浙江省2005年7月高等教育自学考试
美国文学选读试题
课程代码：10055
Part Ⅰ:Choose the relevant match from Column B for each item in Column A.(10%)
Section A
Column A Column B
1. Nathaniel Hawthorne A. Desire Under the Elms
2. William Faulkner B. Go Down, Moses
3. F.S. Fitzgerald C. Sister Carrie
4. Eugene O’Neill D. The Beautiful and Damned
5. Theodore Dreiser E. The House of the Seven Gables
Section B
Column A Column B
1. Frederic Winterbourne A. Daisy Miller
2. Faith B. A Rose for Emily
3. Miss Watson C. Young Goodman Brown
4. Tom Buchanan D. Huckleberry Finn
5. Homer Barron E. The Great Gatsby
Part Ⅱ:Complete each of the following statements with a proper word or a phrase according to the textbook.(10%)
1.In Rip Van Winkle, which is written by ,Rip falls into sleep for 20 years, during which the Revolutionary War takes place.
2.In the history of American literature, Realism was a reaction against and paved the way to Modernism.
3.Henry James’s emphasis on and on the human consciousness proved to be a big breakthrough in novel writing and had great influence on the coming generations.
4.As a genre, naturalism emphasized and environment as important deterministic forces shaping individualized characters who were presented in special and detailed circumstances.
5.The Jazz Age of the was characterized by frivolity and carelessness and brought vividly to life in The Great Gatsby.
6.In his novels, Faulkner created a mythical kingdom which mirrors the decline of the
society of America.
7.The impact of Darwin’s evolutionary theory on the American thought and the influence of the 19th century French literature on the American men of letters gave rise to another school of :American Naturalism.
8.John Steinbeck is a novelist of the 1930s.His novel is a record of the life of the dispossessed and the wretched farmers during The Great Depression.
9.In modern American literature, is widely acclaimed “founder of the American drama.”
10.During the latter period of his life time,Pound found great affinity to the Chinese and he made strenuous effort in the study of literature.
Part Ⅲ:Each of the following statements below is followed by four alternative answers. Choose the one that would best complete the statement. (50%)
1. As to the American literature from the early 1800s to the beginning of the Civil War which of the following is not right?
A. American type of characters speaking local dialects appeared in the fiction.
B. There was a desire for an escape from civilized society and a return to the ennobling nature.
C. There was faith in the value of individualism and self-reliance.
D. There was a stress on law and reason in literary writings of the time.
2. Which of the following writers coined the term “The Gilded Age” which referred to the Realistic Period in American history?
A. Henry James B. Mark Twain
C. Ernest Hemingway D. William Faulkner
3. Which of the following is not right about the characteristics of Emily Dickinson’s poetic writing?
A. Her poetry is unique and unconventional in its own way.
B. Her poems have no titles and a particular stress pattern.
C. Her poems are usually rather long and rarely less than 20 lines.
D. Her poetic idiom is noted for its laconic brevity, directness and plainness.
4. Which of the following is not right about American fiction from 1945 onwards?
A. A group of new writers who survived the war wrote about their traumatic experience within the military machine and on European and Pacific battlefields.
B. There appeared a significant group of Jewish-American writers whose work drew on the Jewish experience and tradition.
C. Black fiction began to attract critical attention during the 1950s.
D. American fiction in the 1950s and 1960s proves to be a harvest which derived from its predecessors.
5. Which of the following is reflected in the hero of The Great Gatsby by F.S. Fitzgerald?
A. The hypocrisy and materialism of small town life in the Middle West.
B. The moral confusion and social decay of the South after the Civil War.
C. The contradictions and disillusionment of the American dream.
D. The cynicism among American veteran soldiers.
6. In spite of strong foreign influences, American romantic writings are typically American which can be revealed in the following except .
A. a desire for an escape from civilized society and a return to the ennobling nature
B. American type of characters speaking local dialects appeared in the fiction
C. the American national experience of “pioneering into the west”
D. an emphasis on the free expression of emotions
7. As to the American realist which of the following statements is right?
A. They aimed at the interpretation of the actualities of any aspect of life, free from subjective prejudice, idealism, or romantic color.
B. Their attention was directed to the familiar daily life of the common people.
C. They tried to explore the harmonious realities of life as well as the illusion of heroism.
D. All of the above.
8. The subjects of Emily Dickinso’s poems are mainly about .
A. religion B. death and immortality
C. love and nature D. all of the above
9. Which of the following does not belong to the Lost Generation of modern American literature?
A. Ezra Pound and Robert Frost B. W.C. Williams and Gertrude Stein
C. F.S. Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway D. William Faulkner and Theodore Dreiser
10. Which of the following is not right about O’Neill’s plays?
A. Many of them are attached with a profound insight into human nature and tremendous skill and logic.
B. His expressionistic experimentations contained his tragic vision in some nonrealistic forms.
C. His plays of expressionistic experimentation daringly penetrates into race religions, class conflicts, sexual bondage and social critiques.
D. His plays concern especially the relationship between man and woman of the modern age.
11. In Faulkner’s novels, the mythical county is .
A. Yoknapatawpha B. Oxford
C. Mississippi D. Pond
12. Born of one common cultural heritage, the American Romanticists shared some common features — ,with the English Romanticists.
A. an increasing emphasis on the free expression of emotions
B. an increasing attention to the psychic states of their characters
C. an increasing emphasis on the desire to return to nature
D. both A and B
13. The novel Moby Dick shows the rebellious struggle of Captain Ahab against .
A. the overwhelming, mysterious vastness of the universe and the awesome forces
B. the gliding great demon of the seas of life
C. the white whale
D. the savage harpooners and the motley crew
14. About Emily Dickinson’s poems of love which of the following is not right?
A. Her love poems show people’s feelings of rapture and happiness coming from their love experience.
B. Some of her love poems treat the suffering and frustration love can cause.
C. Many of them give original depictions of the longing for shared moments, the pain of separation, and the futility of finding happiness.
D. Some of them emphasize the power of physical attraction and express a mixture of fear and fascination for the mysterious magnetism between sexes.
15. Which of the following indicates a permanent convention of American literature which is evident in both of Cooper’s Leather-stocking Tales and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?
A. The desire for an escape from society and a return to nature.
B. The desire to push forward to the west frontier.
C. The self-reliance and independence of the individual.
D. Both A and B.
16. In the play The Hairy Ape, the major character Yank .
A. has a sense of belonging nowhere, hence homelessness and rootlessness
B. is typical of the mood of isolation and alienation in the early twentieth century in the United States only
C. reflects the problem of modern man’s identity
D. both A and C
17. A Rose for Emily is difficult to read because .
A. the chronology of narration is displaced alternatively
B. there are too many characters whose relations are too complicated
C. its language is too symbolic and the dialogues are fragmented
D. none of the above
18. In the middle of 19th century, America witnessed a cultural flowering which is called “ ”.
A. the English Renaissance B. the American Renaissance
C. the Second Renaissance D. the Salem Renaissance
19. After the Civil War America had been transformed from to .
A. an agrarian community…a society of freedom and equality
B. an agrarian community…an industrialized and commercialized society
C. an industrialized and commercialized society…a highly developed society
D. a poor and backward society…an industrialized and commercialized society
20. Which of the following is not right about Emily Dickinson’s poems of nature?
A. In them, she expressed her general skepticism about the relationship between man and nature.
B. Some of them showed her belief that there existed a mythical bond between man and nature.
C. Her poems reflected her feeling that nature is restorative to human beings.
D. Many of them showed her feeling of nature’s inscrutability and indifference to the life and interests of human beings.
21. Eugene O’Neill is remembered for his tragic view of life and most of his plays are about .
A. the root, the truth of human desires and human frustrations
B. the moral nature of the modern mankind
C. the relationship between man and nature as well as man and woman
D. the inner contradiction of men before the real world
22. As a spokesman of the “Roaring 20s”,Scott Fitzgerald portrayed .
A. the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself
B. the psychological journey of the modern man and his helplessness in the modern world
C. the primitive struggle of individuals in the context of irresistible natural forces
D. the hollowness of the American worship of riches and the unending American dream of fulfillment
23. Which of the following was not written by Ernest Hemingway?
A. For Whom the Bell Tolls B. The Green Hills of Africa
C. The Sound and the Fury D. The Old Man and the Sea
24. Which of the following cannot be included in the thematic concerns of Robert Frost’s Poems?
A. The terror and tragedy in nature as well as its beauty.
B. The loneliness and poverty of the isolated human being.
C. His love of life and his belief in a serenity coming from working.
D. The contradiction and misunderstanding between man and woman.
25. As to Ezra Pound, which of the following statements is not correct?
A. His artistic talents are on full display in the history of the Imagist Movement.
B. For he was politically controversial and notorious for what he did in the wartime, his literary achievement and influence are somewhat reduced.
C. From his analysis of the Chinese ideogram Pound learned to anchor his poetic language in concrete, perceptual reality, and to organize images into larger patterns through juxtaposition.
D. His language is usually oblique yet marvelously compressed and his poetry is dense with personal, literary, and historical allusions.
Part Ⅳ:Interpretation(16%)
Read the following selections and then answer the questions. Write your answers on the Answer Sheet.
Passage 1
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 learn and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom if my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I,now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
1.What poem is this stanza extracted? Who is the writer?
2.What’s the theme of this poem?
Passage 2
When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant—a combined gardener and cook—had seen in at least ten years.
It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps—an eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.
Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor－he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron—remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily’s father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.
3.What kind of person is Emily Grierson in this story?
4.Why was the death of Miss Emily compared to a “fallen Monument”?
Part Ⅴ:Give brief answers to the following questions. (14%)
1. Please interpret Henry James’s writings of international theme.
2. Please give a brief analysis of Dreiser’s naturalism in his novel Sister Carrie.
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