Literature (or at least my part of it)

[Connie Prater]

I'm still learning how to write things well, so let me know what you thought. I have a lot of room for improvement, so it'd be great to get some criticisms.
Here's what I wrote of the lit:
Tossups:
The Birthday Party
A Season in Hell
Nathaniel West
The Mysteries of Udolpho
Life is a Dream
Christina Rossetti
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (this may have been a tiebreaker)
Babbitt
Mikhail Lermontov
Theodore Roethke
The Blind Assassin
Jean Anouilh
"The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky"
Sartor Resartus
The Awakening
William Congreve
Sam Shepard
Giovanni's Room
An Ideal Husband
Harry Angstrom
Desire Under the Elms
The Moon and Sixpence
Patrick White
A Hazard of New Fortunes
Sean O'Casey
The Bridge

Bonuses:
H.D./Imagism/Freud
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning/Sillitoe/Angry Young Men
The Man Without a Country/Hale/Danforth
Intruder in the Dust/Faulkner/Go Down, Moses
Piers Plowman/Langland/Do-Well, Do-Better, and Do-Best
Good-bye, Mr. Chips/Hilton/Random Harvest
The Citizen of the World/Goldsmith/She Stoops to Conquer
The Haw Lantern/Heaney/Death of a Naturalist
Locksley Hall/Tennyson/Idylls of the King
The Dog Beneath the Skin/Isherwood/Funeral Blues
Sister Carrie/Dreiser/Frank Cowperwood
The Faithful Shepherdess/Fletcher/The Knight's Tale
Sotweed Factor/Barth/Chimera
"Thanatopsis"/Bryant/"The Embargo"
Golden Notebook/Lessing/Free Women
Roy Hobbs/Malamud/Dubin's Lives
Slow Man/Elizabeth Costello/Coetzee
Spoon River Anthology/Masters/Lucinda Matlock
Zuckerman/Roth/My Life as a Man
Anthony Patch/The Beautiful and Damned/Fitzgerald
Delight in Disorder/Herrick/John Suckling
House Made of Dawn/N. Scott Momaday/Ben Benally
Ship of Fools/Porter/Jilting of Granny Weatherall
Forsyte/Galsworthy/The End of the Chapter
An Equal Music/Vikram Seth/A Suitable Boy

Things I know:
*not being good at thinking of particularly exciting ideas

I'll leave it up to the other people who wrote lit questions (Sam and Marshall) to piggyback off this post if they wish to do so.

[grapesmoker]

I thought the tossups were pretty good, except for the one on West. The bit about Balso Snell entering the Trojan Horse is, for lack of a better term, a stock clue which people who haven't read anything by West are likely to know. I would have described some of the less-well-known plot points from his other works before mentioning that. Also, I think the hard parts of these bonuses were actually really, really hard, and many of the bonuses had either no medium or no easy parts. For example, that bonus on the Cavalier poets seems pretty brutal (minor Herrick poem, Herrick, then Suckling from very hard clues).

[Sam]

I'll leave it up to the other people who wrote lit questions (Sam and Marshall) to piggyback off this post if they wish to do so.

I wrote the English language literature not on Connie's list. The answer matrix is mostly accurate for literature, so people can look there if you need reminding of what those questions were.

EDIT: One thing I am curious about is about the tossup on "Hamlet and his Problems." I tried to keep it from being too obviously an essay about Hamlet early on without being unhelpfully vague; I didn't hear the round where it was read so I don't know if that worked or not.

[Auroni]

I was confused by the repeated use of "this collection" to describe A Season in Hell. As far as I know, it's a multipart poem and I was forced to come up with something else when I heard the familiar clue about the color of the vowels.

EDIT: Also, a lot of the third parts were either unconventional or simply hard. I enjoyed the parts on Lucinda Matlock, the three characters from Piers Plowman, and "Delight in Disorder" (contra Jerry, though it probably should have been the third part after Herrick had already been given), but many of those other third parts simply made the bonuses too hard.

[grapesmoker]

contra Jerry, though it probably should have been the third part after Herrick had already been given

That would have been fine; sorry if I wasn't clear on that. I just mean that there were two really tough parts in that bonus and probably either of them alone would have been ok, but together they made it really hard.

[Connie Prater]

I was confused by the repeated use of "this collection" to describe A Season in Hell. As far as I know, it's a multipart poem and I was forced to come up with something else when I heard the familiar clue about the color of the vowels.

EDIT: Also, a lot of the third parts were either unconventional or simply hard. I enjoyed the parts on Lucinda Matlock, the three characters from Piers Plowman, and "Delight in Disorder" (contra Jerry, though it probably should have been the third part after Herrick had already been given), but many of those other third parts simply made the bonuses too hard.

About the A Season in Hell tossup, you're certainly right, and I just really wasn't sure how to describe it. Sorry about that.

Also, I wasn't completely sure how difficulty would be on my bonuses. On one hand, I feel like the majority of my answer lines were things many good literature players have at least heard of, and the goal for third parts was kind of "things good players have heard of but never really bothered learning." On the other hand, I did notice how difficult a lot of the rest of the set was, and I felt a bit pressured to up the difficulty a bit (again, without writing parts on things I've never heard of). Given these criticisms, I suppose I didn't meet that goal. I guess I want to know the following:
- Would changing the order around on a lot of the bonuses with parts that were deemed too hard have helped significantly?
- Was this the vast majority of my bonuses? If not (or if so and it's not a terrible hassle), please give me a few specifics so that I can become a better judge of difficulty. I seem to have fallen victim to the "because I have heard of it, it must not be hard" fallacy.