Friends only because there is the implication that you aren’t supposed to share the test questions cause they might use them again some day. I’m reasonably confident no one on my friends list will ever pursue an MA in English from SJSU so I’m risking it.

Section A is always about poetry. There are three questions. One of them provoked the reaction of “Ha. Fuck you.” That would be the question asking me to compare the evolution of the elegy over the past two hundred years using ten poems. Yeah right. Another question was about women as symbols of nature: use five poems to explore this concept. It’s a good question, but not one I was prepared to answer. So I went with: explore the concepts of utopian/pastoral and dystopia/anti-technology using at least five poems (one must be from a female author) and specifically address their form and functions. I used: The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot, The Cry of the Children by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Frost at Midnight by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Mending Wall by Robert Frost, I, too by Langston Hughes, and Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. My position was that utopian/pastoral images exist to inspire hope and love in readers whereas as utopian images are used to prompt people to not be complacent and to strive towards bettering the world. I varied from that slightly in the essay, but not a great deal as I went from author to author.

Section B was American/British prose. There are three questions. The first was to pick 5 authors, one from each of the five columns, and address the issues of immigration changing national/ethnic identity in a text by that author. I could have answered this one, but it wasn’t one I felt uberconfident in. The third question asked you to use two grotesque characters from a Dickens novel and compare them to two grotesque characters in other texts; given that I have never read a Dickens novel that one was out. This left the second question which was asking you to pick four authors (one must be American, one must be British) who have published extensively in both poetry and fiction and compare their fiction and poetry and decide which is better and how common is this phenomena and why? I think I did pretty darn well on this one. I was general, but you have to be given the time constraints. I picked Langston Hughes, Edgar Allen Poe, Thomas Hardy, and Jack Kerouac. My premise was that for Hughes and Poe their fiction and poetry is about equally as awesome, whereas Hardy’s novels are great examples of their period and his poetry is still very current and appealing, and Kerouac’s poetry is a great example of period while his fiction (I pointed out that it was almost more creative non-fiction than real fiction) is extremely useful now. I said that most writers exist solely in one genre because that is the medium their inner voice uses to communicate with them.

Section C was world literature. There are three questions. One was to compare the tenets of post-colonial criticism with one other genre, do short readings of two texts using both then compare which was more valuable. I skipped that one. Another was interesting: compare how tradition versus modernity exists in four texts exploring how each is viewed within the text. That one was neat, but I didn’t like it quite as well as the third: many critics contend that books written by “third world” or “minority” writers are representations of their cultures/races/ethnicities while “first world” or “majority” writers are more individualistic explorations. My premise was that this perception is the result of the hubris of the Western mind believing that they can understand a culture after reading one book whereas a closer examination of any of the text reveals enough diversity to destroy the notion that you can understand all of them with such a short examination. I used Our Sister Killjoy, Dogeaters, 100 Years of Solitude, and Midnight’s Children as my text.

I am reasonably confident that I passed, but I’m not going to jinx it by being too confident. 🙂 Oh, I won’t find out one way or another for 2-4 weeks.