I. CLOSE READING
Select one of the three passages below to analyze carefully. Your close reading should be between 1 ½ - 2 pages typed, double-spaced. Identify the author and text quickly, and then explain its significance to the text as a whole. first ID the author and text title, and quickly ID what is happening in the passage. Then, provide a close reading that makes an argument about how the passage functions, analyzing how and why this passage is important to the text as a whole. Your aim is to demonstrate your familiarity with the particular text at hand and its relationship to slavery and pertinent course concepts. contexts of the course, and your skills at close reading. Support your claim about the relationship between passage and text by identifying and analyzing key elements of the passage. How do specific features of the selected passage - language, rhetorical strategies, symbolism, imagery, tone, irony, etc. - contribute to its meaning(s) and to the larger cause of abolition? Certainly, you may (should, even) reference other parts of the text not quoted below, but your primary focus should be on close reading of the passage you select.
1. The gentleman said my master could obtain the very best advice in Philadelphia. Which turned out to be quite correct, though he did not receive it from physicians, but from kind abolitionists who understood his case much better. The gentleman also said, "I reckon your master's father hasn't any more such faithful and smart boys as you." "O, yes, sir, he has," I replied, "lots on 'em." Which was literally true. This seemed all he wished to know. He thanked me, gave me a ten-cent piece, and requested me to be attentive to my good master. I promised that I would do so, and have ever since endeavoured to keep my pledge.
2. "We all sympathize with you in your unfortunate condition, and are ready to do all in our power to make you contented and happy. . . . You have it in your power to be reinstated in our affections. . . . You know that . . . you were never treated as a slave. You were never put to hard work, nor exposed to field labor. On the contrary, you were taken into the house, and treated as one of us, and almost as free; and we, at least, felt that you were above disgracing yourself by running away."
3. When in Mr. Gardner's employment, I was kept in such a perpetual whirl of excitement, I could think of nothing, scarcely, but my life; and in thinking of my life, I almost forgot my liberty. I have observed this in my experience of slavery,-that whenever my condition was improved, instead of it increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom. I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one.
II. ESSAY
Write a 3-4 page essay that responds to one of the following two prompts, and focuses on one of the three slave narratives we have read. Your essay's thesis should include your central claims about the text at hand, and should answer the essay prompt directly and in specific terms. The body of the essay should advance this thesis through your focused analysis of concrete textual evidence. Each body paragraph should be well organized, with a critical topic sentence (think minithesis for that paragraph), textual and/or historical evidence, and analysis of said evidence.
Remember, quotations do not "speak" for themselves - it is your job to explain what is important about them and what that evidence means - and it will be important to consider genre and/or audience in your analysis. Because this is a short essay, your topic should have a relatively narrow and clear focus, so that you may achieve depth in your analysis. You may not write on the same text in both parts of the exam. You may use your books, notes, any handouts, music, critical terms, or theoretical concepts we have discussed in class, and you must cite all references (parenthetical citation is fine). If you use sources from outside of class, you should do so judiciously, and you must include a works cited page or footnotes; if you only are citing from the slave narrative, you need not provide a works cited page.
1. A primary purpose of slave narratives was to expose the mechanics and contradictions of slavery. How does your chosen slave narrative engage one or two specific mechanisms and/or contradictions within the slavery system? What are specific strategies or devices that the
author uses to expose such components of a supposedly natural and just system?
2. Through what means does your selected narrative engage in gendered analyses of race and slave society? How does the author challenge or reinforce social constructions of race and gender, and how does this factor into the text's central arguments and intentions?