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.1. George Bernard Shaw is the leading playwright of his time. What's Bernard Shaw's viewpoint on literature?
Shaw attacked the Neo-Romantic tradition and the fashionable drawing room drama. He hold that art should serve social purposes by reflecting human life, revealing social contradictions and educating people. The mission of his drama was to reveal the moral, political and economic truth from a radical reformist point of view.
2. What are the themes of George Bernard Shaw in his works?
Following the great tradition of realism, he aims to direct social reforms and shows his indignation against political, economic, moral, or religious problems, such as oppression, exploitation, hypocrisy and prostitution, thus called "problem plays".
3. It is said that B. Shaw's play Mrs. Warren's Profession, has a strong realistic theme, which fully reflects the dramatist's Fabianist idea. What's the theme of the work?
A. As one of the influential members of the Fabian Society, Shaw regarded the establishment of socialism by the emancipation of land and industrial capital from individual and class ownership as the final goal.
B. As a realistic dramatist, he took the modern social issues as his subjects. Most of his plays are concerned with political, economic, moral, or religious problems.
C. Mrs. Warren's Profession is a play about the economic oppression of women.
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. Comment on the characteristics of Modernist literature.
Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho analysis as its theoretical base. The major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between man and nature, man and society, man and man, and man and himself. The modernist writers concentrate more on the private than on the public, more on the subjective than on the objective. They are mainly concerned with the inner being of an individual. Therefore, they pay more attention to the psychic time than the chronological one. 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. Discuss briefly the features of Bernard Shaw's works.
A. His play have a variety of subjects. His early plays were mainly concerned with social problems and directed towards the criticism of the contemporary social, economic, moral and religious evils.
B. Structurally and thematically, Shaw followed the great traditions of realism. As a realistic dramatist, he took the modern social issues as his subjects with the aim of directing social reforms.
C. One feature of Shaw's characterization is that he makes the trick of showing up one character vividly at the expense of another. Another feature is that Shaw's characters are the representatives of ideas and points of view.
D. Much of Shavian drama is constructed around the inversion of a conventional theatrical situation.
3. The Waste Land is T.S. Eliot's most important single poem. Try to state the theme and the significance of the poem briefly.
A. With bold technical innovations in versification and style, the poem not only presents a panorama of physical disorder and spiritual desolation in the modern Western world but also reflects the prevalent mood of disillusionment and despair of a whole postwar generation.
B. The Waste Land is a poem concerned with the spiritual breakup of a modern civilization in which human life has lost its meaning, significance and purpose. The poem has developed a whole set of historical, cultural and religious themes; but it is often regarded as being primarily a reflection of the 20th-century people's disillusionment and frustration in a sterile and futile society.