Midterm Examination in ELS 110

Date of Submission: Tuesday, March 24, 2020

A. Choose a famous poem and critique it using reader-based approach.
B. Attach the poem in your paper analysis.
C. Read Ann Adobe’s Book, pp.129-141, Reader-Based Criticism.
D. For the analysis, answer the following questions:
1. How did he or she make you feel it?
2. What are you dependent on in this work to help you make sense of what you read —
descriptive passages, the narrator’s voice, contrasting viewpoints of characters?
3. Do the events fall into a pattern you have met before?
4. Are there opposites in the text that surprise you? Inform you? Keep you from
anticipating what is coming
5. How do your previous experiences with this genre set up your expectations for how
this text will operate?
6. What images and events in the story are you already conditioned to approve or
disapprove?
7. How does the point of view affect (or control) your understanding?
8. What information has been withheld from you? How does that affect your
inferences?
9. What similarities do you recognize between this work and other works—for
example, in terms of themes, setting, characters?
10. How does the text call upon what you know of the world to produce your response
to the work?
11. Did the work cause you to make interpretations that you had to revise later?
12. What events or experiences were you led to anticipate? What mysteries were you
asked to solve? What judgments were you expected to make?
13. What do I already know about this work or this author?
14. ■ What do I already know about the time, place, or characters depicted?
15. ■ What does the title suggest to me?