Ⅰ.Multiple ChoiceSelect from the four choices of each item the one that best answers the question or completes the statement. Ⅲ.Questions and AnswersGive a brief answer to each of the following questions in English.William Shakespeare is one of the most remarkable playwrights the world has ever known.1. Name his four greatest tragedies.
Shakespeare's four greatest tragedies are Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth.
2. What are the characteristics of the four tragedies in common?
Each portrays some noble hero, who faces the injustice of human life and is caught in a difficult situation and whose fate is closely connected with the fate of the whole nation.
3. Briefly summarize each hero's weakness of nature.
Each hero has his weakness of nature: Hamlet, the melancholic scholar-prince, faces the dilemma between action and mind; Othello's inner weakness is made use of by the outside evil force; the old king Lear is unwilling to totally give up his power; and Macbeth's lust for power stirs up his ambition and leads him to incessant crimes.
4. What is Dreiser's style?
A. For lack of concision, his writings appear more inclusive and less selective, and the readers are sometimes burdened with massive detailed descriptions of characters and events.
B. The time sequence is clear and the plot is straightforward, his sentence structure is awkward, inept and occasionally flatly wrong in word selection and meaning, and mixed and disorganized in voice and tone.
C. He broke away from the genteel tradition of literature and dramatized the life in a very realistic way.
5. Frost's poem are mostly concerned with his contemplation on nature, and the relationship between nature and man. What is the characteristics of Robert Frost's poetry?
By using simple spoken language and conversational rhythms, Frost achieved an effortless grace in his style. He combined traditional verse forms—the sonnet, rhyming couplets, blank verse—with a clear American local speech rhythm, the speech of New England farmers with its idiosyncratic diction and syntax. In verse form he was assorted; he wrote in both the metrical forms and the free verse, and sometimes he wrote in a form that borrows freely from the merits of both, in a form that might be called semi-free or semi-conventional.
6. Charles Dickens is a master story-teller. What is Dickens' Oliver Twist famous for?
It is famous for its vivid descriptions of the workhouse and life of the underworld in the 19th century London. The novel also presents Oliver Twist as Dickens' first child hero and Fagin the first grotesque figure.
7. Daisy Miller brought Henry James international fame for the first time. What's the character of Daisy Miller, the protagonist?
A. the American Girl in Europe, embodying the spirit of the New World.
B. Innocence turns out to be an admiring but a dangerous quality and her defiance of social taboos in the Old World finally brings her to a disaster.
8. What does Yoknapatwapha Country stand for in Faulkner's novels?
A. In William Faulkner's writings, the place Yoknapatawpha Country is frequently set as the background for the stories. This place is actually an imaginary place based on Faulkner's childhood memory about the place where he grew up, the town of Oxford in his native Lafayette Country in the American South.
B. With his rich imagination, Faulkner turned the land, the people and the history of the region into a literary creation and a mythical kingdom. The Yoknapatawpha Country series have an overall pattern in which the fate of a ruined homeland always focuses on the collision of Faulkner's intelligent, sensitive, and idealistic protagonist with the society of the twentieth century. Most of the major themes are directly related to this confrontation in Faulkner's novels.
Ⅳ.Topic DiscussionWrite no less than 150 words on each of the following topics in English in the corresponding space on the answer sheet.1. "O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumns being/Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead/Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, /Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, /Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O Thou, Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed..."
Determine the author of the poem first. Then discuss the main idea of the stanza.
Percy Bysshe Shelley. The first line of the poem breaks the very strong literary tradition that associated the west wind with the spring. Of course, Shelley had the best of authorities for his defiance of the convention. The west wind dominates the autumn. One of the effects he gains is to suggest a fresh and vital contact with the actual by creating his wind in dramatic opposition to the lulling, spring zephyr that had become a conventional poetic prop. But another effect is equally, if not more, important. Shelley begins the poem in defiance of a strong literary convention, the association of the west wind with the spring. He marks this defiance by reminding his reader in the first stanza of the conventional west wind, the autumnal winds sister.
2. "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,/And sorry I could not travel both."
Questions: A. Who is the author?
B. What does "diverged" mean?
C. What does the line imply?
A. Robert Lee Frost.
B. "Diverged" means separated and went on in different directions.
C. One has to make choice, especially, in the course of one's life.
3. Why are naturalists inevitably pessimistic in their view? Please discuss the above question in relation to the basic principles of literary naturalism.
A. The American naturalists accepted the more negative implications of Darwin's evolutionary 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.
B. They believed that man's instinct, the environment and other social and economic forces played an overwhelming role and man's fate is "determined" by such forces beyond his control.
With Blue—uncertain stumbling Buzz—
Between the light—and me—
And then the Windows failed—and then
I could not see to see—
Questions:4. A. Identify the poem and the poet.
A. Emily Dickinson; I Heard a Fly Buzz—When I Died—.
5. B. What do "Windows" symbolically stand for?
B. " Windows" symbolically stand for the door to heaven.
6. C. What idea does the quoted passage express?
C. The quoted passage vividly describes the moment of my dying and expresses my doubt of the existence of eternal heaven.
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Questions:7. A. Identify the author and the title of the poem from which this part is taken.
A. Shakespeare;Sonnet 18.
8. B. What does the word "this" in the last line refer to?
B. "This" refers to the poem.
9. C. What idea do the quoted lines express?
C. When you are in my eternal poetry, you are even with time. A nice summer's day is usually transient, but the beauty in poetry can last forever.
10. How do you understand Hemingway's "Iceberg Principle" according to his works?
A. Hemingway once said, "The dignity of movement of any iceberg is due to only one eighth of it being above water."
B. 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 emotion language, and with a bare minimum of adjectives and adverbs.
11. The literary school of naturalism was quite popular in the late 19th century. What are the major characteristics of naturalism?
A. Strongly influenced by social Darwinism, naturalism emphasizes the determining power of the crushing forces of environment and heredity.
B. Being devoid of the freedom of choice and incapable of shaping their own destinies, men and women are helpless and insignificant in a cold and indifferent world.
C. The naturalistic writers reported truthfully and objectively, with a passion for scientific accuracy and overwhelming accumulation of factual detail.