PrepTest 102, Section 1, Question 8

Working the answers

• A

  This recommends the historical approach that had crowded out attention to the poetry. Where is the return to literary art? The writer never says historical records are the most fruitful way to treat these works.

• B

  The oral tradition matters, but it's one part of the history we're given. This leaves out the main development: scholars moved away from studying the poems' literary qualities and then returned to them.

• C
  Correct

  This captures our prediction. The opening's “new surge of critical interest” follows the period dominated by nonpoetic study, and the ending explains Adam Parry's role in bringing attention back to “Homer's poetry as literary art.”

• D

  Nonspecialists studied the poetic aspects during the earlier period. That doesn't mean they wrote most studies of Homer overall. Professional scholars were producing plenty of work, too; they were studying different things. D changes a contrast about the subject of scholarship into a claim about who produced most of it.

• E

  We aren't told that Milman Parry resolved a dating or authorship problem. His work on oral tradition helps explain the history of Homeric scholarship; discovering who wrote the poems isn't the point of that history.