美国文学 选择题 诗歌分析题 有答案(15)

很有用的 美国文学选读 自考本科资料 试题

(1) The spirit of frivolity and carelessness is brought vividly to life in "The Great Gatsby" (1925).

(2) Faulkner’s footsteps in portraying the decadence and evil in the Southern society in a Gothic manner.

(3) Salinger is considered to be a spokesman for the alienated youth in the post-war era and his The Catcher in the Rye is regarded as a students’ classic.

(4) O’Neill is remembered for his tragic view of life and most of his plays are about the root, the truth of human desires and human frustration. (P548---549)

4. What are the styles of the modernists in writing?

Answer:

(1) The defining formal characteristics of the modernistic works discontinuity and fragmentation.

(2) The biggest shift is from the external to the internal, from the public to the private, from the chronological to the psychic, from the objective description to the subjective projection.

(3) Modern American writers in general emphasize the concrete sensory images or details as the direct conveyer of experience.

(4) Their language is direct, compressive, vivid and sparing of words.

(5) Modern fiction tended to employ the first person narration or limit the reader to the "central consciousness" or one character’s point of view. This limitation accorded with the modernistic vision that truth does not exist objectively but is the product of a personal interaction with reality. (P552---553)

5. Some theories and ideologies influenced the Modernists, what are they?

Answer:

(1) Darwinism; (2) Karl Marx’s scientific socialism; (3) Freud’s "unconsciousness" and psychoanalysis; (4) William James’ "stream of consciousness"; (5) Carl June’s "collective unconscious", "archetypal symble". (P546)

6. What are the characteristics of the Eugene O’Neill’s plays?

(1) Of all the plays O’Neill wrote, most of them are tragedies, dealing with the basic issues of human existence and predicament: life and death, illusion and disillusion, alienation and communication, dream and reality, self and society, desire and frustration, etc. His characters (The Hairy Ape) in the plays are described as seeking meaning and purpose in their lives in different ways, some through love, some through religion, others through revenge, but all meet disappointment and despair.

(2) Dramatization of man’s effort in finding the secret of life results in a reconciliation with the tragic impossibility.

(3) "The Hairy Ape" is a play that concerns the problem of modern man’s identity. Yank’s sense of belonging nowhere, hence homelessness and rootlessness, is typical of the mood of isolation and alienation in the early twentieth century in the United States and the whole world as well. (P570-571)

7. Analyze "The Hemingway Code Hero"

Answer:

(1) They are always Exposed to and victimized by violence in various forms, Nick becomes the prototype of the wounded hero who, with all the dignity and courage he could muster, confronts situation.

(2) They are a group of wandering, amusing, but aimless people, who are caught in the war and removed from the path of ordinary life.

(3) They are the men trapped both physically and mentally.

(4) God’s design or his beneficence and to suggest that man is doomed to be entrapped. 15 美国文学 单选题 诗歌分析题

(5) They believe: life is worth living and there are causes worth dying for.

(6) In a tragic sense, the struggle of Hemingway’s heroes show: it is a representation of life as a struggle