专    业：英语语言文学                                  科目代码：441

研究方向：英美文学、西方文论                            考试科目：英美文学

(请把答案写在答题纸上)

I. Fill in the following blanks.   (30%)

1.      is the real mainstream of the English Renaissance. The most famous dramatists in this period are       , and Ben Johnson, who wrote plays with universal qualities of greatness.

2.        is a term invented by John Dryden and later adopted by Samuel Johnson. describing a school of highly intellectual poetry. The main themes of those poets are        ,        and       .The leading figure of the school is        whose best known work The Songs and Sonnets was written in the early period of his writing.

3.       is a religious allegory by John Bunyan, the chief Puritan writer of prose. Milton was the Chief Puritan poet of the Renaissance period whose most famous work is       .

4. With the publication of        by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798, a new movement appeared       on the literary areas. In the neoclassic theory, poetry had been regarded as primarily an       of human life, “a mirror held up to nature.” Romantic theories, however various, referred to the       and       of the individual writer.

5. “Ode To A Nightingale” was written by       in 1819, which is remarkable for its ________and its_________.

6. The Romantic period produced two major novelists,       who deliberately chose to write the life       of provincial English gentlefolk, and        who switched to novel writing after establishing himself as a writer of romantic historical narrative poetry.

7. Among the famous novelists of the Victorian Age were the critical realists like       ,         who were concerned about the fate of common people and carried their duty forward to the criticism of the society and the defense of the mass.

8.“Dover Beach” represents the view of       on spiritual unrest of the Victorian Age. Heroes and Hero Worship written by       who desires for heroes that would reorganize society and govern it in an efficient way.

9.       is regarded as the last important novelist of the Victorian Age who came to question and attack the Victorian conventions and morals. His most famous works are Far from the Madding Crowd,    and      .

10. The English aesthetic movement, influenced by the French symbolists, covered a wide range of poets, writers and artists. Among them,       was the most representative, who was also considered as one of the pioneers of the modem drama.

11. James Joyce is the most outstanding stream-of-consciousness novelist in modern time, whose encyclopedia-like masterpiece is       . D.H. Lawrence was regarded as revolutionary as Joyce in novel writing whose best novels are       and        .

12. A Passage to India, a novel written by       is a fable of moral significance that implies a highly mystical, symbolic view of life, death and human relationship.

13. The landmark and a model of the 20^th century English poetry, comparable to Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads is       by       . “Ash Wednesday”and The Four Quartets were produced in his later years His famous essay on the importance of tradition both in creative writing and in criticism is       .

14. Sailing to Byzantiumwas written by       , a realist symbolist-metaphysical poet with an uncanny power over words, whose style was influenced by       nationalism.

15. Person Narrative is a truthful account of his comprehension of the world by       who played a key role in American Puritanism.

16.       ,which was at once a philosophy, a religion and a literary movement, was one of the most prominent signs of American cultural independence in the period of American Renaissance.       , the most vocal interpreter of this theory, delivered his famous address       at Harvard in 1837.

17. “The Fall of the House of Usher” is the masterpiece of        who has long been a highly controversial figure in American Renaissance The poem        best represents his poetic theory.

18. Like Whitman, Emily Dickinson is an important figure of the American Renaissance In her poem       , she personifies death and immortality to make her message strongly felt.

19. With the mixture of naturalism and impressionism in a novel about the American Civil War named       , Stephen Crane won himself international reputation and the high regard of Henry James and Joseph Conrad.

20. As an American expatriate writer,       masterly juxtaposed American innocence and European experience in a series of intense, psychologically complex works. The other dominant figures of the Age of Realism are       . and       .

21. Ezra Pound’s artistic talents are on full display in the history of the       movement, which flourished from 1907 to 1917 and advanced modernism in arts.

22. The “Second Flowering” refers to the full blossom of American writing in the time of       . comparable only to the great age of the American Renaissance just before the Civil war. The most important writer of the Jazz Age is       .

23. Ralph Ellison’s        published in 1952 tells an existential story of a black man in modemAmerica.

24. The Beginning of the       can be dated to a poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in the fall of 1955.       , a poem by Allen Ginsberg and        a novel by Jack Kerouae became their pocket Bibles

25. The most frequently cited postmodern author has probably been       , especially his early novels V, the Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow. Other names to be reckoned with in postmodern American fiction include Kurt Vonnegut, William Grass, Robert Coover and        whose first novel is Snow White.

26. The Woman Warrior is written by       , a Chinese American writer, another important Chinese American woman writer is Amy Tan, whose most famous work is         .       .

27.       by Ernest Hemingway in 1925,       by Norman Mailer in 1948,       by Joseph Heller in 1961 are among the major American novels on wars in the 20^th  century.

28. Jewish American literature is a unique pan of American literature. Bellow, Roth, Malamud, and Singer best represent the Jewishness in American literature, reflecting on it in their own ways. For example, stresses the power of intellect in his novels with self-teaching at the heart of all his novels while        deals with the closed society of religious Jews.

29. Stephen Greenblatt is the most influential practitioner of the       , one of the most recent developments in contemporary critical theory.

30. There are several American writers who have won Noble Prize in literature. Please name three of them and their works.

 

II. Read the following lines taken from some poems and explain the meaning of them (20%):

1. That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few; do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.   (William Shakespeare)

2. The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.                  (Ezra Pound)

3. Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!

Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.   (Edgar Allen Poe)

 

Ⅲ. Read the follwing poem and answer the questions  (20%):

 

The Tyger

 

Tyger!Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

 

In what distant deeps or sides

Burnt the fire of thine eye?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand, dare seize the fire?

 

And what shoulder, & what art,

Could mist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand? & what dread feet?

 

What the hammer? What the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? What dread grasp

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

 

When the stars threw down their spears,

And water’d heaven with their tears;

Did he smile his work to see?

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

 

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immoral hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

 

1. Who is the poet of this work? What is the main idea of the poem?

2. What are the special artistic features of this poem?

 

IV. Read the following story and answer the essay questions:   (50%)

 

Little Things

Early that day the weather turned and the snow was melting into dirty water. Streaks of it ran down from the little shoulder-high window that faced the backyard. Cars slushed by on the street outside, where it was getting dark. But it was getting dark on the inside too.

    He was in the bedroom pushing clothes into a suitcase when she came to the door.

    I’m glad you’re leaving! I’m glad you’re leaving! She said, Do you hear?

    He kept on putting his things into the suitcase.

    Son of a bitch! I’m so glad you’re leaving! She began to cry. You can’t even look me in the face, can you?

    Then she noticed the baby’s picture on the bed and picked it up.

    He looked at her and she wiped her eyes and stared at him before turning and going back to the living room

Bring that back, he said.

Just get your things and get out, she said.

He did not answer. He fastened the suitcase, put on his coat, looked around the bedroom before turning off the light.

Then he went out to the living room.

She stood in the doorway of the little kitchen, holding the baby.

I want the baby, he said.

Are you crazy?

    No. but I want the baby. I’ll get someone to come by for his things.

You re not touching this baby, she said.

    The baby had begun to cry and she uncovered the blanket from around his head.

Oh, oh she said, looking at the baby.

    He moved toward her.

    For God’s sake! She said. She took a step back into the kitchen.

    I want the baby.

    Get out of here!

    She turned and tried to hold the baby over in a comer behind the stove.

    But he came up. He reached across the stove and tightened his hands on the baby.

    Let go of him, he said.

    Get away, get away! She cried.

The baby was red-faced and screaming. In the scuffle they knocked down a flowerpot that hung behind the stove.

    He crowded her into the wall then, trying to break her grip. He held on to the baby and pushed with all his weight.

    Let go of him, he said.

    Don’t, she said. You’re hurting the baby, she said.

    I’m not hurting the baby he said.

    The kitchen window gave no light. In the near-dark he worked on her fisted fingers with one hand and with the other hand he gripped the screaming baby up under an arm near the shoulder.

    She felt her fingers being forced open. She felt the baby going from her.

    No! she screamed just as her hands came loose.

    She would have it, this baby. She grabbed for the baby’s other arm. She caught the baby around the wrist and leaned back.

    But he would not let go. He felt the baby slipping out of his hands and he pulled back very hard.

In this manner, the issue was decided.

 (1988)

Questions:

1. How helpful is the sentence for your understanding of the man’s character: “He fastened the suitcase, put on his coal, looked around the bedroom before turning off the light” ?

2. What do you think the baby represents to each of them? And who do you think loves the baby more?

3. How do you interpret the last sentence?

 

V.   Read the following passage and answer the question:  (30%)

Defamiliarization is a critical term coined by the Russian Formalists, Literally, it means “making strange”. In a famous essay first published in 1917, Victor Shklovsky argued that the essential purpose of art is to overcome the deadening effects of habit by representing familiar things in unfamiliar ways. This theory vindicates the distortions and dislocations of modernist writing, but it applies equally well to the great exponents of the realistic novel. Charlotte Bronte does something similar to salon art in the following passage:

 

This picture, I say, seemed to consider itself the queen of the collection.

It represented a woman, considerably larger, I thought, than the life. I calculated that this lady; put into a scale of magnitude suitable for the reception of a commodity of bulk, would infallibly turn from fourteen to sixteen stone. She was, indeed, extremely well fed; very much butcher’s meat--to say nothing of bread, vegetables, and liquids—must she have consumed to attain that breadth and height, that wealth of muscle, that affluence of flesh. She lay half-reclined on a couch—why, it would be difficult to say; broad daylight blazed round her. She appeared in hearty health, strong enough to do the work of two plain cooks; she could not plead a weak spine; she ought to have been standing, or at least sitting bolt upright. She had no business to lounge away the noon on a sofa. She ought likewise to have worn decent garments—a gown covering her properly, which was not the case...a perfect rubbish of flowers was mixed amongst them, and an absurd and disorderly mass of curtain upholstery smothered the couch and cumbered the floor. On referring to the catalogue, I found that this notable production bore the name “Cleopatra.”—Charlotte Bronte, Villette (1853)

 

Essay question:

As is known, Cleopatra is often rendered respectable in literary works by its attachment to a mythical or historical source with the discourse of art history, which is “habitually” perceived. In what way is Brontê’s lavish depiction of the female nude different from such a convention? How does the author achieve such an effect? Please elaborate on your argument according to your understanding of “defamiliarization”.