美国文学提纲(2)

I. Multiple Choice (20 points in all, 1 for each)

1) Check the dictionary: pompous, vernacular

2) At the beginning of Faulkner’s A Rose For Emily, there is a detailed description of

Emily’s old house. The purpose of such description is to imply that the pe rson living in it C.

A. is a wealth lady

B. has good taste

C. is a prisoner of the past

D. is a

conservative aristocrat

3)Stylistically, Henry James’s fiction is characterized by D.

A. short clear sentences

B. abundance of local images

C. ordinary American speech

D.

highly refined language

1. The convention of the desire for an escape from society and a reture to nature in

American Literature is particularly evident in A

A. Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Takes

B. Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Le tter

C. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass

D. Irving’s Rip Van Winkle

2. In 1873, Ralph Waldo Emerson made a speech entitled at Harvard, which was hailed

by Oliver Wendell Homes as “our Intellectual Dedaration of I

A. Nature

B. Self-Reliance

C. Divinity Scholar Address

D. The American

Scholar

3. What’s the analogy that Emily Dickin son uses in her poem Because I could not stop

for death? A

A.Horse and carriage

B. stage and performance

C. Cloud and Shade

D. ship and

harbor

4. Most of the writers in the Modern Period were able to probe into the inner would of of

human reality on the base of D

A. Carl Jung’s “collective unconscious” and “archetypal symbol”

B. Sigmound Frend’s “interpretation of dreams”

C. William Jame’s “stream of consciousness”

D. all of the above.

II. Blank Filling (10 points in all, 1 for each)

1) Henry James is considered the founder of Psychological realism. He believed that reality lies in the impressions made by life on the spectator.

2) Mark Twain’s first novel, The Gilded Age was an artistic failure, but it gave its

name to the America of the postbellum period which it attempts to satirize.

Blank Filling

Blank Filling

1. The best of puritan poets was Edward Taylor, whose complete edition of poems appeared in 1960, more than two hundred years after his death.

8. Edwin Arlington Robinson produced a large body of works and was honored with the Pulitzer Prize in 1522, 1925 and 1928.

10. Fitzgerald’s first novel This Side of Paradise, with its portrayal of casual dissipations of “f laming youth”, was an immediate commercial success.

3. In “Song of Myself”, Whitman’s own early experience may well be identified with the children of a young growing American.

4. The range of Dickinson’s poetry suggests not her limited experience but the power of her creativity and imagination.

5. Mark Twain, breaking out of the narrow limits of local color fiction, described the breadth of American experience as no one had ever done before, or since.

7. Many of O. Henry’s stones talk about the life of poor people in New York.

8. Henry James realism is characterized by his psychological approach to his subject matter.

9. The Financier, T he Tifan and The Stoic form Dreiser’s “Trilogy of Desire”

12. American writers of first postwar era self ——consciously acknowledged that they were a “Lost Generation” devoid of faith and alienated from a civilization.

13. At one time, Sandburg’s reputation mainly rested on a multi ——volume biography of Abraham Lincoln including “The Prairie Years” and “The War Years”14. For publication of his collected Poems, Wallace Stevens received the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize.