Sample Passage Analysis
I am aware, as several of you have reported in emails to me, that the passage analysis exam is not showing up yet on Blackboard.
I am having trouble getting this exam to work properly and may need until a consultation with our AIS folks tomorrow morning to resolve this. Either way, as soon as the exam works, I will alert you.
In the meantime, here is a sample question (not one of the actual
questions) along with an answer. Obviously, this answer is an idealized
response--something you may not be able to complete in the 20 minutes
you have for each question. But it gives you a good sense of what to
shoot for.
Sample Question and Answer:
Question
In a detailed paragraph, answer this guiding question: How does this author/text use figurative language to comment upon the status of women in American culture? Your answer should identify the text and author, discuss relevant cultural contexts, and identify and discuss examples of figurative language in the passage.
Passage
If I a take a chamois and rub real hard on the bone, right on the ledge of your cheek bone, some of the black will disappear. It will flake away into the chamois and underneath there will be gold leaf. I can see it shining through the black. I know it is there….
And if I take a nail file or even Eva’s old paring knife—that will do—and scrape away at the gold, it will fall away and there will be alabaster. The alabaster is what gives your face its planes, its curves. That is why your mouth smiling does not read your eyes. Alabaster is giving it a gravity that resists a total smile…
Then I can take a chisel and small tap hammer and tap away at the alabaster. It will crack then like ice under the pick, and through the breaks I will see the loam, fertile, free of pebbles and twigs. For it is the loam that is giving you that smell.
Answer
In this passage from Sula, Morrison suggests uses a sequence of images to question racial categories and link White and African Americans together with the land. As Sula fights of the joys of orgasm during a sexual encounter with Albert Jackson, she works her mind through a series of reflections on her lover’s face. After Sula’s imagined rubbing of his cheekbones, Ajax’s black skin emerges as gold—a clear reference to the potential beauty, wealth, and power of the African American man. But then Sula’s artistic rendering becomes more brutal as she applies a nail file or knife to Ajax and digs beyond the gold to the alabaster—a white stone symbolizing the shining white bone that all races share regardless of skin pigmentation (interestingly, “alabaster” can be traced back to Egyptian / African civilization as ultimately can the genetic lines of White Americans). Finally—and in this line Sula lives out the narrator’s characterization of her as an artist without an art form—she chisels away at Ajax like an artist might work on a sculpture until that sculpture cracks and exposes loam – a particularly fertile type of soil. The last image could function symbolically in several ways: as a symbol of Sula’s personal desire to reproduce with Ajax, as a symbol of African American plantation slavery and the role of African Americans in developing American agriculture, and as a symbol of the American land as the space that White and African Americans must negotiate with each other (from the plantation South to the hills (the Bottom) and valleys (Medallion) of Ohio. This hopeful union of sexual ecstasy with an empowering vision of African American identity and potential unity with White Americans is both beautiful and moving, but the collapse of Sula’s relationship with Ajax and the culminating events of the novel undermine the argument that Morrison is optimistic about racial equality in America.
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