one more prelim tip

(this post is for you, M.)

A friend asked me about studying for prelims and sharing my methods for preparing, so I've been thinking about it after the written exam. One more thing that I think helped me was to outline critical conversations. Remembering secondary sources was much harder than remembering literary texts, so when I saw a significant exchange happening among my secondary sources I outlined that. For example, in my second list there were a lot of critical texts about how to define the South and the field of Southern literature, all working around the question of what constitutes Southern difference. I created a document that listed their names along with a couple of sentences about their views, focusing on the ways that they intersect with and respond to other critics. Really useful because I was able to easily remember and draw from my outline of the critical conversation and insert myself into it for an essay on the exam.

It's all about relationships. Remembering what one critic or theorist said or what happened in one literary text is much less important than making connections among them.