GRE Literature Advice from recent test-takers

[frettedwithgoldenfire]

Hi all,

I'm taking the GRE Subject test in literature on Saturday, and at this point I'm freaking out more than a bit. I've looked at comments posted here about recent tests, and it appears that the most recent tests have been heavier on comprehension (as well as on Old English for some reason) and lighter on the identification that's so heavily featured in the prep books and the available online tests. Is this impression accurate to people's experience? Is there anything you would recommend to study specifically (if Old English is in fact more prominent, I'm not exactly sure how to prepare for that, as I have no Old English background, but suggestions are appreciated) or any good last-minute tips you have for me and the other students who are taking the test on Saturday? Any advice is welcome from all, but particularly so from those who can speak to the apparent new direction the test is taking.

 

Thanks all! And good luck to those taking the test Saturday!

[doubledogd]

I took the subject test in September, and I would definitely say that there was a large number of longer passages and grouped questions that included comprehension and identification.

Many of the basic identification questions were theory/criticism-based. A good idea might be to read (or reread) Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: an Introduction.

If you haven't already taken all the practice exams you can find, do that and make sure to go through the answers. Try to have a sense of major authors and movements--simply recognizing names and using context clues will take you far.

I went in expecting a lot of questions in areas that I felt weak in (ancient Greek, Old English, 18th-century) and definitely saw them there, but I was pleasantly surprised by the relative popularity of modernist and 20th-century authors too.

My best piece of (testing) advice is to go ahead and guess whenever you can eliminate at least one of the possibilities. Since a wrong answer is only a 1/4 point off, I took an aggressive approach, left only eight questions blank, and ended up with a strong score. 

[frettedwithgoldenfire]

So you didn't feel like there was a lot of Old English? At this point, that's what I'm most worried about. 

[Waco-Waco]

To be honest (not that I'm an expert on the topic) I would just spend equal amounts of time revising/reading up on each historical period. I can't say for certain but I'm pretty sure they're not going to use the same test in Oct as they did in Sep (?), so who knows what will come up. Also, even though I myself remarked on another thread that there was a lot of Old English, I do think there is something to be said for 'remembering the questions that were difficult and thinking that the test is skewed to things that you find difficult'. I'd say I spent basically an even amount of time on each historical period, and an equal amount of time looking at theory and literary terms. You can find this stuff everywhere but here are some of the terms I memorised: 
 

alexandrine - Another name for iambic hexameter. Final line of a Spenserian stanza is alexandrine 

 

Alliterative verse - stemming from Anglo-Saxon epics. Think Sir Gawin, Vision of Piers 

 

apostrophe - an exclamatory rhetorical figure of speech, often introduced by ‘O’, where the speaker breaks off and directs speech to imaginary person or idea

 

Aubade - a poem or song about/of lovers separating at dawn: Donne’s ‘The Sunne Rising’. 

 

Ballad - quatrain where second and fourth lines rhyme, usually alternating 4-stress and 3-stress lines, 8 and 6 syllables. ‘Ancient Mariner’, example. 

 

Breton Lay - form of medieval French and English romance literature, short rhymed tales of love and chivalry, often involving supernatural motifs. Chaucer’s ‘The Franklin’s Tale’. 

 

chiasmus - rhetorical construction in which order of words in the second of two paired phrases is the reverse of the order of the first. Byron: ‘pleasure’s a sin, and sometime’s sin’s a pleasure’

 

elegy (pastoral) - the mourner is a shepherd: Milton’s Lycidas and Shelley’s Adonias

 

End-stopped line - a line of verse that ends grammatically

 

epithalamium - a form of poem that is written for the bride, or to celebrate a wedding generally. Spenser’s Epithalamium

 

Eclogue - a poem in a classical style on a pastoral subject. Sometimes also called bucolics 

 

euphuistic prose - tending to euphemism; abounding in highflown or affectively refined expression; associated with pre-Shakespeare John Lyly. 

 

fabliau - comic work concerning cuckolded husbands, etc. 

 

feminine rhyme - rhyme that matches two or more syllables at the end of respective lines, final syllable usually unstressed. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20: passion/fashion. 

 

georgic - a poem dealing with agriculture 

 

hamartia - tragic mistake or tragic flaw, from Aristotle’s Poetics. 

 

Heroic Couplets - rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter, Restoration. 

 

Kunstlerroman - Bildingsroman, but about growth of artist. Lawrence’s ‘Sons and Lovers’ 

 

Litotes - a figure of speech, in which the speaker emphasises the magnitude of a statement by denying its opposite. Beowulf: ‘That sword was not useless to the warrior now’

 

monody - an ode sung by one voice. Milton’s Lycidas 

Neo-classical unities - principles of dramatic unity popular in antiquity until after the renaissance; place, time, and action. 

 

Ottava Rima - eight iambic lines, usually in pentameter. Each stanza has three rhymes of a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c. Byron’s Don Juan, Yeats’ Sailing to Byzantium. 

 

Poetic inversions - inversion of normal grammatical word order

 

Prosopopoeia - rhetorical device in which a speaker or writer communicates to the audience by speaking as another person or object 

 

Rhyme Royal - seven lines, usually iambic pentameter. Rhyme scheme is 

a-b-a-b-b-c-c. 

 

roman á clef - a novel describing real-life events behind a facade of fiction. Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, Hemmingway’s Sun Also Rises, Plath’s Bell Jar. 

 

Sturm and Drang - a German literary genre emphasising the volatile emotional life of the individual. Associated with Goethe. 

 

Synaethesia - the description of a sense impression. Keats’ ‘sunburnt mirth’ 

 

Synecdoche - a figure of speech that presents a kind of metaphor in which:

• part of something is used for the whole
• the whole is used for a part
• the species is used for the genus 
• the genus is used for the species, or
• the matter is used for the thing. 
• Consider the characterization of fictional characters, i.e represented by an individual body part. 

 

terza rima - a three lined stanza using chain rhyme in a-b-a, b-c-b, etc. Think Dante, and also Shelley’s Ode to The West. 

 

Villanelle - the one with two alternating refrains that resolve into a concluding couplet. Dylan Thomas’ ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’. 

 

There were a bunch more that I picked up on the way (I'm sure you're well beyond this if your test is on Sat, but hey, might be of some use). 

[Ramus]

So you didn't feel like there was a lot of Old English? At this point, that's what I'm most worried about. 

Last year there was one, maybe two questions on Old English. At the time, I hadn't taken OE, and so really didn't have any clue what to expect. But the questions turned out to be remarkably easy. Although the passage included on the test looked a little funny, it was pretty easy to render into MdnE by simply sounding it out and fiddling with some of the consonants. 

Here are a couple of examples of the type of passage ETS will give:

Þæt wæs god cyning. (Beowulf)

Her Sigeric wæs gehalgod to arcebisceope, and Eadwine abbod aforðferde, and Wulfgar abbod feng to þam rice. (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle)

It might help to know that Þ and ð are OE characters that we'd both write as 'th,' and that usually you can translate æ as a simple 'a' in MnE (at least in these examples). But even if you didn't know that, you could still fumble through these.

In the first example, wæs looks like MnE 'was,' and it turns out that's what it meant in OE, too. (Go with your gut instinct on these.) 'god' could be 'God,' but you don't need to know OE to guess that it might alternatively be 'good' (and it is). 'cyning' is certainly the most difficult in the line, but we have a 'c' that could be a 'k' and an 'ing'. What do you think it is? If you guessed 'king', you're right. The line means 'That was [a] good king.'

The second passage is a bit more challenging, but I still think it's manageable. Remember that you don't have to know each and every word -- ETS will give you answers that'll help you make educated guesses on the stuff you can't figure out. So let's try this one out. 'Her' looks like 'Here' (referring to the year in the Chronicle). 'Sigeric' is capitalized, so we might guess that it's a proper name. 'Wæs,' again, looks like 'was.' Don't spend too much time on 'Gehalgod,' but it might help if you remember from grammar that passives in the past tense are formed by "was/were" + a past participle. 'To' is identical to modern 'to' in all but pronunciation, and 'archbisceope' looks an awful lot like 'archbishop.' Let's just try translating that much: "Here Sigeric was [something] to archbishop.' It's not perfect, but we can probably guess what 'gehalgod' is from the context. Maybe something like 'named' or 'appointed'? (It's 'consecrated'.) People sometimes get 'appointed' to an archbishopric, but they don't often get 'stabbed' to an archbishopric, right? Again, make an educated guess. 

So, this is all to say: Don't worry about the OE stuff. You can figure it out. The only thing that might be worth memorizing is the stuff on the unique characters  I mentioned above. 

 

 

 

 

Edited October 22, 2015 by Ramus

[Ramus]

To be honest (not that I'm an expert on the topic) I would just spend equal amounts of time revising/reading up on each historical period.

Not terrible advice, although I would not spend all that much time at all on pre-1500 stuff (except Chaucer "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" -- you'll need to read Chaucer in ME, so read over the General Prologue to refamiliarize yourself with the language). You'll get a question or two on OE stuff, but, as I say above, you can more or less figure that out by identifying words that look like MnE.

The year I took the test there was, rather bizarrely, an obscure passage from Margery Kempe. I wasn't prepared for it, nor were some of my medievalist friends who took the same test. But in all honesty, if I were to take the test again knowing there was going to be a question about Margery Kempe on there, I still wouldn't read the Book of Margery Kempe for the sake of that question. It's simply not worth the effort to review a lot of other non-Chaucerian pre-1500 literature in order to be prepared for the lone question you get on it. You're better off directing your efforts elsewhere, to areas and topics the test has weighted more heavily (like early modern lit, for example). 

Edited October 22, 2015 by Ramus

[sarabethke]

I definitely think Middle English moreso than Old English. Chaucer especially, and I noticed a lot on Shakespeare. There were passages with 10 comprehension questions, which was a lot. My strategy was to skip around, first going for the ones I felt confident about and circled the ones I skipped so they'd be easier to come back to. I actually left a lot blank because probability aside, I'm a terrible guesser. If I couldn't narrow a question down to two or three choices I didn't guess. I got 63rd percentile, which isn't fantastic, but it was what I was going for based on UT's "minimum" 60th percentile.

[EmmaJava]

I'll just say my score because I haven't been able to figure out what to do with it - it's a 470. I took the test because of a small handful of programs that I couldn't bring myself to not apply to...with this score, though, do I follow through? I still have a longer list of programs that don't require it. What would others do? Thanks in advance.

[haltheincandescent]

I'll just say my score because I haven't been able to figure out what to do with it - it's a 470. I took the test because of a small handful of programs that I couldn't bring myself to not apply to...with this score, though, do I follow through? I still have a longer list of programs that don't require it. What would others do? Thanks in advance.

Well, it depends, I guess, on why you can't bring yourself to not apply to those programs. Is it because they are absolutely incredible fits with your interests, or is it because more like feeling obliged to apply to, say, Harvard or Berkeley because they're ranked as topmost programs? If it's the former, as long as the rest of your application is quite strong (meets or even exceeds their specific cut offs), and you can demonstrate your close fit with the program as shown in specific past research, it might not ultimately be too utterly damaging, and so it might still be worth applying. See also if you can gauge the importance of the test to different departments. CUNY, for example, says they require it, but that it's ultimately weighted the least among the various other parts of the application. Furthermore, it might depend on your area of specialization. If you're declaring an interest in something more canonical, my inclination is to think a low score on an exam that essentially tests your extreme surface level of "canon" literature would be more problematic than if, for example, you're interested in film studies, digital humanities, obsure-ish theory, "popular" culture of varying sorts (comics, sci fi, YA lit, etc.) or such. Although, despite these sorts of specialization, somewhere like UT Austin for instance still says something to the effect of: "because all our students, regardless of field, are required to enter with a broad knowledge of literary history in order to effectively serve as instructors in our introductory undergraduate courses early in their graduate studies, a mid-range or above subject test score helps to ensure that there are few major gaps in knowledge." Again, see what you can dig up about those specific programs you don't want to give up, and try to measure the importance of the score. There's always the possibility, as well, of contacting the DGS to see if there are stringent cutoffs if nothing at all is stated on their admissions pages. 

To return to the original point, though: if you're just applying to a program because you feel you have to (I had a few on my original list like that which I ultimately, painfully still, cut because I realized that, even though Princeton and Berkeley are strong programs and a degree from either would be pretty fancy, I don't really fit with either program, and would ultimately be less-than-happy there even if somehow accepted without fit...), then cut it in favor of something better for your interests. There are plenty of great programs all over the board in terms of rankings that don't require or even want the subject test scores, so you're still fine.

So, point being: I think at the end of the day, you should apply to where you truly have a strong fit, and where you would legitimately regret not applying to, (or, as I framed it for myself on a more cynical/materialistic day, where you're legitimately willing to potentially outright lose the admissions fee), regardless of the simple requirement of "a" subject test score, especially since, as you say, it's only a small handful on a list that has a lot of others that don't require it. Obviously I wouldn't put all your eggs in one basket, so to speak, since that score is definitely going to be a liability, but if/since you have a reasonable ratio of require to not-require, I think (though just my opinion, ultimately) it might be still worth trying.

[EmmaJava]

Thanks, haltheincandescent, for this incredibly thoughtful reply. Much appreciated. You've pretty much reinforced what I'd been coming round to, and I guess in a sense I'm just processing the score. I knew immediately after taking it that I didn't do well, but hadn't prepared - emotionally, I guess - for having done so poorly. 

The reason I can't not apply to certain programs is indeed based on what I perceive to be incredible fit, not on a sense of obligation (I don't really have one of those). I know that I'm a strong applicant in other areas and my strength is in obscure-ish theory, to borrow your phrase, and these gaps in my canonical knowledge simply reflect what I have, and haven't, pursued. I'll have to retake the general GRE in November because my previous test was over 5 years ago, but back then I scored in the 99th percentile on verbal and maxed out the writing (bombed the math). I've got peer-reviewed publications and strong recommendations. The statement of purpose is always a work in progress but coming along. I'm one of those applicants that looked hard for ways to avoid the subject test but in the end, being honest about myself with programs that I thought I needed to apply to, sucked it up and gave it a shot. I guess the let down has more to do with feeling as though I could have just skipped that whole drama and gone straight to the rest of my list, which is now what it will be by default. I'll still give those schools that require it a try, but I can't really consider myself a serious contender. That's ok. Good wake-up call for me, on I go.

 

[Tinieblas.]

I took the test in April.  Compared to the practice tests that I took, I found that the real test involved a greater amount of reading comprehension, which slowed me down quite a bit.  Also, the test seemed very theory/criticism heavy.  I don't remember there being an excessive amount of Old English.  I used the Princeton book, Vade Mecum, Hapax Legomena and the old ETS book and was scoring really well on practice tests, but on the real thing I scored significantly lower.  I think I got tripped up by questions about some of theorists that I had only studied superficially, and I definitely wasn't expecting all of the reading comprehension.  

[frettedwithgoldenfire]

Thanks everyone for the advice, I think it went okay- I agree with all those who say more comprehension, I would definitely say they've changed the test to such a degree that info in test books is no longer accurate. Huge amounts of comprehension now, I wish I had been prepared for that much, it takes up a lot of time. A lot of the questions I remember I have ended up having wrong answers for, but I guess you remember the ones you are most unsure about so maybe it's okay...

 

@doubledogderrida and others who took the test in September, what did the raw score/percentile breakdown look like? I'm wondering if the new comprehension focus has shifted the balance between the two. The test ETS has made available online has 206+ raw as 99th percentile, 173-176 as 89th, 157-160 as 79th, 145-148 as 69th, and so on. What did those breakdowns look like for your test? I'm worried that the raw score needed for those percentiles has gone up..

[haltheincandescent]

@doubledogderrida and others who took the test in September, what did the raw score/percentile breakdown look like? I'm wondering if the new comprehension focus has shifted the balance between the two. The test ETS has made available online has 206+ raw as 99th percentile, 173-176 as 89th, 157-160 as 79th, 145-148 as 69th, and so on. What did those breakdowns look like for your test? I'm worried that the raw score needed for those percentiles has gone up..

Unless I'm overlooking data somewhere on my score report, they don't give you your raw score, so it's hard to say, unfortunately.

Edited October 26, 2015 by haltheincandescent

[doubledogd]

Yeah, as haltheincandescent says, I don't think I was ever given access to my raw score.

[frettedwithgoldenfire]

Ah I see, well thanks anyways. I was hoping for some info to make the wait a little more bearable, but I'm sure soon other parts of my application will take over my attention nad help me forget about that