I'M TELLING IT ON THE MOUNTAIN!!!

Good news! All my hard work studying for the GRE English Subject Test paid off!

Err, well, that's overblowing things a little bit. What i meant to say was that I studied a little bit, and turns out the small amount of preparation that i did (yes i acknowledge that i should have prepared more) actually made something of a difference. There were a couple of questions on something that i think came from The Canterbury Tales, and generally the reading i did of random middle English poets helped me to remember what the language looked like at different periods of time. That actually really helped. And i could think to myself, "Well, i don't think that guy wrote then, and that guy is much later than that, so it has to be between these three other people." And that's how a lot of the test went.

And actually, my heart leapt with glee when the first question on the test was on none other than Toni Morrison whom i have spent a good deal of time studying, and then another question on Jane Austen. It seems as though ETS is making more of an effort to consider having people other than the cannon on the test. Also, there were a lot of Harlem Renaissance author questions on there, and i was generally able to answer all of those without a problem.

AND! (here's the part i'm really excited about) when i saw the passage, "O, reason not the need! Our basest beggars/ Are in the poorest thing superluous,/ Allow not nature more than nature needs,/ Man's life is cheap as beast's." Which is OF COURSE King Lear's reaction to his daughters Regan and Goneril's decision to take his horsesmen away from him (though he starts the play by divesting himself of his rule, dividing his kingdom and power between his three daughters. Regan and Goneril are the mean ones and Cordelia is the one who takes him in the end.) I was all over that question! That's one of my favorite passages!

So all of this sounds like very good news, and it makes it sound like i did very well on the exam. It's still entirely possible that I bombed. I certainly didn't finish the test (i probably answered about 2/3 or 3/4 of the questions), and i had to make educated guesses about most of them. There are only a few on which i was certain, and the rest was a little bit of process of elimination and then guessing from what i had left. All i'm asking for is a 500 or more so i'm not automatically discounted from Brown's program. That's all i'm asking.

We'll find out in six weeks.