GRE lit exam study strategy

[JennyFieldsOriginal]

So, I'm preparing for the GRE literature exam in November.

Here's what I've done:

So far I've gone through both volumes of the Norton English Literature and taken extensive notes on all the author and period introductions, as well as skimming major works and reading major poems.

What I'm planning to do in the final month:

skim important works of non-British lit in the Nortons (World, American)

make index cards from the REA and Princeton Review Lit exam prep books

take all the practice exams in both review books, and the one from ETS

I also plan on making index cards from a website put up by someone who very kindly wrote summaries of major works online to help people prepare for the GRE lit exam

other than that: review, review, review.

Here's my dilemma:

I also have access to the Spark Notes books on Literature, Short Stories, Shakespeare, and Poems. I don't know if I should try to look these over too. I also don't know if my study strategy seems to be any good. If anyone who took the exam has any thoughts on this I'd appreciate it.

Best of luck to everyone else who is studying for this beast! Personally, I'm feeling a little screwed

[locald]

I just took the test on Saturday. It was almost entirely reading comprehension, literary theory (obscure -- know names of the theorists!) and grammar (also obscure and difficult). My sense during the test was that ETS developed it against the test prep material out there. Time was a huge problem, a problem that I was not encountering on the practice tests. And keep calm. I got a little panicky and it definately obstructed my reading. Good luck.

[NewVolunteer]

Like the last poster, I took the test on Saturday, and my experience was very much the same. The vast majority of the test questions were of the reading comprehension/advanced grammar variety. And yes, there were a number of theory questions that were more obscure than I'd anticipated. Also, there were more linguistic questions than I would've thought; I had a full four or five "clusters" of questions dealing with Middle (and to a lesser degree, Old) English passages. As a medievalist these were welcome to me, but maybe not so much for the average literature student. Noticeably absent were the long stretches of "identification" questions that were so prevalent in the prep materials I'd studied.

I would have to agree that the test seemed to be determinedly different from the older prep materials. It felt to me like the exam might be moving away from the "canon," testing general reading comprehension, grammar, poetic forms and devices, and theory rather than the ability to recognize major authors and works.

That said, I would still advise studying your test prep materials; I picked up any number of points precisely because of such materials (given my deplorably deficient knowledge of Restoration literature, it was a coup for me to recognize and ace the section from Congreve's The Way of the World!). But definitely spend plenty of time taking practice tests and working through comprehension questions. Try to get used to reading those difficult passages quickly and well. Such questions constituted the bulk of the exam.