美国文学选读复习材料

一

1.“He was silent with conceit of his son. Mrs. Morel sniffed, as if it were nothing.”(Sons and Lovers by wrence)From the above quotation, we can see that Mrs. Morel’s attitude to her husband is ______ .

A. sincerely warm

B. genuinely kind

C. seemingly angry

D. merely contemptuous

2. A boy makes a quest of his idealized childish love through painful experience up to the point of losing his innocence and coming to see the drabness and harshness of the adult world.

The above sentence may well sum up the major theme of ______.

A. Eliot’s poem The love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

B. Bernard Shaw’s play Mrs. Warren’s Profession

C. Joyce’s story Araby

D. Lawrence’s story The Horse Dealer’s Daughter

3. Linguistically, compared with the writing s of Mark Twain, Henry James’s fiction is noted for his ______.

A. frontier vernacular

B. rich colloquialism

C. vulgarly descriptive words

D. refined elegant language

4. Which of the following statements about Washington Irving is NOT true?

A. Literary imagination should breed in a land rich in the past culture.

B. He is preoccupied with the Calvinistic view of original sin and the mystery of evil.

C. His stories are among the best of the American literature.

D. Some of his works are based on the materials of the European legendary tales.

5. Which of the following is NOT one of the main ideas advocated by Emerson, the chief spokesman of New England Transcendentalism?

A. As an individual, man is divine and can develop and improve himself infinitely.

B. Nature exercises a healthy and restorative influence on human beings.

C. There exists an emotional communication between an individual soul and the universal “Oversoul.”

D. Evil and sin are ever present in human heart and will pass on from one generation to

another.”

6. Whitman’s poems are characterized by all the following features EXCEPT ______ .

A. the strict poetic form

B. the free and natural rhythm

C. the easy flow of feelings

D. the simple and conversational language

7. “Then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.” In the quoted sentence, the author might imply that ______.

A. nothing changes in the 5000 years of human history

B. man’s desire to conquer nature can only end in his own de struction

C. nature is evil as it was 5000 years ago

D. nature has the ultimate creative power

二、作家作品：

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Herman Melville

Henry James

Ernest Hemingway

James Fenimore Cooper

Benjamin Franklin

Thomas Jefferson

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Thomas Paine

Edgar Allan Poe

Washington Irving

Henry David Thoreau

Thomas Paine

Edgar Allan Poe

Washington Irving

Henry David Thoreau

Walt Whitman

Mark Twain

Robert Frost

Thomas Stearns Eliot

Theodore Dreiser

John Steinbeck

III. Reading Comprehension. (30 points in all, 10 for each)

Read the quoted parts carefully and answer the questions in English.

1. 1. “With Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz—

Between the light—and me—

And then the Windows failed—and then

I could not see to see—”

Questions:

A. Identify the poem and the poet. (4 points)

B. What do “Windows” symbolically stand for? (3 points)

C. What idea does the quoted passage express? (3 points)

A. Emily Dickinson: “I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died”.

B. Eyes, for they are considered as the windows of human soul.

C. The last thing the dying person saw and heard was the fly and its buzz. When the eyes failed, the human soul was closed and the person died. (The speaker could not see any of the afterlife or God or angels she expected to see.)