Reading comp PrepTest 136 · Section 1 · Question 15

Topic: Humanities

Paragraph 1

• Paragraph note
  • Background and context for Morrison's innovation in Jazz (literature's musical aspirations, especially African American literature; Morrison first to use music to structure a novel)
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, and the author's attitude
  • Author's view:
    • Writing often aspires to be musical, especially in the African American artistic tradition (first through third sentence)
    • Morrison is the first African American writer to use a musical genre to structure a novel, which she does in the 1992 novel Jazz (last sentence)
  • Author's attitude: "have not coexisted without intruding on each other's terrain" (first sentence); "writing has aspired to the condition of music" (second sentence); "Nowhere is this truer" (third sentence); "often considered its greatest artistic achievement and one of the greatest contributions to North American art" (third sentence); "none had attempted to draw upon a musical genre as the structuring principle" (last sentence)

Paragraph 2

• Paragraph note
  • Comparison between Jazz's narration (harmony between third- and first-person narration) and structure of jazz (harmony between ensemble and solos)
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, and the author's attitude
  • Comparison, according to the author:
    • Morrison's narration switches between a fair, disembodied, third-person narrator and distinct character voices (offset by quotes), which resembles the harmony between jazz's ensemble sound with solos intertwined (second through last sentences)
  • Author's attitude: "not only" (first sentence); "more strikingly" (first sentence); "slips easily" (second sentence); "sensitive and sympathetic" (second sentence); "first-person lyricism" (second sentence); "generous" (third sentence);

Paragraph 3

• Paragraph note
  • Ellington example to clarify the comparison in the previous paragraph (Ellington's soloists performed within the logic of his arrangements, like Morrison's first-person narrators)
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, and the author's attitude
  • Example of jazz's structure, according to the author:
    • Duke Ellington let individual musicians' voices out but still kept their solos within the logic of his compositions (first and second sentence)
  • Comparison, according to the au
    • Ellington's soloists performed "as if with quotation marks around" their solos, much like Morrison's narrators (second sentence)
    • Jazz set in Ellington's time period (last sentence)
  • Author's attitude: "was the first" (first sentence); "always performed within the undeniable logic of the composer's frame" (second sentence); "same effect that Toni Morrison has achieved" (last sentence); "perfected" (last sentence)

Paragraph 4

• Paragraph note
  • Author's conclusion (Jazz imitates Ellington's genius while innovating new ways to depict narrative POV)
• Views, minor Meta-Structures, and the author's attitude
  • Author's view:
    • Morrison's Jazz imitates Ellington's genius by depicting characters improvising in a constructed collective narrative; this innovation creates new ways to express narration (first and last sentences)
  • Author's attitude: "has found a way, paradoxically" (first sentence); 'carefully constructed" (first sentence); "genius" (last sentence); "linguistic virtuosity" (last sentence); "redefine the very possibilities of narrative point of view" (last sentence)

Main Point: In using the structure of jazz music — specifically, imitating the style of Duke Ellington — Toni Morrison created an innovative work in Jazz that redefined what was possible with narrative points of view.

Innovative Subject: This passage falls into a particularly common Meta-Structure for humanities passages: Innovative [Subject]. In this case, "[Subject]" can stand in for the novel Jazz or the novelist Toni Morrison. The author elaborates on the main innovation of this novel/ist at length in the passage. As the author explains, the novel/ist uses jazz's composition — where individual musicians can play solos that express their individuality while still working within the composition's logic — as an inspiration for its narration. Jazz switches between a detached third-person narrator (who functions like the primary composer in jazz) and various first-person narrators (who function like individual musicians). In the same way a composer "allows" individual jazz musicians to express themselves within the composition's logic, Jazz's third-person narrator "allows" the first-person narrators to express themselves within the novel's overarching narrative.

When a passage uses an Innovative [Subject] Meta-Structure, the main point is generally the author's opinion on the innovation. The author summarizes their opinion in the passage's last sentence, so we can use that to answer any question that requires us to think about the Main Point.

Comparison: Since the passage's main point argues that there is a similarity between the structure of Jazz (the novel) and jazz (the genre), it's unsurprising that the most prominent minor Meta-Structure is the comparison. Highlighting or noting the times when the author makes a specific comparison between the novel and genre should help us answer one or two questions about the analogy drawn between these.

Ironically, since it discusses jazz so heavily, this passage is relatively one-note. The innovation that the author mentions as being present in Morrison's Jazz is described in the first paragraph. The rest of the passage largely fleshes it out without introducing opposing views or different innovations. While each paragraph builds on the discussion of Morrison's innovation by adding details, none add anything that dramatically changes our understanding of the main point. As such, we should expect several questions about the structure, attitude, and other big-picture aspects, as there isn't a lot of variety to the minor details that could be asked about!