Ⅰ.Multiple ChoiceSelect from the four choices of each item the one that best answers the question or completes the statement. Mark your choice by blackening the corresponding letter A, B, C or D on the answer sheet. Ⅲ.Questions and AnswersGive a brief answer to each of the following questions in English. Write your answers in the corresponding space on the answer sheet.1. Some critics believe that the transitional writer Thomas Hardy is emotionally traditional and intellectually advanced. How do you understand this idea?
A. On the one hand,in his Wessex novels, there is an apparent nostalgic touch in his description of the simple and beautiful though primitive rural life, which was gradually declining and disappearing as England marched into an industrial country. And with those traditional characters he is always sympathetic.
B. On the other hand, the immense impact of scientific discoveries and modem philosophic thoughts upon the man is quite obvious.
C. In his works, man is shown inevitably bound by his own inherent nature and hereditary traits which prompt him to go and search for some specific happiness or success and set him in conflict with the environment.
D. Though Naturalism seems to have played an important part in Hardy's works, there is also bitter and sharp criticism and even open challenge of the irrational, hypocritical and unfair Victorian institutions, conventions and morals which strangle the individual will and destroy natural human emotions and relationships. The conflicts between the traditional and the modem, between the old rural value of respectability and honesty and the new utilitarian commercialism, between the old, false social moral and the natural human passion,etc. are all closely set in a realistic background tree to the very time and the very place.
2. William Faulkner is one of the greatest American novelists. What do you know about his narrative techniques?
A. He would never step between the characters and the reader to explain, but let the characters ex- plain themselves and hinder as little as possible the reader's direct experience of the work of art. The most characteristic way of structuring his stories is to fragment the narrative by juxtaposing the past with the present, in the way the montage does in a movie.
B. The interior monologue Faulkner used helps him achieve the most desirable effect of exploring the nature of human consciousness.
C. Faulkner was good at presenting multiple points of view, which gave the story a circular form, wherein one event is centered, with various points of view radiating from it, or different people responding to the same story. Thus a high degree of truth could be reached. The other narrative techniques Faulkner used to construct his stories included symbolism and mythological and biblical allusions.
3. Try to state the theme and the significance of T. S. Eliot's most important single poem The Waste Land 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 modem Western world, but also reflects the prevalent mood of disillusionment and despair of a whole post-war generation.
B. The Waste Land is a poem concerned with the spiritual breakup of a modem 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-eentnry people's disillusionment and frustration in a sterile and futile society.
4. Identify Henry James's most famous theme in his fiction and his favourite approach in characterization, which makes him different from Mark Twain and W. D. Howells as realists. Please give two titles of his works in which this theme and this approach are employed.
A. The international theme.
B. James's psychological approach.
C. The Portrait of A Lady incarnated the clash between the Old World and the New in the life journey of an American girl in a European cultural environment. The Princess Casamassima, which exposed the anarchist conspiracy in the slum of London,was written in a naturalistic mode.
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. Please discuss the significance of William Wordsworth's poetry in the history of English literature.
A. First of all, Wordsworth's theory, as stated in his "Preface" to the second edition of the "Lyrical Ballads," serves as a manifesto of Romanticism. The poet takes the direct experience of the senses as the source of poetic truth as poetry comes from the "emotion recollected in tranquillity." The significance of the "Preface" also presents itself in the poet's advocation of the writing of the common people in ordinary language.
B. Secondly, his practice is what his theory implies, for the joys and sorrows of the common people are his themes. It can be seen in many of his poems such as the "Lucy poems."
C. Thirdly, natural scenery with its beauty and mystery acts also as one of his favorite themes and the sympathy out of the poet's nature towards the poor in rural places becomes part of his concern.
D. Fourthly, the inner workings of individual's mind remain what Wordsworth likes to reveal in his depiction of natural scenery, and the spiritual growth of his own makes his masterpiece The Prelude.
E. Finally, the seemingly simplicity of the poet both in diction and description is immersed found and sympathetic longing for a better world. So the most important contribution he has made is that he has not only started the modern poetry, the poetry of the growing inner self, but also changed the course of English poetry by using ordinary speech of the language and by advocating a return to nature.
2. Retell in a few sentences the story of the last chapter (Chapter 135) "The Chase—Third Day" of Melville's novel Moby-Dick. Discuss the meaning of the ending of the story.
A. The story of Moby-Dick is simple, telling the battle between Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod and the monstrous white whale Moby Dick. Ahab is obsessed by his determination to revenge himself upon the fierce, cunning whale, because it has crippled him. After many days of search and pursuit, the white whale is finally sighted.
B. Chapter 135 is a description of the third day's chase. Three boats have been lowered in chase of the whale, but two of them are later destroyed by the whale. Although the whale is harpooned at last, the ship is sunk and all the people aboard are drowned except Ishmael, the narrator of the story who happens to be rescued by another whale ship.
C. Moby-Dick is not merely a whaling tale or sea adventure. It is a tragic epic. The voyage the Pequod has made is a symbolic voyage of the mind in quest of the truth and knowledge of the universe, a spiritual exploration into man's deep reality and psychology. The battle between Ahab and the white whale symbolizes the struggle between man and nature, man and fate, good and evil.