English 494
Study Guide for Exam 2
This page is intended as a helpful guide to studying for the exam. It may not cover all the information that is on the test. Your class notes and your books with your annotations should be your principal guide to studying for the exam.
Exam 2 will include multiple choice, identification, and an essay. The PowerPoint lectures are here: https://jazzageharlemrenaissance.wordpress.com/lectures/
I. Works Covered
All the works on your syllabus since Exam 1 may be covered; however, the works listed below will receive more emphasis. You should know the title of the story, the author, and the important features. Some works that we didn't discuss have been omitted.
- Within Our Gates (film)
- Jazz and blues (various)
- Paul Laurence Dunbar (handout), "We Wear the Mask," "Sympathy," "When Malindy Sings"
- Sterling Brown, "Ma Rainey" HRR 232-234
- Countee Cullen, "Heritage," "From the Dark Tower"HRR 244-248
- Claude McKay, ""Mulatto" (p. 263 under Hughes), "If We Must Die, "The White House, "The Negro's Friend"(290-291)
- Alain Locke, from The New Negro, HRR 46-51
- W. E. B. Du Bois, "Criteria of Negro Art," HRR 100-105
- Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "I, Too," "The Weary Blues, "Negro," "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," HRR 91-95
- Richard Bruce Nugent, "Smoke, Lilies and Jade" (569-583)
- Jean Toomer, Cane, especially "Karintha," "Fern," "Becky," "Georgia Dusk," "Reapers,""Blood-Burning Moon," "Rhobert," and "Box Seat"
- Nella Larsen, Passing
II. General issues, literary movements, ideas, and terms (from your notes). If you’ve been taking notes this semester, all of this information should be readily available in your notebook.
- Modernism and modernity
- Information from reports
- Visions of the 1920s in later films
- The Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age: Parallels
- The lost generation and information from reports
- W.E. B. Du Bois's ideas of African American art
- Terms
- passing
- New Negro
- bootlegging
- race man
- double consciousness
- Harlem
- authenticity
- Cotton Club
- expatriate
- iceberg theory
- primitivism
- race memory
- Talented Tenth
- World War I
III. Potential essay questions. These are sample questions for the exam, although there is no guarantee that any of them will be on the exam. At least one of the questions will invite you to use materials from earlier in the semester if you want to do so, but you will not be required to write about materials covered before Exam 1.
- Compare and contrast Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield.
- Compare and contrast these two poems.
- What part does jazz play in the literature of the Harlem Renaissance?
- In what ways is the idea of the primitive past or race memory seen as redemptive in Cane?
- What role do cabarets or theatrical performances play in literature of the Harlem Renaissance? In what ways do they symbolize the role of performance (and racial performance) in the literature?