How do I approach an unseen American literature essay question?
- Read the passage and highlight it - looking for key literary techniques 2) Try and place the text on the historical and literary movement timeline (use the date given as rough guidance, the author's name - if you know other pieces of their literature - or the themes mentioned throughout the text)3) Annotate the text - for each underlined phrase you should say what literary technique it uses, think of how it's relevant to the date it's set in and how it links to other texts (eg/ the main ones you have studied)
Example essay paragraph:Firstly, the extract begins with a seemingly ignorant Buck remaining oblivious to the “trouble that was brewing”, this description of “trouble” is ambiguous, and the reader is not immediately sure as to what the “trouble” “brewing” is. This oblivious and somewhat ignorant view towards the politics and welfare of the surrounding world symbolises the nature of the Gilded Age, a time of vast corruption within politics hidden by a façade of wealth and decadence, as well as foreshadowing the “trouble…brewing” years after London’s “the Call of the Wild” – such as WWI and the Great Depression. This warning of ignorance is quickly swept away by the mention of “yellow metal” in “Arctic darkness”, alluding to the exploitation of rural areas to help advance the industrialisation of careless and superficial American 1890s societies. The industrialisation and wealth obsessed world clearly conveyed in the beginning of the extract are reminiscent of many other American literature from the 1880s to the 1940s. Steinbeck’s realist novel ‘the Grapes of Wrath’, which is punctuated by modernist intercalary chapters, highlights the industrialisation of the 1930s as machines took the places of men and capitalism ruled over America. Despite these two novels being written many years apart, the themes interwoven in them are comparable, emphasising the likeliness between London’s “the Call of the Wild” and much other American Literature from this time period.
