英美文选论述题

1.What makes “The adventures ofHuckleberry Finn” more than a child’s adventure story? Briefly discuss the question from the following aspects: the setting，the language，the character(s)and the style.A.Setting: in the novel, Mark twainrecreates a small-town world of America and presents the local color.nguage: He uses simple, direct languagefaithful to the colloquial speech, the vernacular language of the local people.C.Character(s): The author recreates tworebels and fugitives running away from civilization, especially Huckleberry Finn, an innocent boy who refuses to accept the conventional village morality.D.Theme: The novel is a criticism of socialinjustice, hypocrisy, conservativeness and narrow-mindedness of the American small town society.E.Style: The novel employs a humorous styleof narration and is also highly symbolic with the central symbol.8.What is the theme of poem “Paradiselost”, and why did John Milton write this poem?A.The theme is the "Fall of Man," i.e. man'sdisobedience and the loss of Paradise, with its prime cause-Satan.B.Satan is a rebellious figure against Godin literature, defe He tempted Adam and Eve, which proved his evilness.ated, he and his rebel angels were cast into hell.However, Satan refused to accept his failure, swearing that “all was not lost”and that he would revenge for his downfall. The freedom of the will is the keystone of Satan’s character, which was the important spirit of the rising middle class. 2.Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoewas a great success partly becausethe protagonist wasa real middle-class hero. Discuss Crusoe,the protagonist of the novel, as anembodiment ofthe rising middle-class virtues in the mid-eighteenth century England. A. Social background: The EighteenthCentury England witnessed thegrowing importance of the middleclass.a. Industrial Revolution;b. The expansion of internationalmarkets;c. The middle class was a revolutionary class then and quite different from the feudal aristocratic class. They were people who had known poverty and hardship, and most of them had obtained their present social status through hard work. They believed in self-restraint, self-reliance and hard work. To work, to economize and to accumulate wealth constituted the whole meaning of their life.d. Literature should provide a realistic presentation of the life of the common people; it should meet the demand of the middle class people.B. Robinson Crusoe embodies the virtuesof the middle class people.With a great capacity for work, inexhaustible energy, courage and persistence in overcoming difficulties, in struggling against nature, Crusoe becomes the prototype of the empire builder, the pioneer colonist.3.What are the major points aboutEnlightenment?A.The 18th-century England is known as theAge of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason.The Enlightenment Movement was a progressive intellectual movement which flourished in France and swept through the whole Western Europe at the time.B.The movement was a furtherance of theRenaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries.C.Its purpose was to enlighten the wholeworld with the light of modem philosophical and artistic ideas.D.The enlighteners celebrated reason orrationality, equality and science. They held that rationality or reason should be the only,the final cause of human thought and activities.They called for a reference to order, reason and rules.They advocated universal education.They believed that human beings were limited, dualistic, imperfect, and yet capable of rationality and perfection through education.E.As a matter of fact, literature at thetime, heavily didactic and moralizing, became a very popular means of public education.F.Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, RichardBrinsley Sheridan, Henry Fielding and Samuel Johnson were the great enlighteners. 4.Based on “Sister Carrie”,say something about the characteristics of American naturalism.A.The impact of Darwin's evolutionarytheory on the American thought and the influence of the 19th century French literature on the American men of letters gave rise to another school of realism: American naturalism.B.The American naturalists accepted themore negative implications of this theory and used it to account for the behavior of those characters in literary works who were conceived as more or less complex combinations of inherited attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economic forces.C.The American naturalists followed theFrench novelist and theorist Emile Zola's call that the literary artist “must operate with characters, passions, human and social data as the chemist and the physicist work on inert bodies, as the physiologist works on living bodies”.D.They chose their subjects from the lowerranks of society, and portrayed misery and poverty of the "underdogs" who were demonstrably victims of society and nature. And one of the most familiar themes in American naturalism is the theme of human "bestiality," especially as an explanation of sexual desire. E.“Sister Carrie”is a typicalrepresentative of American naturalism.7.Discuss Hemingway’s art of fiction: his style, the particulartype of hero in his novels and his life attitudes, etc.A.Style: Hemingway himself once said, “The dignity ofmovement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. ”Typical of this "iceberg" analogy is Hemingway's style. According to Hemingway, good literary writing should be able to make readers feel the emotion of the characters directly and the best way to produce the effect is to set down exactly every particular kind of feeling without any authorial comments, without conventionally emotive language, and with a bare minimum of adjectives and adverbs. Seemingly simple and natural, Hemingway's style is actually polished and tightly controlled, but highly suggestive and connotative. While rendering vividly the outward physical mastery of the art of modern narration events and sensations Hemingway expresses the meaning of the story and conveys the complex emotions of his characters with a considerable range and astonishing intensity of feeling..Type of hero:“In Our Time”is the first book to present a Hemingway hero----Nick Adams.Victimized by violence in various forms, he becomes the prototype of the wounded hero who, with all the dignity and courage he could muster, confronts situations which are not of his own choosing yet threaten his destruction. “The sun also rises”casts lights on a whole generation after the First World War and the effects of the war by way of a vivid portrait of "The Lost Generation," a group of young Americans who left their native land and fought in the war and later engaged themselves in writing in a new way about their own experiences. The young expatriates in this novel area group of wandering, amusing, but aimless people, who arecaught in the war and removed from the path of ordinary life.Life attitudes: Hemingway deals with a limited range of characters in quite similar circumstances and measures them against an unvarying code, known as "grace under pressure,"which is actually an attitude towards life that Hemingway had been trying to demonstrate in his works. However, though life is but a losing battle, it is a struggle man can dominate in such a way that loss becomes dignity; man can be physically destroyed but never defeated spiritually. 9.Robinson Crusoe is universally considered as Daniel Defoe’s masterpiece. What is the significance of the novel?As a sequel to Tom Sawyer, .Huckleberry Finn marks the climax of Twain's literary creativity. Hemingway once described the novel the one book from which "all modern American literature comes." And the book is significant in many ways. First of all, the novel is written in a language that is totally different from the rhetorical language used by Emerson, Poe, and Melville. It is not grand, pompous, but simple, direct, lucid, and faithful to the colloquial speech. This unpretentious style of colloquialism is best described as "vernacular." Speaking in vernacular, a wild and uneducated Huck, running away from civilization for his freedom, is vividly brought to life. The great strength of the book also comes from the shape given to it by the course of the raft's journey down the Mississippi as Huck and Jim seek their different kinds of freedom. Twain, who knew the river intimately, uses it here both realistically and symbolically.The profound portrait of Huckleberry Finn is another great contribution of the book to the legacy of American literature. The novel begins with a description of how Widow Douglas attempts to civilize Huck and ends with him deciding not to let it happen again at the hands of Aunt Sally. The climax arises with Huck's inner struggle on the Mississippi, when Huck is polarized by the two opposing forces between his heart and his head, between his affection for Jim and the laws of the society against those who help slaves escape. Huck's final decision to follow his own good-hearted moral impulse rather than conventional village morality amounts to a vindication of what Mark Twain called "the damned human race, damned for its comfortable hypocrisies, its thoroughgoing dishonesties, and its pervasive cruelties. With the eventual victory of his moral conscience over his social awareness, Huck grows.。