A. They ventured the forbidden subjects such as sex, death, and violence. B. They stressed the possible triumph of human will. C. They wrote in a daring, open, and direct manner. D. They see human beings no more than a physical object.
28. ____ is often acclaimed as the literary spokesman of the Jazz Age.
A.
Ernest
Hemingway B. F. Scott Fitzgerald C.
William
Faulkner D. John Steinbeck
29. ____, one of America’s greatest playwrights, won the Nobel Prize in 1936, the first American playwright to receive the honor. Some of his most famous works include The Hairy Ape, Long Day’s Journey into Night. A.
Arthur
Miller B. Tennessee Williams C.
Bernard
Malamud D. Eugene O’Neill
30. Edgar Allan Poe occupies an important position in American literature as a poet and a ____. A.
short
story
writer B. novelist
C.
dramatist D. translator
III. 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.
2. Instead of having her punished for her life of sin, Dreiser let Caroline Meeber in
Sister Carrier become successful. Can you tell why?
美国文学期末考试试卷模拟试题三
参考答案
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. 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.