美国文学课程要点练习题及答案

美国文学归纳内容I Fill the Following Blanks with Appropriate Answers1 The pseudonym of Mark Twain is .Samuel Langhorne Clemens2 Twain’s writings are characterized by broad ,often irreverent humour or biting . social satire3 The pseudonym Mark Twain is a Mississippi River phrase meaning “”.two fathoms deep4 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the sequel to , is considered to mark Twain’s master piece.Tom Sawyer5 Huckleberry Finn is entirely narrated from Huck’s point of view, noted for its authentic language & for its deep .commitment to freedom6 Henry James created fictions by juxtaposing American innocence & European experience in a series of intense .psychologically complex works7 In the works The Portrait of a Lady ,the scene reflects the impact ofon Americans traveling or living abroad.European culture8 In general, the style of Henry James’later works is complex, with motives & behavior of his characters revealed by means of their conversations & through their minute observations of one another.obliquely9 The most straightforward definition of realism is probably the one given by the American realist : that is “nothing more & nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.”William Dean Howells10 The subjects of realistic fiction tended to be contemporary, ordinary &.middle-class11 Plots of realistic fictions had to be unobstrusive, made up of theincidents of everyday life.trivial12 Realism first appeared in US in the literature of ,an amalgam of romantic plots & realistic descriptions.local colour13 was unquestionably the most influential American literary realist in the last quarter of the 19th century.William Dean Howells14 By the end of 19th century, the realists & naturalists had turned from portrayal ofcharacters & events, instead sought to describe the wide range of American experience & to present subtleties of human personality.idealized15 Naturalism in literature refers to theory that literary composition should be based on an objective, presentation of human beings.empirical16 Naturalism agrees with determinism of Darwin & economical determinism of Marx.biological17 One of the first American exponents of naturalism was Frank Norris, whose novelis a classical study of the interplay between instinctual drives & environmentconditions.McTeague18 Edwin Robinson is an American poet known for the poems set in Tilbury Town, anNew England village modeled after his childhood home.imaginary19 The trilogy of narrative poems created by Edwin Robinson includes Merlin,Lancelot& .Tristram20 Stephan Crane is known for his & often brutal portrayals of human conditions. pessimistic21 ,a story of young prostitute who commits suicide, was Crane’s first novel which won praise from the American writers.Maggie, a Girl of the Streets22 The second novel of Crane, ,gained international recognition as a penetrating & realistic psychological study of a young soldier in the American Civil War.The Red Badge of Courage23 ’s Sister Carrier tells the story of a small-town girl who moves to Chicago & eventually becomes a Broadway star in New York city.Theodore Dreiser24 In The Financier & , Dreiser drew harsh portraits of a type of ruthless businessman. Titan25 Frost’s poetry is based upon the life & scenery of rural New England , the language of his verse reflects the of that region.compact idiom26 Frost’s colloquialism is structured within traditional & rhythmical schemes.metrical27 American modernism is treated as rebellion against the tradition ofliterature.genteel28 Artists of modernism, esp, poets, negated poetic meter & rhyme, which were a hindrance to the creation of .perfect image29 firmly believed that poetry should express the complicated meaning of life.T.S.Eliot30 Ernest Hemingway’s style is characterized by crispness, & emotional understatement.laconic dialogue31 Hemingway is a writer of ,disappointed by war & ethic confusion in the west after the world wars.lost generation32 In 1952, Hemingway published , a novelette about an aged Cuban fisherman. The Old Man & the Sea32 Scots Fitzgerald is best known for his novels & Tender is the Night, both depicting disillusion with the American dream of self-betterment, wealth & success through hard work & perseverance.The Great Catsby34 The female protagonist in The Great Catsby is ,an upper-class woman who finally rejected Catsby.Daisy Buchanan35 John Steinbeck was a nobel laureate, who described in his works the unremitting struggle of people who depend on the for their livelihood.soil36 ,by T.S. Eliot, is an erudite work that expresses vividly his conception of thesterility of modern society.The Waste Land37 Four Quartets is considered to be Eliot’s finest work, expressing in moving verse a sense of time.transcedental38 William Faulkner is known for his epic portrayal in some 20novels of thebetween the old & new South.tragic conflict39 After returning from Europe, Faulkner began his series of novels set in the mythical Yoknapatawpha County based upon Lafayette County,Mississippi.baroque, brooding40 Faulkner experimented with writings by means of interrupted simple stories with rambling, , soliloquies.streams-of-consciousness41 As a writer of modernism, Faulkner attempted to apply in the writing.multi-narrative voices42 Eugene O’Neil’s describes the disintegration of the mind of a black dictator under the influence of fear.The Emperor Jones43 In the essay collection For Lancelot Andrews,T.S.Eliot describes his position as that of ainliterature, a royalist in politics, and an Anglo-Catholic in religion.classicistII Choose the appropriate answer in the following statements.1 The subjects of realistic fiction tended to be contemparary, ordinary and a) lower-class. b) middle-class.c) upper middle-class. d) upper-class.b)2 The words “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material”constitute the definition of realism from a) Sherwood Anderson. b) Henry Louis Mencken. c) William Dean Howells.d) Hart Crane.c)3) The novel The Portrait of a Lady of Henry James reflects a) the impact of European culture b) influence of feminism c) puritanism upon d) all of these on Americans traveling or living abroad.a)4) In The Portrait of a Lady, Hnery James depicted in the finishing part the “the motionless seeing” of Isabell pondering over the mistakes of marriage she had made. There is a great drama in the “seeing”, which is created by the a) thoughts in her mind. b) her actions. c) her inner monologue. d) both b) &c).d)5) In realistic novels, plots had to be a) unobstrusive b) dramatic c) full of suspenses d) Gothic by nature, made up of trivial incidents of everyday life.a)6) In realistic novels, the author himself strives to make his language as invisible as possible, a neutral reflector of a) personal b) interpersonal c) impersonal d) subjective reality.c)7) The characters under the pen of realists are not rural labourers in harmony with the cycles of nature, but a) country gentries b) southern plant owners c) urban bourgeois d) poverty-stricken urban intellectuals alienated from both nature and themselves by the pressures of a scrambling, competitive, materialistic society.c)8) By the end of 19th century, the realists and naturalists began to describe the wide range of a) American experience b) Continental experience c) plots imitating those of England d) all of these andto present the subtleties of human personality.a)9 a) Ernest Hemmingway b) Longfellow c) Robert Frost Lee d) Bret Harte was the first American writer of local colour to achieve wide popularity.d)10) The Guilded Age is a novel composed by Mark Twain whose theme is the loss of a) American innocence. b) old idealism. c) frontier west. d) illusion in the materialsitic prosperity.b)11 In The celebrated Jumping Frog, there is astory about how ordinary people tirck experts or how the weak a) “hoax” b) “compete” c) “defeat” d) both a) & b) the strong.12 The Adventrues of Huckleberry Finn is a long fiction which is expected to voice the hope for a) idealism & utilitarianism. b) idealism & democracy. c) realism & utilitarianism d) freedom & anarchism.b)12 Naturalism is a term invented by the a) American b) German c) Russian d) French novelist Emile Zola.d)13 In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the moral climax comes in Chapter 31, a) when Huck thinks deeply about morality and then decides to break the law. b) when Huck follows the law although it is against the conscience to do it. c) when Huck had a good idea to mediate between morality and law. d) when Huck decides to take no action about turning in Jim.a)14) The goal of naturalism is to achieve extreme a) objectivity b) subjectivity c) both c) neiher and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economical classes who were dominated by their environment.a)15 American naturalists emphasized that world was amoral, that men and women had no free will, that their lives were controlled by a) heredity. b) environment. c) both. d) neither.c)16 In the story a) Uncle Tom’s Cabin b) The Man Higher Up c) The Titan d) Maggie; a Girl of Street , Stephan Crane believed that environemnt counts for a great deal in determining human fate.d)17 In a) The Pit b) Moran of the Lady Letty c) McTeague d) The Octopus, Norris described a calfornia landscape in which “A tremendous immeasurable Life pushed steadily heavenward without a sound, without a motion.”c)18 The story in The Call of the Wild is that of a dog named a) Jack, b) Jim, c) Huck, d) Buck, who is kidnapped from his home on a California ranch and taken to Yukon where he serves as a sled puller for his owner.d)19 At the end of the First World war, there was a modernistic trend in literature in which a group of writers called a) anarchists b) Beat Generation c) Lost Generation d) both b) & c) rebelled against former ideals and values, but replaced them only by despair or a cynical hedoism.c)20 In The Waste Land, the subject lies in an erudite poem that expresses vividly his conception of the a) sterility b) productivity c) adaptability d mobility of modern society.a)Explain the Following Terms in Your Own Words1 Realism 教材pp235-238 或讲授内容(注：归纳出基本内容即可)2 Modernismpp330-340(注：归纳出基本内容即可)3 Naturalism(答案：Naturalism (literature), in literature, the theory that literary composition should be based on an objective, empirical presentation of human beings. It differs from realism in adding an amoralattitude to the objective presentation of life. Naturalistic writers regard human behavior as controlled by instinct, emotion, or social and economic conditions, and reject free will, adopting instead, in large measure, the biological determinism of Charles Darwin and the economic determinism of Karl Marx. Naturalism was first prominently exhibited in the writings of 19th-century French authors, especially Edmond Louis Antoine de Goncourt, his brother Jules Alfred Huot de Goncourt, and Émile Zola. ) 4．Lost Generation(答案：Lost Generation, group of expatriate American writers residing primarily in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. The group never formed a cohesive literary movement, but it consisted of many influential American writers, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Carlos Williams, Thornton Wilder, Archibald MacLeish, and Hart Crane. The group was given its name by the American writer Gertrude Stein, who, in a conversation with Hemingway, used an expression she had heard from a garage manager, une géneration perdue ("a lost generation"), to refer to expatriate Americans bitter about their World War I (1914-1918) experiences and disillusioned with American society. Hemingway later used the phrase as an epigraph for his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926).)5 Imagism(答案：This is literary movement led by Ezra Pound, held by a group called the imagists. It is an attempt on the part of Pound, Williams, and Doolittle to remake poetry. The imagist credo called for new rhythms, clear and stripped-down images, free choice of subject matter, concentrated or compressed poetic expression, and use of common speech. The poets who subscribed to this credo applied it differently: Williams found his new rhythms in everyday speech, while Pound sought his new rhythms in adaptations in English of Chinese, Greek, Provençal (southern France), and other poetic traditions.The movement continued to influence some poets for a number of years under the leadership of Amy Lowell.)6 Streams of ConsciousnessStream of consciousness, as a term, was first used by William James, in his book The Principles of Psychology Widely used in narrative fiction, the technique was perhaps brought to its highest point of development in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939) by the Irish novelist and poet James Joyce. Other exponents of the form were American novelist William Faulkner and British novelist Virginia Woolf. The British writer Dorothy Richardson is considered by some actually to be the pioneer in use of the device.In literature, it is literary technique employed to evince subjective as well as objective reality. It reveals the character's feelings, thoughts, and actions, often following an associative rather than a logical sequence, without commentary by the author. It is used to record the random and apparently illogical flow of impressions passing through a character’s mind.7 Tell briefly the relationship between Streams of Consciousness & Interior Monologue. Stream of consciousness is often confused with interior monologue, but the latter technique works the sensations of the mind into a more formal pattern: a flow of thoughts inwardly expressed, similar to a soliloquy. The technique of stream of consciousness, however, attempts to portray the remote, preconscious state that exists before the mind organizes sensations. Consequently, the re-creation of a stream of consciousness frequently lacks the unity, explicit cohesion, and selectivity of direct thought. 论述题1 What are the two types of people depicted in Hemingway’s early works? And name some of two of early representative works based upon Europe with the one-sentence introduction of the themes respectively.(答案：Hemingway in his early works depicted the lives of two types of people. One type consisted of men and women deprived, by World War I, of faith in the moral values in which they had believed, and who lived with cynical disregard for anything but their own emotional needs. The other type were men of simple character and primitive emotions, such as prizefighters and bullfighters. Hemingway wrote of their courageous and usually futile battles against circumstances.1The Sun Also Rises (1926), is the story of a group of morally irresponsible Americans and Britons living in France and Spain, members of the so-called lost generation of the post-World War Iperiod.2A Farewell to Arms(1929), is the story of a deeply moving love affair in wartime Italy between an American officer in the Italian ambulance service and a British nurse.)2 What is the writing style of Hemingway? How does it manifest?(答案：Hemingway's economical writing style often seems simple and almost childlike, but his method is calculated and used to complex effect. In his writing Hemingway provided detached descriptions of action, using simple nouns and verbs to capture scenes precisely. By doing so he avoided describing his characters' emotions and thoughts directly. Instead, in providing the reader with the raw material of an experience and eliminating the authorial viewpoint, Hemingway made the reading of a text approximate the actual experience as closely as possible. Hemingway was also deeply concerned with authenticity in writing. He believed that a writer could treat a subject honestly only if the writer had participated in or observed the subject closely. Without such knowledge the writer's work would be flawed because the reader would sense the author's lack of expertise. In addition, Hemingway believed that an author writing about a familiar subject is able to write sparingly(保守的) and eliminate a great deal of superfluous detail from the piece without sacrificing the voice of authority. Hemingway's stylistic influence on American writers has been enormous. The success of his plain style in expressing basic, yet deeply felt, emotions contributed to the decline of the elaborate Victorian-era prose that characterized a great deal of American writing in the early 20th century.)3.Give a brief Introduction of Biography of Edwin Robinson & his writings.(答案：American poet, best known for his poems set in Tilbury Town, an imaginary New England village modeled after Gardiner, Maine, his childhood home. Born in Head Tide, Maine, Robinson was educated at Harvard University. His first volumes of poetry, The Torrent and the Night Before (1896) and The Children of the Night (1897), contain psychological portraits of the townspeople of Tilbury, whose inner depths of character are presented with acute understanding and irony. In 1899 Robinson moved to New York City, where his volume Captain Craig and Other Poems(1902) attracted little interest. In 1905, however, this work was favorably reviewed by President Theodore Roosevelt, and thereafter Robinson's poetry received more attention.Robinson's book Town Down the River (1910) contains additional character portraits, notably that of Miniver Cheevy, a romantic in love with the past who consoles himself through drunkenness. Robinson achieved his first major success with The Man Against the Sky (1916), which was concerned with the limited nature of humanity. He also composed a trilogy of narrative poems—Merlin（隼）(1917), Lancelot{兰斯洛特（亚瑟王圆桌武士中的第一位勇士）}(1920), and Tristram(1927; Pulitzer Prize, 1928)—based on Arthurian legend. His other works include Collected Poems (1921; Pulitzer Prize, 1922), Roman Bartholow(1923), The Man Who Died Twice(1924; Pulitzer Prize, 1925), and Matthias at the Door(1931). For the last 25 years of his life ，Robinson spent his summers at the MacDowell Colony of artists and musicians in Peterborough, New Hampshire.4 How does T.S.Eliot’s complexity of theme manifest in the long poe m The Waste Land? (referring to second paragraph,PP415 of the textbook )5 How does William Faulkner describe Emily in A Rose for Emily? What is the use of displaced chronology in the story?(答案：Although Emily is clearly insane and her actions grotesque, she is not portrayed as an isolated feak with no relation to human beings in general, or her community in particular. This is largely due to the narrator who unquestionably speaks for the community. Miss Emily, though a recluse, does not act in a social or moral vacumm, all that she does is observed , surmised and reacted to by the community as represented through the narrator, and therefore she is inevitably linked to it and forms part of it. In addition, we are aware of various sub-groups and generations within the community partly because of the contradictory ways in which Emily is described.Faulker’s handling of time in this story is also noteworthy. The displaced chronology undoubtedly allows the narrator to tell the story in the most dramatic way also fill in useful background details, but it is also a way in which one of the themes-the relation of the individual and his actions to the past, present and future-can be illustrated and reinforced by the structure of the storyitself.)6 What is the idea of Lost Generation? How did the writers express it in literature?(答案：referring to pp教材333-334,归纳主要要点即可)7 What are the important differences between Tom & Huck under the pen of Twain? (答案：教材，pp243, 第二段14-22行)。