The best way to prepare is to read each assignment as closely as you can. The most effective method of recalling and understanding the literature is always to take notes as you read and to read closely.
In reading closely, you will need to pay attention to certain patterns and themes that run consistently throughout particular writers or groups of writers. For example, Walt Whitman's most famous poem is Song of Myself. In this poem he is celebrating the Romantic individual. So in this quotation from the poem, the idea of "myself" is very clear. If you look in the possible responses, you can see that Whitman's poem is the most obvious answer. You could have eliminated Thoreau's Walden because it is a work of non-fiction. It is not a poem.
"I celebrate myself, and sing myself,/And what I assume you shall assume,/For every atom belonging to me as good belong to you."
*Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self-Reliance"
Most of the quotations that you should be prepared to know about will be either first lines of poetry or will be quotations that will clearly identify the author and that should be enough to determine the correct response because only one author's work will be offered at a time as an option. There are other types of multiple-choice questions; however, if you pay attention to both themes and literary periods, you should be able to discern the correct response.
If you read every assignment, and pay attention to the major themes of each literary period and the individual authors in them, then, you should do very well in this course.
The questions will have come from the following 10 key themes for the course.
A. Bradstreet as Puritan Woman Poet
B. Whitman and Romantic Individualism
C. Freneau and the Native Americans
D. Poe's Literary Reaction against Puritanism and the Enlightenment
E. Emerson: Self-Reliance and Non Conformity
F. Thoreau and Living Deliberately in the Woods
G. G. Douglass and Jacobs: The Life of the American Slave
H. H. Hawthorne and the Depiction of Woman
I. Irving and American Nationalism
J. J. Dickinson and the Dark Side of American Romanticism
Again, the best way to prepare is to read every assignment closely and with care.