This document contains sample exam questions for a course on American literature from 1865 to 2000. The questions ask students to: 1) Analyze how disenfranchised groups in America have negotiated assimilation and maintained their culture through literature. 2) Discuss the role of violence in post-Civil War America and speculate on its future role based on course texts. 3) Trace how the meaning of the "American Dream" has changed from 1865 to 2000 and predict its definition in 40 years using fictional works. 4) Explain the prominence of internal migration in literature and what it reveals about American culture.

1. Sample Exam Questions
FIT  EN272  Fall 2012
L. M. Freer

2. • Historically, how have America’s
disenfranchised (including the poor,
minorities, women, etcetera) negotiated the
push to assimilate? What kinds of things do
they let go of in order to be part of American
mass culture, and what kinds of things do they
hang on to? How is this demonstrated in
literature?

3. • What role has violence (wars, riots, excessive
policing) historically played in the post-Civil
War United States, and what role do you think
it will play going forward? Use the fiction you
read in this course not only to explain the
past, but to speculate about the future.

4. • How and why does the meaning of “the
American Dream” change over the time
period we have studied (1865-2000)? What
will the American Dream be in forty years?
Use a variety of fictional texts from this
semester’s reading to both explore the past
and speculate about the future.

5. • Many of the texts that we have read this
semester depict internal migration—
characters moving from one place to another
within the United States. Why are those
journeys a prominent feature of our literature,
and what does their prominence explain
about American culture?

6. • What is the next major change we will see in
American values or culture? Use the fiction
you read in this course to both explain major
changes seen during the time period we have
studied (1865-2000) and to speculate about
the future.

7. • What has historically gotten in the way of a
person’s ability to tell their own story or shape
their own narrative in this country? What do
instances of editorial intervention, unstable
narrators, or differences between writer and
subject do to an individual’s story, fictional or
true? What does this say about American
culture?

8. • Many of the writers in this course have
developed distinct ideas of what it means to
be “an American.” What are those ideas? Why
do their definitions of this concept vary so
widely? Do we have a clear sense of what it
means to be an American today?