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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. Whom of the following is Ailey’s neighbor in North Carolina?

2. Which of the following classes do Ailey and Rebecca have together?

3. What is Dante’s middle name?

4. Which of the following is quoted at the beginning of XI?

5. In what year does Micco leave the land where he had grown up?

Short Essay Questions

1. How is Ailey enrolled as Oludara’s research assistant?

2. What bias does Ailey note is at work among the interviewers for the Federal Writers’ Project?

3. What does Ailey note having taken for granted in Chicasetta and at Routledge?

4. How does Lydia avoid being placed on her college’s “Dirty Thirty” list?

5. To what labor is Gideon put after being transported to what would become Georgia?

6. What explanation is given in the novel for the hindered growth of many enslaved women and girls?

7. How does Lydia dissuade Dante’s uncle from inserting himself into their nuptials?

8. How does Rebecca regard Ailey’s presence in their common graduate program?

9. How does Ailey address Rebecca’s questions about the Pinchard descent of her own family?

10. For what reason is Lonny Maxwell dismissed from teaching?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What function does the front matter serve for the novel? How is that effect achieved?

Essay Topic 2

To what genre other than literary fiction might The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois be considered to belong? What in the text supports that identification? How does it do so?

Essay Topic 3

Section divisions, their titles, and chapter numbering / division schema are all components of paratext. That is, they are not part of the text but are associated with it closely and affect its meaning. What significance, if any, accrues to the chapter-numbering scheme at work in The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois? If there is significance, how does that significance manifest? If there is not, what in the novel supports the paratextual divisions that are in place?

(see the answer keys)

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