Q14

[jayparkcom]

What's wrong with C?

[ohthatpatrick]

(C) just extrapolates too much. This passage is a Clarify the Misconception passage.

Misconception: Kingston's work don't have a large traceable body of direct literary antecedents. (lines 2-6)

Reality: They DO have historical antecedents, namely, the Chinese tradition of "talk-story". (lines 6-12)

Notice how (A) just restates these two elements.

Now see how (C) starts overgeneralizing:
examining "Chinese American writers in general" shows that "critics of ethnic literatures" have been mistaken.

Nothing in the passage ever discusses "Chinese American writers in general". The talk-story tradition relates to China. Even though it's implied that Chinese American immigrants would be familiar with this tradition, we don't ever hear that "talk-story" influences typical Chinese American writing. Also, the author of this passage is only targeting critics who think that Kingston's work lacks a historical precedent. (C) makes it seem like the author is targeting "critics of ethnic literatures" in general for something a mistake they recurrently make.

These type of overly broad, overly extrapolating answers often sound tempting because in high school and college we were often rewarded by our teachers for extracting a broader moral to whatever specific text we were reading.

However, LSAT is primarily a test of what's on the written page, so we are safer picking (A), which is fully supportable, than (C).

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have unresolved qualms.

[Sbrown]

I had a lot of trouble with this question, due mainly to the statement in Answer A that "Kingston’s writings have significant Chinese American antecedents". While there is no shortage of references to Chinese antecedents, The only mention of other Chinese Americans comes in paragraph 2, which states:
"Thus, Chinese immigrants to the U.S. had a fully
established, sophisticated oral culture, already ancient
and capable of producing masterpieces, by the time
they began arriving in the early nineteenth century.
This transplanted oral heritage simply embraced new
subject matter or new forms of Western discourse, as in
the case of Kingston’s adaptations written in English."

What I had missed here was "...by the time they began arriving in the early nineteenth century." It seems that since there are no dates given for any of Kingston's works, we are to assume that she is currently alive based of the verb usage such as "Kingston herself believes" and "She distinguishes", and thus must have been born recently enough for her writings to have "significant Chinese American antecedents".

It seems almost as if the writer of the question was assuming that the reader would not make any distinction between "antecedents" in general, and "Chinese American antecedents". This would also have been much more clear as the correct answer choice had the passage supplied any dates for Kingston's works.

I couldn't find any explanations online which made this distinction, so I hope this clears things up for anyone who might have had the same issue with this question.