the English Language are works by Samuel Johnson, a staunch conservative/Tory writer unlikely to have produced such a passionate paean to liberty.
The Sacred Wood and The Waste Land are works by T. S. Eliot, who famously described himself as "Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature, and a royalist in politics."
Passage adapted from "What is the People?" by William Hazlitt (1817)
Example Question #1 : Literary Analysis
A)
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly consider'd how much depended upon what they were then doing;—that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost.
B)
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.
C)
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo...
His father told him that story: his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face.
He was baby tuckoo. The moocow came down the road where Betty Byrne lived: she sold lemon platt.
D)
Eight months after the celebration of the nuptials between Captain Blifil and Miss Bridget Allworthy, a young lady of great beauty, merit, and fortune, was Miss Bridget, by reason of a fright, delivered of a fine boy. The child was indeed to all appearances perfect; but the midwife discovered it was born a month before its full time.
Which begins James Joyce's The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man?
D
C
B
A
C
The key here is modernist experimentation.
Autobiographies are normally written from the point of view of the mature author, but in the opening lines of The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Joyce experiments with a stream-of-consciousness flow as experienced by a young child—a technique that he would go on to refine in Ulysses.
A is the opening paragraph from Sterne's Tristram Shandy, written one hundred and fifty years before Joyce's novella. Even though Tristram Shandy is also highly experimental, the eighteenth-century diction is a hint that this is not a work by Joyce.
B and D by Dickens and Fielding, respectively, are also conventional in terms of style and narration.
A: Adapted from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne (1759)
B: Adapted from David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)
C: Adapted from The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (1916)
D: Adapted from The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling by Henry Fielding (1749)
Example Question #1 : Literary Analysis
"A preacher in earnest, weeping sometimes for his auditory, sometimes with them; always preaching to himself like an angel from a cloud, but in none; carrying some, as St. Paul was, to heaven in holy raptures, and enticing others by a sacred art and courtship to amend their lives: Here picturing a vice so as to make it ugly to those that practiced it, and a virtue so as to make it be beloved even by those that loved it not, and all this with a most particular grace and an inexpressible comeliness."
Who is the subject of this biographical excerpt?
John Donne
John Milton
Andrew Marvell
George Herbert
Henry Wotton
John Donne
The correct answer is John Donne (1572-1631). A "Metaphysical" poet known for his romantic and satyrical works, Donne was ordained as an Anglican Priest in 1615, and served as Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London from 1621 until his death in 1631. In both his secular—often erotic—poetry and his devout prose meditations, Donne used extended visual metaphors, or "conceits," to explore metaphysical concepts in terms of everyday objects and phenomena from the physical world.
George Herbert (1593-1633), also an Anglican priest and Metaphysical poet, wrote exclusively on religious and spiritual themes.
Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), poet, politician, and close friend to John Milton, was the author of "To His Coy Mistress," "The Garden," "An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell's Return From Ireland," and other poems in the Metaphysical vein.
John Milton (1608-1674), puritan writer of poetry and prose works, is best known today as the author of Paradise Lost (1667).
Henry Wotton (1568-1639) was an English writer, diplomat, and politician, who is best known today for his ode, "O his Mistris, the Queen of Bohemia."
Passage adapted from Izaak Walton, The Lives of Dr. John Donne; Sir Henry Wotton; Mr. Richard Hooker; Mr. George Herbert; and Dr. Robert Sanderson. By Isaac Walton. With Notes, and the Life of the Author. By Thomas Zouch, Md. (London: Wilson, Spence, and Mawman, 1796): 57.
Example Question #1 : Literary Analysis
All of the following novels are set during World War II, EXCEPT __________.
Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier
Normal Mailer's The Naked and the Dead
Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five
Joseph Heller's Catch-22
Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier
Ford Maddox Ford (1873–1939) belongs to an earlier generation of writers, and did not live to see the outbreak of World War II. The Good Soldier was written during—and is set against the backdrop of—World War I.
The other titles are all iconic World War II novels that in different ways portray the dehumanizing effects of war.
Example Question #1 : Literary Analysis Of British Plays
Adapted from Timon of Athens, IV:3, lines 409-447 by William Shakespeare
The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea: the moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun:
The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears: the earth's a thief,
That feeds and breeds by a composture stol'n
From general excrement: each thing's a thief:
The laws, your curb and whip, in their rough power
Have uncheck'd theft.
Which of the following is NOT exemplified in the above selection from Timon of Athens?
Sprung Rhythm
Iambic Pentameter
Personification
Blank Verse
Poetic Conceit
Sprung Rhythm
Sprung Rhythm is a system of scansion in which only stressed syllables are counted. It was invented by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in the late-19th century.
Blank Verse is a poetic form composed of unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter.
Iambic pentameter is a metrical form in which each line consists of five iambic feet. A metrical foot is a unit of stressed and unstressed syllables. An iambic foot consists of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable.
Personification is the attribution of human qualities to inanimate objects.
A Poetic Conceit is an extended metaphor that compares dissimilar objects in a surprising and imaginative manner.
Example Question #1 : Literary Analysis
Adapted from Timon of Athens, IV:3, lines 409-447 by William Shakespeare
The sun's a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea: the moon's an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun:
The sea's a thief, whose liquid surge resolves
The moon into salt tears: the earth's a thief,
That feeds and breeds by a composture stol'n
From general excrement: each thing's a thief:
The laws, your curb and whip, in their rough power
Have uncheck'd theft.
The above passage from Shakespeare's "Timon of Athens" is the source of the title of a novel by which twentieth century author?
Vladimir Nabokov
Thomas Pynchon
William Faulkner
Ernest Hemingway
John Updike
Vladimir Nabokov
"Timon of Athens" (one of the more obscure works by Shakespeare) is a key intertext in Vladimir Nabokov's 1962 novel Pale Fire, the title of which was drawn from the third line of the passage in question.
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