IV. Give brief answers to the following and write your answers on the Answer Sheet. (30%, 15 points for each) 1.
(1) The whole nation had a strong sense of optimism and the mood of “feeling good”, giving birth
to the spectacular outburst of romantic feeling.
(2) The English counterpart exerted a stimulating impact on the writers of the young nation.
(3) Taking foreign influence in consideration, the great works of American writers still carried typically American romantic color.
(4) The young nation had brought forth its own philosophy. Transcendentalism stresses man’s capacity of knowing truth intuitively, and of attaining knowledge transcending the reach of the senses. 2.
(1) In this novel, Dreiser expressed his naturalistic pursuit by expounding the purposelessness of life and attacking the conventional moral standards.
(2) The novel best embodies his naturalistic belief that while men are controlled by heredity, instinct and chance, a few extraordinary and unsophisticated human beings refuse to accept their fate wordlessly and instead strive, unsuccessfully, to find meaning and purpose for their existence.
(3) To Sister Carrie, the world is cold and harsh. Alone, helpless, she moves along like a mechanism driven by desire and catches blindly at any opportunities for a better existence, opportunities first offered by Drouet, and then by Hurstwood. A feather in the wind, she was totally at the mercy of forces she cannot comprehend, still less to say control. The famous picture of Carrie sitting in a rocking chair in her room in the evening, rocking back and forth, is a picture of Carrie’s drifting with the tide. She has no control, no freedom of will.
2007—2008学年度第二期 《美国文学史及作品选读》考试A卷
参 考 答 案
命题人： 王琪、丁华良
I: Complete each of the following statements with proper words or phrases. (20%, 1 point for each) 1. Bryant 2. frontier saga 3. transcendentalist 4. Moby Dick 5. Sketch Book
6. Walden 7. Longfellow 8. Civil War 9. Howells 10. free verse
11. Henry James 12. Martin Eden 13. The Gift of Magi 14. Pound 15. The Great Gatsby 16. A Farewell to Arms 17. Steinbeck 18. Mark Twain 19. Environment 20. American Crisis
II: Each of the following statements below is followed by four alternative answers or completions. Choose the one that is the best in each case. (30%, 1 point for each) 1 --- 5: B B D A B 6 --- 10: D D A C D 11 ---15: A D B C D 16 --- 20: B D B D C 21 --- 25: C B B A C 26 --- 30: C B B D A
III. Read the poems and answer the questions that follow. (20%) Poem 1
1.1 Who wrote this poem? (1%) Emily Dickinson.
1.2 What is the poet or the speaker in the poem watching and recording? (1%)
Apparently the woman tells the story of how she is busily going about her day when a polite gentleman by the name of Death arrives in his carriage to take her out for a ride, but, in reality, the speaker is watching and recording her own funeral.
1.3 What is death compared to in the poem? (1%) Death is compared to a polite gentleman or polite wooer.
1.4 What is depicted in the 3rd stanza? How is it related to the whole poem? (2%)
Death takes the woman on a leisurely ride to the grave and beyond, passing playing children, wheat fields, and the setting sun, which indicate the three periods of a day, morning, noon and evening and symbolize the three stages of human life — childhood, middle age and old age. 1.5 What is depicted in the 4th stanza? (1%)
In this stanza, the speaker describes her dead body and what is wearing. She feels cold because it is evening now and dew drops are forming and she is not wearing much, but more probably it is because she is dead and blood circulation in her body has stopped.
1.6 What does the poet or the speaker in the poem think of eternity? (2%)
The speaker is not quite sure whether there will be eternity after death since she just surmises that “the Horses’ Heads / were toward Eternity —”.
1.7 What is the attitude of the poet or the speaker in the poem towards death? (2%)
The woman describes their journey with the casual ease one might use to recount a typical Sunday drive. She treats death light-heartedly for she believes that death is a necessary step towards eternity or immortality. Poem 2
2.1 Who wrote this poem? (1%) Edgar Allan Poe. 2.2 What is the theme of the poem? (2%)
In the poem, Poe examines a theme which he examines in many of his works: the death of a beautiful woman. It is a poem written in memory of his deceased young wife Virginia Clemm. 2.3 What is the mood of the poem? (1%) The poem is permeated with melancholy.
2.4 How does the poem coincide with Poe’s poetics or theory of poetry writing? (3%)
The poem coincides with Poe’s poetics. It is readable at one sitting. In the poem, Poe examines a theme which he examines in many of his works: the death of a beautiful woman, which, according to him, is “unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” The poem is permeated with melancholy as he believes “melancholy is the most legitimate of all the poetic tones.” And it is rhythmic. 2.5 What makes you think the poem reads like a fairy tale? (3%) The poem has got the elements of a fairy tale. 1) It has the beginning of a fairy tale (1st stanza). 2) The couple's love originated from their childhood.
3) Annabel Lee died because \
Annabel Lee, who was then carried away and buried in a sepulchre in the kingdom by the sea.
4) However, unlike The Raven, in which the narrator believes he will \
Annabel Lee says the two will be together again. And neither the angels in heaven above， Nor the demons down under the sea， Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.
5) On moonlit nights, the speaker will go and lie down by the side of his deceased young wife
In the sepulchre there by the sea， In her tomb by the side of the sea. The poem reads like a fairy tale.
IV. Answer the following questions, and put your answers on the Answer Sheet. (30%, 15 points for each)
1. What is local color fiction? List at least 5 of the best known writers of local color.
Realism first appeared in the United States in the literature of local color, an amalgam of romantic plots and realistic descriptions of things was immediately observable; the dialects, customs, sights, and sounds of regional America. Bret Harte was the first American writer of local color to achieve wide popularity, presenting stories of western mining towns with colorful gamblers, outlaws, and scandalous women. Harte, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Kate Chopin, Joel Chandler Harris, and Mark Twain provided regional stories and tales of the life of America’s Westerners, Southerners, and Easterners. Local color fiction reached its peak of popularity in the 1880s, but by the turn of the century it had begun to decline. 2. Instead of having her punished for her life of sin, Dreiser let Caroline Meeber in Sister Carrier become successful. Can you tell why? This is due to a number of reasons:
1) Theodore Dreiser based the novel on the life of his sister Emma. In 1883 she ran away to Toronto, Canada with a married man who had stolen money from his employer. Another sister of his was a prostitute.
2) Like Sister Carrie who went to Chicago at the age of 18, Dreiser himself left home at age 15 for Chicago and started to support himself, doing menial jobs. He understood perfectly well how hard life was for a girl like Sister Carrie in a big city.
3) His sympathy for Sister Carrie is related to his naturalistic beliefs. The naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral, that men and women had no free will, that their lives were controlled by heredity and the environment, that religious “truth” were illusory, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death. As a pioneer of naturalism in American literature, Dreiser wrote novels reflecting his mechanistic view of life, a concept that held humanity as the victim of such ungovernable forces as economics, biology, society, and even chance. In his works, conventional morality is unimportant,
consciously virtuous behavior having little to do with material success and happiness. So Sister Carrie is not to be blamed for her sin of life.
4) His sympathy for Sister Carrie also shows the influence of the teachings of Charles Darwin----natural selection and the survival of the fittest and that of the teachings of Herbert Spencer----social Darwinism. In this novel, Sister Carrie is portrayed as an example of the survival of the fittest in an indifferent world.