Reading ComprehensionDifficulty: Hard

PT126 S2 P3 Q16 Explanation

Chinese Talk-story

A free, expert breakdown of this official LSAT Reading Comprehension question.

TopicsMeaning in ContextHumanities

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Passage

With their recognition of Maxine Hong Kingston as a major literary figure, some critics have suggested that her works have been produced almost ex nihilo, saying that they lack a large traceable body of direct literary antecedents especially within the Chinese American heritage in which her work is embedded. But these critics, a highly developed genre of song and spoken narrative known as "talk-story" (gong gu tsai).

Traditionally performed in the dialects of various ethnic enclaves, talk-story has been maintained within the confines of the family and has rarely surfaced into print. The tradition dates back to Sung dynasty (A.D. 970-1279) storytellers in China, and in the United States it is continually revitalized by an overlapping sequence of immigration or new forms of Western discourse, as in the case of Kingston's adaptations written in English.

Kingston herself believes that as a literary artist she is one in a long line of performers shaping a recalcitrant history into talk-story form. She distinguishes her "thematic" storytelling memory processes, which sift and reconstruct the essential elements of “personally remembered stories”, from the memory processes of a print-oriented culture that emphasizes be frozen in print, but which continue to grow both around and from that frozen text.

Kingston's participation in the tradition of talk-story is evidenced in her book China Men, which utilizes forms typical of that genre and common to most oral cultures including: a fixed "grammar" of repetitive themes; a spectrum of stock characters; symmetrical structures, including balanced oppositions (verbal or physical contests, antithetical characters, dialectical discourse language rich in aural and visual puns, making her work a written form of talk-story.

What this question is testing

Meaning in Context

Anticipate

This is a Meaning in Context question. The phrase has a normal-English meaning ("stories about my own life") and a passage-specific meaning. The right answer always tracks the passage-specific meaning.

In P3 Kingston is contrasting her own way of remembering stories — sifting and reconstructing the essentials — with print culture's habit of memorizing exact words. So "personally remembered stories" here means stories that live in a particular teller's memory in a partial, idiosyncratic, reshapable form.

Goal

Looking for an answer that captures that partial, teller-shaped quality. Be wary of:

The dictionary-bait reading (memoir of one's own life)

Answers that bring back the verbatim/precise-word view the passage is contrasting against

Answers about literary genres rather than memory processes

Reading along? Open the full official question in LawHub — we show a fragment here and keep the reasoning in our own words.

The question
16.

It can be inferred from the passage that the author uses the phrase “personally remembered stories” (third paragraph)

Answer choices

  1. Wrong Emphasis12% picked this

    a literary genre of first-person

    The phrase appears in a discussion of memory processes, not literary genre. P3 is about how a teller holds and reshapes stories, not about a category of writing called "first-person storytelling."

  2. Dictionary Bait33% picked this

    a thematically organized personal narrative of one's

    This is the everyday meaning of "personally remembered" — stories about one's own past. But in context, Kingston isn't talking about her autobiography; she's talking about how she remembers narratives in general. The passage's "personally remembered stories" refers to a teller's reshaped versions of stories, not memoir.

  3. Correct46% picked this

    partially idiosyncratic memories of

    Why this is right

    The contrast in P3 is between Kingston's sifting-and-reconstructing memory and the print tradition's emphasis on precise word sequences. So "personally remembered stories" denotes narratives held in memory in a partial, teller-shaped way — exactly "partially idiosyncratic memories of narratives."

    Skill tested: Meaning in Context · how this choice captures the passage's function is the move to repeat next time.

  4. Opposite7% picked this

    the retention in memory of precise sequences

    P3 explicitly says print-oriented culture is what emphasizes "the retention of precise sequences of words" — and contrasts that with Kingston's thematic memory. So "personally remembered stories" is the opposite of word-for-word retention.

  5. Wrong Emphasis1% picked this

    easily identifiable thematic issues in

    The phrase isn't about literary themes that are easy to identify — it's about memory. Kingston's memory is "thematic" in the sense that it preserves the essentials of a story rather than its exact words; that's a description of how she remembers, not a property of literary themes themselves.

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