PrepTest 150, Section 1, Question 18
Passage A In a 1978 lecture titled "The(449 more words not shown)
Passage A(186 more words not shown)
Passage B(271 more words not shown)
Borges and the author of(15 more words not shown)
- AThe genre of(13 more words not shown)
- BAny science fiction(11 more words not shown)
- CEvery work of(9 more words not shown)
- DSome rhetorical figures(9 more words not shown)
- EA story cannot(15 more words not shown)
Reading the passage
A's detective-fiction reader could bring suspicion to any narrative. B makes the freedom explicit: readers may apply whichever interpretive approach they choose to any text (Passage B, paragraph 1). The approach can travel from one kind of story to another.
What we’re looking for
Keep that separate from B's claim about an especially rich experience. A protocol may fit one work best without being impossible to apply elsewhere.
Working the answers
- A
Fully determined by the author's intention leaves out the reader's contribution. Both accounts make the reader's way of engaging with a text important. B's discussion of deliberate writing doesn't erase that contribution.
- BCorrect
A science-fiction story is still a narrative, so Borges's suspicious reader could approach it as a detective story. B likewise lets us apply any protocol to any text. We could scrutinize the characters and events for clues even in an imagined future world. That might not be the approach the work rewards most, but the choice says could, not should or would work best.
- C
B explicitly raises borderline cases. Not every work fits one genre unambiguously.
- D
B says we tend to pay more attention to sound in poetry than in prose. That difference in attention doesn't establish that some rhetorical devices occur only in poetry. More prominent is not the same as exclusive.
- E
B discusses an especially rich experience under one protocol, not a requirement for any true enjoyment. Neither account says we must first know a story's intended genre to enjoy it.
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