Cross-text connections

Text 1: Literary critic Gerald Ashworth praises the 1930s novels of Winifred Slade for their refusal of plot. Nothing happens in them, he writes, and that is their achievement: they render ordinary duration without the distortion that incident imposes. Ashworth made the case in a 1951 essay that set Slade against the plot-driven realism of her contemporaries, and later critics largely repeated it. Text 2: Critic Nadira Bose reads the same novels closely, tabulating every reported action sentence by sentence, and counts, in one of them, a death, a bankruptcy, and a departure. What is unusual, she argues, is not the absence of events but their placement: each is reported in a subordinate clause while the main clause describes weather or a meal. The effect, she concludes, is produced by grammar rather than by what Slade chose to leave out.

Based on the texts, how would Bose most likely respond to Ashworth's description of Slade's novels?

• A) By praising Slade for the same reasons Ashworth does.
• B) By arguing that Slade's novels are more conventional than Ashworth allows.
• C) By arguing that the events are present but subordinated, so the effect comes from how they are told rather than from their absence. ✓
• D) By agreeing that Slade's novels contain no significant events.

Why: Bose counts "a death, a bankruptcy, and a departure" in one of Slade's novels and finds each is "reported in a subordinate clause while the main clause describes weather or a meal," concluding the effect is "produced by grammar rather than by what Slade chose to leave out." The option that says "By praising Slade for the same reasons Ashworth does." misreads her as sharing Ashworth's praise for the "refusal of plot," but she directly disputes his premise that nothing happens in the novels. The option that says "By arguing that Slade's novels are more conventional than Ashworth allows." invents a claim about conventionality that neither text raises, since her point concerns sentence structure, not how conventional the plots are. The option that says "By agreeing that Slade's novels contain no significant events." contradicts her own count of events, since she affirms events do occur, just buried inside subordinate clauses.

Text 1: Neuroscientist Alicja Wozniak reports that a brain region activates more strongly when people view faces than when they view houses, and concludes that the region is specialized for face processing. The contrast appeared in every participant she scanned, held for unfamiliar faces as well as familiar ones, and did not depend on whether the faces were photographed in color or drawn in outline. Text 2: Neuroscientist Ugo Ferrante replicates the face-versus-house difference in a sample of forty adults. He then shows that the same region responds just as strongly in bird experts viewing birds and car experts viewing cars, and only in those experts; novices matched for age and education showed no such response to either set of images. He proposes that the region handles fine discriminations within any category a person knows intimately.

Based on the texts, how would Ferrante most likely respond to Wozniak's conclusion?

• A) By accepting her data but arguing that faces are one instance of a broader category of expert discrimination. ✓
• B) By rejecting her data and arguing that the brain region is not specialized for processing faces at all.
• C) By accepting her data but proposing that the region is actually specialized for processing any visual category rather than faces specifically.
• D) By accepting her data but arguing that face recognition relies on expertise developed over a much longer period than bird or car discrimination.

Why: Ferrante "replicates the face-versus-house difference" that Wozniak reports, accepting her data, but shows the same brain region "responds just as strongly in bird experts viewing birds and car experts viewing cars, and only in those experts," proposing the region "handles fine discriminations within any category a person knows intimately." The option that says "By rejecting her data and arguing that the brain region is not specialized for processing faces at all." has him rejecting the data outright, but he replicates it in his own sample of forty adults. The option that says "By accepting her data but arguing that face recognition relies on expertise developed over a much longer period than bird or car discrimination." invents a claim about a much longer period of expertise development that the text never states or compares between faces and other categories. The option that says "By accepting her data but proposing that the region is actually specialized for processing any visual category rather than faces specifically." overstates his proposal into the region handling any visual category, when he limits it to categories one knows intimately through expertise, since novices "showed no such response to either set of images."

Text 1: Literary theorist Marisol Ayala argues that a reader's interpretation of a poem cannot be wrong, since the poem's meaning is produced in the encounter between text and reader rather than fixed in advance. She arrives at the claim from a decade of classroom transcripts in which one short lyric yielded readings she could not rank, and she treats that variety as evidence about what poems are. Text 2: Theorist Halvard Nilsen agrees that no interpretation is guaranteed by the text alone. He observes that Ayala herself corrects students who misread a poem's syntax, and that she could not do so if every encounter were equally authoritative. The transcripts she publishes record such corrections on nearly every page. What her practice shows, he argues, is that interpretation is constrained without being determined.

Based on the texts, how would Nilsen most likely respond to Ayala's argument?

• A) By pointing out that Ayala's students sometimes misread poems, therefore all interpretations are equally valid and cannot be wrong.
• B) By rejecting Ayala's claim entirely and asserting that poems have one correct interpretation fixed in the text itself.
• C) By accepting that meaning is not fixed in advance while arguing that her own teaching shows interpretation still has limits. ✓
• D) By conceding that meaning emerges between text and reader while insisting that Ayala's corrections prove readers cannot influence interpretation.

Why: Nilsen "agrees that no interpretation is guaranteed by the text alone" but notes that "Ayala herself corrects students who misread a poem's syntax," concluding that "interpretation is constrained without being determined." The option that says "By rejecting Ayala's claim entirely and asserting that poems have one correct interpretation fixed in the text itself." has him rejecting Ayala's claim entirely and asserting a single fixed meaning, but he explicitly agrees meaning is not predetermined. The option that says "By conceding that meaning emerges between text and reader while insisting that Ayala's corrections prove readers cannot influence interpretation." garbles his point into its opposite, since he uses her corrections to show interpretation has limits, not that "readers cannot influence interpretation" at all. The option that says "By pointing out that Ayala's students sometimes misread poems, therefore all interpretations are equally valid and cannot be wrong." describes the reverse of his conclusion, since he draws on her corrections to argue interpretations can be wrong, not that misreadings prove all interpretations are equally valid.