PrepTest 123, Section 4, Question 3
For decades, there has been a deep rift(452 more words not shown)
According to the passage, in(9 more words not shown)
- Apoetry should not(4 more words not shown)
- Bunlike the writing(12 more words not shown)
- Cgraduate writing programs(8 more words not shown)
- Dfiction is most(7 more words not shown)
- EEuropean literary cultures(4 more words not shown)
Reading the passage
What views did we hear about the United States? One is suspicion of generalists: working in several areas can make people doubt your expertise. Another is the belief that poetry and fiction should have separate jobs. Poetry is supposed to express feelings and inner states through lyrical language; fiction is supposed to supply characters and narrative events.
What we’re looking for
The question asks for a widely held view, not the writer's preferred approach. Keep that distinction straight: the writer reports these expectations in order to challenge the rigid separation they support.
Working the answers
- ACorrect
The opening assigns “character and narrative events” to fiction while reserving lyrical expression of inner states for poetry. Under that conventional division, characters and stories don't belong in poems. Dove's narrative poetry challenges precisely that restriction.
- B
Specialization doesn't mean fiction isn't academically serious. The opening explicitly describes university programs training fiction writers as well as poets; it doesn't rank their seriousness.
- C
The students are generally trained in one genre or the other. That doesn't mean the programs teach only poetry or exclude fiction. This turns a division between two kinds of training into the elimination of one.
- D
Dove's fiction shows that lyrical elements can work, but the text doesn't report a widely held belief that fiction is best when it includes them. The conventional view favors keeping the forms separate.
- E
The suspicion is attributed to U.S. culture. Germany provides a contrasting example of writers moving among genres; we cannot switch the claim's subject to European literary cultures.
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