美国文学选读试题与答案(英专)(转贴)
美国文学史及美国文学选读(英专)(转贴)1、who were the earliest settlers ? where were they then? Who was the most influential group?
2、What were the first American writings?
3、Give a description of American puritans?
The answer:r
1. the earliest settlers included Dutch, Swedes, Germans, French, Spaniards, Italians
and Portuguese. Frenchman settled in the Northern colonies and along the St. Lawrence River,
Swedes along the Delaware, Dutch along the Hudson, Germans and Scotch-Irish in New York and
Pennsylvania, and the Spanish in Florida. There were negroes in New England , the middle
colonies, and throughout the South; and American Indians were everywhere. All contributed to
the forming of the American civilization, but the colonies that became the first united states
were for the most part English sustained by English traditions, ruled by English laws,
supported by English commerce, and named after English monarchs and English lands: Georgia
Carolina Virginia Maryland New York New Hampshire New England.
2. the first writings that we call American were the narratives an journals of these
settlements. They wrote about their voyage to the new land, about adapting themselves to
unfamiliar climates and crops, about dealing with Indians. They wrote in diaries and in
journals. They wrote letters and contracts and government charters and religious and political
statements. They wrote about the land which stretched before them---unimaginable and immense,
with rich dense forests and deep-blue lakes and rich soil. it stirred the imagination to great
heights. All seemed possible through hard-working and faith.
3. the American puritans, like their brothers back in England, were idealists, believing
that the church should be restored to the “purity” of the first century Church as established
by Jesus Christ Himself. To them religion was a matter of primary importance. They made it
their chief business to see that man lived and thought and acted in a way which tended to the
glory of god. They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity,
and limited atonement (or the salvation of a selected few) through a special infusion of grace
from god, all that john Calvin(1509-1564),the great French theologian who lived in Geneva had
preached. It was this kind of religious belief that they brought with them into the wilderness.
There they meant to prove that they were God’s chosen people enjoying His blessing on this
earth as in heaven 。
[[i] 本帖最后由 梁上燕 于 2006-7-25 10:36 编辑 [/i]] Part II 理性和革命时期文学(转贴)
What is your impression upon the person of Benjamin Franklin?
What belief does the Autobiography stand for?
What is Thomas Paine’s Common Sense about?
What does Freneau’s poem the wild honey suckle indicate?
Answer:
1. The secular ideals of the American Enlightenment were exemplified in the life and
career of Benjamin Franklin, who instructed his countrymen as a printer, not a priest. He was a
humanist, concern with this world and the people in it. He was a scientist; a master of
diplomacy; a humanitarian who helped established hospitals, schools, and libraries. He was a
believer in the possibilities of human progress and comforts of material success; and he was a
prose stylist whose writing reflected the neoclassical ideals of clarity, restraint,
simplicity, and balance. Franklin seemed to represent the age in his paradoxical faith in both
social order and in natural rights, in love of stability and devotion to revolutionary change.
He was symbolic even in his success in the printing trade, for the 18th century in America was
a time of and immense expansion of publishing that fed a growing an increasing literate
colonies population.
2. The Autobiography is, first of all, a Puritan document. It is Puritan because it is a
record of self-examination and self-improvement. The Puritans, as a type, were very much given
to self-analysis. Because they believed in predestination, the Puritans and Calvinists
constantly examined their conscience to ascertain for themselves how much more they should do
to ensure salvation. Thus they were most of them great keepers of diaries and journals. Reading
the Autobiography, one sees an old man, serene and cool, casting a backward glance, looking
intensely into his past life and, pen in hand, carefully noting down his experience as if in
this way, he could communicate with God. The meticulous chart of 13virtued he set himself to
cultivate to combat the tempting vices, the stupendous effort he made to improve his person,
the belief that God help those who help themselves and that every calling is a service to God
---all these indicate that Franklin was intensely Puritan. Then, the book is also a convincing
illustration of the Puritan ethic that, in order to get on in the world, one has to be
industrious, frugal, and prudent.
3. The life of Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was one of continual, unswerving fight for the
rights of man. He wrote a number of works of such a revolutionary and inflammatory character
that it is no exaggeration to state that he helped to spur and inspire two greatest revolutions
that his age had witnessed. His Common Sense, declaring as it did that “Government, even in
its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one, ” attacked
British monarchy and added fuel to the fire which was soon to bring the colossus of its
colonial rule down in flames. Paine declared that the crisis with which the North American
colonies were then faced could only be solved by an appeal to man’s instincts and common sense
and to “the clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed” impulses of conscience. The booklet was
warmly received in the colonies both as a justification for their cause of independence and as
an encouragement to the painfully fighting people. Paine became a major influence in the
American Revolution.
4. Here Freneau offers, along with other early writers like William Byrd II, Timothy
Dwight, and Thomas Jefferson, a version of an abundant America with potential for providing a
good life for all. The poem is also an indication of his dedication to American subject matter
as he examined peculiarly American characteristic of the countryside. Freneau was the most
significant poet of
18th century America. Some of his themes and images anticipated the works of such 19th century
American Romantic writers as Cooper, Emerson, Poe and Merville Part III 浪漫主义文学(转贴)
1 what is irving’s style?
2 what does irving’s “rip van winkle” reveal?
3 read poe’s works, and tell what poe’s theories for the short story and poetry are?
4 read “raven”, and use it as an example to illustrate his poetic theories.
5 what transcendentalist views did Emerson state in his Nature?
6 In your opinion,how should we read Walden?
7 From Walden, we can know what Thoreau’s belief is?
8 What is the theme of Moby Dick?
9 What is the significance of the character, Ahab, in the history of American literature?
10 say something about the symbolism in Moby Dick.
11 give a brief analysis of Hester Prynne and Dimmesdale in The Scarlet Letter.
12 can you say something about the style of Walden ?
13 what is the Hawthorn’s style?
14 what is transcendentalism?
Answer:
1. Irving’s style can only be described as beautiful. It is imitative, it is true, but
he was a highly skillful writer. Never shocking and a bit sentimental as times, his manner
seems more important than his matter. The gentility, urbanity, and pleasantness of the man all
seem to have found adequate expression in his style. The adage, “the style is the man,”
applies to no one else so well. Responsive to sensuous experience, Irving was in fact recording
his expressions in his writings. The reader sees, hears, smells, tastes and touches while
reading him , and enjoys the lucid style probably as much as the stories. There are quiet a few
skriking features which characterize Irving’s writings. First, Irving avoids moralizing as
much as possible; he wrote two amuse and entertain, which departs to no small extent from the
basic principles of his Puritan forebears. Then he was good at enveloping his stories in an
atmosphere, the richness of which is often more than compensation for the slimness of plot. His
characters are vivid and true so that they tend to linger in the mind of the read. The humor
which has built itself into the very texture of his writings is such that reading him, it is
difficult not to smile and occasionally even chuckle. And the finished and musical language
(indeed, some people read Irving just for the music of his language) and the patent workmanship
have been among the points of critical attention for a long time. There is a good deal of craft
and skill in the man. If Franklin took pens to learn how to write well from Addison and Steele
and Irving modeled himself on Goldsmith so that he is at times known as “the American
Goldsmith”. A chinese student of English may do well to read and even recite a little of
Irving to improve his written English.
2. the story reveals, to some extent, the conservation attitude of its author. Rip went
to sleep before the War of Independence and woke up after it. The change that had occurred in
the 20 years he slept was to him not always for the better. Whereas, before the war, there had
been peace and harmony, there came now the scramble for power between parties. What had been a
disinterested, dispassionate idle talk about events and occurrences of the times, was now
replaced by a passionate factional squabble. The tempo of life quickened. Pre-war leisurely
existence acquired “a busy, bustling, disputatious tone”. Instead of feeling happy about the
country finally independent from the york of british colonial rule. Rip was pleased with his
new life chiefly because “he had got his neck out of the york of matrimony”. The story might
be taken as an illustration of Irving’s argument that change and revolution upset the natural
order of things, and of the fact that Irving never seemed to accept a modern democratic
America.
3. His theories for the short story and poetry are remarkable in their clarity even if
they lack what Joseph wood kryutch terms “intellectual detachment” and “catholidity of taste
” Poe’s principles for the short story are best illustrated in his review of Hawthorne’s
Twice-Told Tales. The short story, he says, must be of such length as to be read at one
sitting, so as to insure the totally of impression. The very first sentence ought to help to
bring out “single effect” of the story. No word should be used which does not contribute to
the pre-established design of the work. A tale should reveal some logical truth with the
fullest satisfaction, and should end with the last sentence, leaving a sense of finality with
the reader. Poe’s own creations of imagination satisfy his critical theories more or less
perfectly. Take his “the fall of the house of usher” for example. The initial sentence, a
long periodic leads the reader right into the story of “the melancholy of the house of usher
”. It is obvious that “melancholy” is to be the tone of the story, and that tone is set from
the very outset by the few words which poe choose carefully to place on the first page, words
like “insufferable gloom, desolate or terrible, bleak walls, vacant eye like windows, decayed
trees, depression of soul, iciness and dreariness” serve to establish the gloomy and dreadful
atmosphere of the story admirably well. The whole story is narrated in agonizing suspense:
Roderick and his sister, the corruption of his mind and the disintegration of his house, and
the narrator apparently losing his own reason in his friend’s presence –all these contribute
to the single effect the author intends the tale to produce on the reader: the disintegration
and annihilation of a human mind. There is not much to cut in the narration. And the end of the
story, a wonderfully loaded long sentence, fits the standard of finality as much as one can
possibly image. We may also take a look at “the cask of amontillado” . here again the first
sentence introduces the reader right into the story the last one gives the reader a wonderful
sense of absolute finality. Perhaps, the exception of the pleadings of the dying man, we don’t
find much that is irrelevant to the organic whole of the story. In both this and “the fall of
the house of usher” brevity is emphasized. Other stories like “ligeia” the first sentence of
which contains a mystery enough to get the story stared, “the purloined letter ” in which no
one knows where the letter is before the end of the second page, and then “the murders in the
rue morgue ”, to quote just a few titles among so many, all seem to substantiate his critical
assumptions with regard to the short story. There is, of course, discrepancy between his own
theory and practice. One handy example may be “the man of the crowd” which does not offer any
final ending. 楼主还有些没发完吧??可以发完整版的么?急需 请查看短消息:yct22 这是延大的试题么？？
可以发给我一份吗。谢谢
顶
楼主可以发一份完整版到我邮箱里吗[email]baimoshui@126.com[/email] 我也要~~~~~[email]abcd860126@163.com[/email] 我也要．．．．．．[email]793765816@qq.com[/email] 谢谢！！ 可以发一份给我吗????可以给我发份么？
可以给我发分完整版的么？１１７０７３６２８＠１６３.ＣＯＭ我的邮箱～谢谢袄～～我也要~~~~~~~
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