Question
Description acceptable. An elegy for this person tells her, “If you’re reading this then you survived your life into this one if / you’re reading this then the bullet doesn’t know us / yet.” For 10 points each:
[10h] Identify this person, the addressee of a letter that recalls her time working in a nail salon. That letter ends with the narrator seeing monarch butterflies in a field and asking this person why she wasn’t trampled by buffaloes.
ANSWER: Ocean Vuong’s mother [or Lê Kim Hồng or Rose Lê; accept Little Dog’s mother or the mother from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous or equivalents; accept “Dear Rose”; prompt on mother; reject “Vuong”]
[10e] This author’s Mourning Diary inspired both Vuong’s letter and the epigraph of his elegy. This theorist wrote “The Death of the Author.”
ANSWER: Roland Barthes [or Roland Gérard Barthes]
[10m] Vuong sees his father chase his mother in a poem noting “Everyone’s here,” which inverts a line from this poem. “A red fox stain covers Blue Hill” in this poem in which a car radio bleats, “Love, O Careless Love.”
ANSWER: “Skunk Hour” (by Robert Lowell; the Vuong poem is “The Last Prom Queen in Antarctica”)
Data
| Team | Opponent | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cornell A | Chicago A | 10 | 10 | 10 | 30 |