Ⅰ.Multiple Choice Select from the four choices of each item the one that best answers the question or completes the statement. Mark your choice by blacking the corresponding letter A, B, C or D on the answer sheet. Ⅱ.Reading Comprehension Read the quoted parts carefully and answer the questions in English. Write your answers in the corresponding space on the answer sheet.1. "And thus the native hue of resolution/Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." (Shakespeare, Hamlet)
Questions: A. What does the "native hue of resolution" mean?
B. What does the "pale cast of thought" stand for?
C. What idea do the two lines express?
A. determination (determinedness, action, activity...).
B. consideration (indecision, inactivity, hesitation...).
C. Too much thinking (consideration of) made (makes) activity (action) impossible.
2. "The early lilacs became part of this child,/And grass and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird,/And the Third-month lambs and the sow's pink-faint litter, and the mare's foal and the cow's calf,/And the noisy brood of the barnyard or by the mire of the pond-side,/And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there, and the beautiful curious liquid,/And the water-plants with their-graceful flat heads, all became part of him."
Questions: A. Name the author of the poem.
B. What is the poetic style called?
C. What does the passage describe?
A. Walt Whitman.
B. Free verse.
C. The passage describes the growth of a child who is wandering and admiring the scene around him. In the poem, the early experience of the poet may well be identified with the early days of a young and growing America.
3. "I celebrate myself, and sing myself,/And what I assume you shall assume,/For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you./I loafe and invite my soul,/I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass." (from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself")
Questions: A. Whom does "myself" refer to?
B. How do you understand the line "I loafe and invite my soul"?
C. What does "a spear of summer grass" indicate?
A. The poet himself and the American people.
B. This line indicates a separation of the body and the soul.
C. The phrase indicates Whitman's optimism and experience.
4. "And so she died. Fell ill in the house filled with dust and shadows, with only a doddering Negro man to wait on her, we did not even know she was sick; we had long since given up trying to get any information from the Negro. He talked to no one, probably not even to her, for his voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse."
Questions: A. Identify the author and the title of the work from which the passage is taken.
B. Who dies?
C. How do you describe the relationship between her and her neighbors?
A. William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily.
B. Emily dies.
C. She is secluded from her neighbors.
Ⅲ.Questions and Answers Give a brief answer to each of the following questions in English. Write your answers in the corresponding space on the answer sheet.1. What are the common features in Shakespear's characterization of the four greatest tragedy heroes?
(1)Each portrays some noble hero, who faces the injustice of human life and is caught in a difficult situation.
(2)Heroes' fate is closely connected with the fate of the whole nation.
(3)Each hero has his weakness of nature.
2. What is the position of Henry Fielding in the history of English literature?
Henry Fielding was the first of all the 18th century English novelists to write the "comic epic in prose", and the first to give the modern novel its structure and style. Before him, the narration of the novel was either in the epistolary form or through the mouth of the hero. Fielding used "the third-person narration" in which the author remains the omniscient God. Thus, "He" can not only represent the behaviours of the characters, but also the internal workings of their mind. In form, Fielding retains a grand epic style and keeps to a realistic representation of common life as it is. So, he has been regarded as "Father of the English novel".
3. Whitman has made radical changes in the form of poetry by choosing free verse as his medium of expression. What are the characteristics of Whitman's free verse?
What he prefers for his new subject and new poetic feelings is "free verse", that is, poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme. A looser and more open-ended syntactical structure is frequently favored. Lines and sentences of different lengths are left lying side by side just as things are, undisturbed and separate. There are re~ compound sentences to draw objects and experiences into a system of hierarchy.
4. Give a brief analysis of Carrie Meeber in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie?
Carrie Meeber is the protagonist of Sister Carrie. Penniless and "full of the illusions of ignorance and youth", she leaves her rural home to seek work in Chicago. She got to know Charles Drouet, a salesman and she became his mistress. During his absence, she falls in love with Drouet's friend George Hurstwood, a middle-aged, married, comparatively intelligent and cultured saloon manager. They finally elope and live together for more than three years. Carrie becomes mature in intellect and emotion, while Hurstwood, away from the atmosphere of success on which his life has been based, steadily declines. At last she thinks him too great a burden and leaves him. She finally succeeded in her career but feels lonely.
Sister Carrie best embodies Dreiser's naturalistic belief that while men are controlled and conditioned by heredity, instinct and chance, a few unsophisticated human beings refuse to accept their fate and try to find meaning and purpose for their existence. Carrie, as one of such, senses that she is merely a cipher in an uncaring world yet seeks to grasp the mysteries of life and thereby satisfies her desires for social status and material comfort.
Ⅳ.Topic Discussion Write no less than 150 words on each of the following topics in English in the corresponding space on the answer sheet.1. Discuss what is "stream-of-consciousness" in novel writing.
Stream-of-consciousness is a literary trend of modernism with the notion that multiple levels of consciousness existed simultaneously in human mind, that one's present was the stun of his past, present and future, and that the whole truth about human beings existed in the unique, isolated and private world of each individual. Writers like Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf concentrated all their efforts on digging into human consciousness. In their writings, the past, the present and the future are mingled together and exist at the same time in the consciousness of an individual.
2. Under the influence of the leading romantic thinkers like Kant and the Post-Kantians, Romanticists demonstrated a strong reaction against the dominant modes of thinking of the 18th-century's Neoclassicists. Discuss the relation to the works you know, the difference between Romanticism and Neoclassicism.
(1)Neoclassicists upheld that artistic ideals should be order, logic, restrained emotion and accuracy, and that literature should be judged in terms of its service to humanity, and thus, literary expressions should be of proportion, unity, harmony and grace. Pope's An Essay on Criticism advocates grace, wit (usually through satire/humour), and simplicity in language (and the poem itself is a demonstration of those ideals, too); Fielding's Tom Jones helped establish the form of novel; Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" displays elegance in style, unified structrue, serious tone and moral instruction.
(2)Romanticists tended to see the individual as the very center of all experience, including art, and thus, literary work should be "spontaneous overflow of strong feelings", and no matter how fragmentary those experiences were (Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," or "The Solitary Reaper,") or Coleridge's "Kubla Khan", the value of the work lied in the accuracy of presenting those unique feelings and particular attitudes.
(3)In a word, Neoclassicism emphasized rationality and form but Romanticism attached great importance to the individual's mind (mention, imagination, temporary experience...).