Short Fiction I unit test
A test on this unit alone, marked as a percentage and a letter grade — for the test your class is actually sitting, rather than for May. Answer everything, then submit once: seeing the answer to question 3 before attempting question 4 makes the final percentage meaningless.
Conflict types
Narrative perspective
Symbol
Foil
In medias res
Unreliable narrator
Direct vs indirect characterization
Mood and atmosphere
Tone in fiction
Character vs characterization
Static vs dynamic character
Protagonist and antagonist
Short answer 1. Define or explain: Theme
3 ptsShort answer 2. Define or explain: Narrative distance
3 ptsShort answer 3. Define or explain: Round vs flat character
3 ptsShort answer 4. Define or explain: Free indirect discourse
3 ptsFree response
6 ptsThis course has no free-response prompt tagged to this unit, so one from elsewhere in the course is used. It is still worth writing — the skill transfers.
Prose Fiction Analysis (Question 2, suggested time: 40 minutes). The following passage opens Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion (1817). “Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed. … Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot’s character; vanity of person and of situation.” Write an essay that analyzes how Austen uses literary elements and techniques to develop her portrayal of Sir Walter Elliot and the narrator’s attitude toward him.