Reading comp PrepTest 136 · Section 1 · Question 21

Passage

Questions 15-22  .        Music and literature, rivals among the arts, have  . not coexisted without intruding on each other's Remaining source text redacted.
Passage walkthrough
Passage Summary

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.

Meta-Structure?

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.

Last Thoughts?

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!

Question prompt

It can be inferred Remaining source text redacted.
Why the credited answer is right

Credited answer: D

The notes below walk through why it fits the stem and how to eliminate the rest.

Question Type

Humanities

Strategy Overview

Review the main point, and use notes or highlighted/underlined text in the passage to recall the author’s attitude, and find the answer that best reflects your understanding of the main point/author’s attitude

Answer Anticipation

This question asks us about the author's view, but doesn't provide any insight into the topic of the correct answer or where the supporting information might show up in the passage. This means the correct answer is likely to relate back to the author's main point. As such, we'll need to rely on our big-picture understanding of the passage to answer this question. We should start by reminding ourselves of the main point (either by reviewing what we said after reading the passage or by rereading our answer to the main point question). We can also review any notes about the author's attitude or any text we highlighted because it expresses the author's opinion. After doing that, we can head to the answer choices, tabling those that don't line up with the main point. For those answer choices that conform to the author’s main point, we'll use our notes and the passage to see if it's correct.

Answer choices

  1. A
    In Jazz, Morrison has Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice A is not credited

    (A) Is this consistent with the author's main point or reflected in our notes on the author's argument?

    No. While our note on the first paragraph says that "Morrison [was the] first to use music to structure a novel," this doesn't necessarily mean that other writers attempted to use music as an inspiration for their novels' narration. For that reason, we should resist any urge to review the passage and eliminate — or at least table — (A) before moving on to the next answer choice.

    If we reviewed the passage to see whether the author would agree with (A), we'd see that the passage discusses only African American writers, and it notes that “none had attempted” what Morrison did in Jazz (P1, S4). So, this answer is too broad in talking about all North American writers, and it’s contradicted for the writers that the passage discusses.

  2. B
    Because of its use Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice B is not credited

    (B) Is this consistent with the author's main point or reflected in our notes on the author's argument?

    This matches the author's positive attitude toward Jazz as that attitude is reflected in our notes and main point, but the answer choice is a bit too strong for us to comfortably select it. Notice the super bold, superlative language: "the most successful representation to date." For that reason, we should resist any urge to review the passage and eliminate — or at least table — (B) before moving on to the next answer choice.

    If we had to review the passage to check whether the author would agree with (B), we'd see that there are two issues with this answer choice's bold langauge. First, the passage says that Jazz was the first work to incorporate jazz’s structure into a novel (P1, S4), but there may have been more successful ones since then. Second, the passage never says or implies that using jazz as a “structuring principle” improved Morrison's depiction of the milieu in which jazz musicians live and work. For these reasons, we can eliminate (B).

  3. C
    In Jazz, Morrison develops Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice C is not credited

    (C) Is this consistent with the author's main point or reflected in our notes on the author's argument?

    Nope. This answer doesn’t line up all that well with the overarching point of the passage or our notes on the second and third paragraphs, which say there is a "harmony between third- and first-person narration" in Jazz and that Ellington's soloists "performed within the logic of his arrangements, like Morrison's first-person narrators." Both notes suggest that the Morrison's first-person narrators and individual jazz musicians (at least in Ellington's compositions) can be distinguished from the "ensemble." For this reason, we can eliminate (C) without reviewing the passage.

    Besides, if we checked the passage, we'd see that, if anything, it supports the view that it’s clear to know who’s talking and when, based on the characters’ sections being offset by quotes (P2, S4).

  4. D
    The structural analogy between Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice D matches the stem

    (D) Is this consistent with the author's main point or reflected in our notes on the author's argument?

    Yes! According to our note for the third paragraph, Ellington's soloists "performed within the logic of his arrangements, like Morrison's first-person narrators." According to our note, Morrison was able to shift between third- and first-person narrators in way that didn't undermine the logic of her compisition. So, it wasn't just that she had multiple narrators — her narrators form a cohesive ensemble, just like Ellington's musicians. For this reason, we can safely select (D) without reviewing the passage — especially if we havd good reason to eliminate the other choices.

    But, if we wanted to check the passage, we could. If we can find anything other than just a shift between first- and third-person narrators that’s analogous between Ellington’s compositions and Jazz, then this is the answer. Reviewing the third paragraph, we can see that the author notes that Ellington's musicians "always performed within the undeniable logic of the composer's frame—they always, in other words, performed as if with quotation marks around their improvisations and solos," before arguing that "[i]t is this same effect that Toni Morrison has achieved in Jazz" (P3, S2-S3). So, as we suspected, Morrison's ability to make her first-person narration fit within her "composer's frame" is another similarity between Jazz and Ellington's compositions.

  5. E
    Morrison disguises the important Remaining source text redacted.
    Why choice E is not credited

    (E) Is this consistent with the author's main point or reflected in our notes on the author's argument?

    Nope. This answer doesn’t line up with the main point about the connection between Jazz and Ellington’s jazz compositions. It also doesn’t make much sense that Morrison disguised the connection between her novel and jazz, and then named it Jazz. For this reason, we can eliminate (E) without reviewing the passage.

    Besides, if we checked the passage, we wouldn't find any support for this answer choice. Although the author says that Morrison's "narration slips easily" from third- and first-person, the author never says or implies that this disguises her structural connection to Ellington's jazz compositions. In fact, the author uses Morrison's shifting narrators as a reason why her novel is similar to Ellington's compositions, so the author would probably say that the shifting narrators reveals her structural connection to Ellington's jazz compositions.

What this tests

Question analytics

Based on historical answer selection rates for this question.

Answer choice distribution

  1. A 6%
  2. B 4%
  3. C 16%
  4. D Credited 61%
  5. E 13%

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