A. Multiple-choice questions:

(Each of the statements below is followed by four alternative answers. Choose the one that would best complete the statement and put the letter in the bracket. )

1. Of all the following issues,     B     is definitely NOT the focus of the Romantic writers in the American literary history.

      A. Puritan morality      B. human bestiality     C. noble savages     D. divinity of man

2. Henry David Thoreau's work,       A    , has always been regarded as a masterpiece of the New England Transcendental Movement.

       A. Walden     B. The Pioneers      C. Nature     D. "Song of Myself"

3. "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind" is a famous quote from    D      's writings.

A. Walt Whitman    B. Henry David Thoreau    C. Herman Melville    D. Ralph Waldo Emerson

4. The famous 20-year sleep in "Rip Van Winkle" helps to construct the story in such a way that we are greatly affected by Irving's___A_____.

    A. involvement with the passage of time             B. transient beauty

    C. laziness and corruptibility of human beings        D. supernatural manipulation of man's life

5. According to Emerson, man's capacity is __C______.

    A. ambiguous     B. limited       C. infinite     D. subsidiary to God

6. Moby Dick, the big white whale, is possibly read as ____C____.

     symbolic of all the following EXCEPT

     A. malignancy     B. beauty     C. adultery     D. God

7. According to Nathaniel Hawthorne, romance should be ___D_____.

    A. both imaginative and creative       B. full of adventures

    C. a true record of human life          D. a mixture of facts and fancy

 8. Which of the following is NOT emphasized by the New England Transcendentalism?B

     A. Nature is not purely of matter, but alive with God's overwhelming presence.

     B. Individual human beings are depraved, hence they should be immortal .

C. Material economy for spiritual wealth.

D. In every single human being there dwells the divine spirit.

9. The pink ribbon appears three times in respectively three places in"Young Goodman Brown", which might possibly suggest that ____A____.

      A. Goodman Brown's night trial in the forest might be an illusion

      B. Faith is seen to be there with Brown at the witch meeting

      C. Hawthorne uses it as an indication of Brown's physical presence in the forest

      D. the pink ribbon is not Faith's

10. Walt Whitman was a founding figure of American poetry. His innovation first of all lies in his use of

       ______C__ , poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme.

      A. blank verse        B. heroic couplet      C. free verse        D. iambic pentameter

11. Leaves of Grass commands great attention because of its uniquely poetic embodiment of ___A_____ , which are written in the founding documents of both the Revolutionary War and the American Civil War.

     A. the democratic ideals     B. the romantic ideals   C. the self-reliance apirits    D. the religious ideas

12. According to Whitman, the genuine participation of a poet in a common cultural effort was to behave as a supreme ___B______.

       A. democrat      B. individualist       C. romanticist       D. leader

13. Whitman is noted for his use of     A      language, which has a lot to do with his early career as a newspaperman.

     A. oral      B. poetic       C. formal      D. archaic

14. In  B       , Washington Irving agrees with the protagonist on the preferability of the past to the present, of a dream-like world to the real world.

    A. "Young Goodman Brown"   B. "Rip Van Winkle"   C. Daisy Miller    D. The Confidence-Man

B. Blank-filling :

 (Complete each of the following statements with proper Words or phrases according to the textbook. )

1. Ishmael, the elmracter, is intended as a    contrast

      to Ahab in that the former shows a strong capacity for love and sympathy whereas the latter does not.

2. Emerson believed that man's knowledge of the universe lies in an original relation with it, rather than in __ books written by foregoing generations

_______.

3. The most clearly defined literary movement in the Romantic Period is generally agreed to be _______ New England Transcendentalism

__.

4. In most of the American Romantic writings, a new emphasis was put on the ___ imaginative and emotional

______qualities of literature.

5.      Washington Irving

     is greatly honored as the American Goldsmith for his literary craftsmanship.

6. By means of     free verse

    , Walt Whitman believed, he has turned the poem into an open field, an area of vital possibility where the reader can allow his own imagination to play.

7. All his life, Hawthorne seemed to be haunted by _____sin and evil

__ which he has managed to articulate fully in almost all his works.

8. Faith in "Young Goodman Brown" is to a great extent read as a(n)    allegorical

     figure, symbolic of the possibility of good in man as a whole.

 

C. T-F statements:                                 

(Decide whether the following statements are true or false and write your answers in the brackets. ) 1--9  FTFTT  FTFT

 

1. Emerson and his young friend Edgar Allan Poe are considered the forerunners of the literary movement of New England Transcendentalism in the 19th century.F

2. Cooper, one of the 19th century American writers, is generally noted for his Leather-Stocking Tales.T

3. Geoffrey Crayon is a carefully contrived character in Washington Irving's The Sketch Book and his optimistic view of the changing society in his time impresses the readers.F

4. For Emerson and his disciples, material economy is good for spiritual wealth.T

5. Walt Whitman was also a political poet who wrote a series of poems incorporating his emotions and feelings during the Civil War, which were gathered as a collection under the title of Drum Taps.T

6. The forest Young Goodman Brown goes to during his night journey is literally a place where the evil beings rustle about.F

7. Ahab seeks to destroy the whale to prove that man is greater than the power that hides behind the pasteboard masks of physical reality.T

8. Rip Van Winkle feels happy and fortunate to be with his family again after he comes back from the woods.F

9. Two juxtapositions are paralleled with one anther in Irving's "Rip Van Winkle". One is between the pre-war and the post-war periods, and the other between a dream-like world and a temporal one.T

D. Work-author pairing-up :

 (   C  ) 1. The Scarlet Letter                 A. Herman Melville

 (   A  ) 2. The Confidence-Man              B. Walt Whitman

 (    C ) 3. The House of the Seven Gables      C. Nathaniel Hawthorne

 (  F   ) 4. "The Over-Soul"                  D. Henry David Thoreau

 (    D ) 5. Walden, or Life in the Woods        E. Washington Irving

 (    B ) 6. "Song of Myself                  F. Ralph Waldo Emerson

 (  B  ) 7. There Was a Child Went Forth

 (   E  ) 8. The Sketch Book

(   A  ) 9. Billy Budd1.

 

E. Define the literary terms listed below:

l. American Puritanism

2. Transcendentalism

3. Free verse

F. Reading comprehension:

Directions : For each of the quotations listed below please give the name of the author and the title of the literary work from which it is taken and then briefly interpret it. (Note : Possible answers are suggested in brief for reference, but they are not the complete and the only answers.  You need to extend them and work out your

own )

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." These lines are taken from "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman.The poet is celebrating individualism and nationalism in this poem. Here "I" does not necessarily mean the poet or a particular person, because the poet intermingles the first person with the second person by the word "assume". So later in this poem the poet is singing of all those people who form the American nationality.

 

2. "Standing on the bare ground, --my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,--all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.' This selection is from Nature by Emerson. It is a classic piece in American Transcendental writings, for it first of all contains the most effective pun on"I" (eye) used to demonstrate fully the spirituality of human beings. It also illustrates Emersonian philosophy of each individual human being being part of the Universe, that is, the over-soul. Last but not the least, it affirms the divinity of human beings.

3. "There was, as usual, a crowd of folk about the door, but none that Rip recollected. The very character of the people seemed changed. There was a busy, bustling, disputatious tone about it, instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquility. He looked in vain for the sage Nicholoas Vedder  "This selection is taken from "Rip Van Winkle" by Washington Irving. It at least highlights the change that Rip feels as he enters the village after the 20-year sleep; the destructive effect of the change; Irving's preferance for the values and memories that are gone with the change.

 

4. "Oh, lonely death on lonely life! Oh, now I feel my topmost greatness lies in my topmost grief. Ho, ho] from all your furthest bounds, pour ye now in, ye bold billows of my whole foregone life, and top this one piled comber of my death! Toward thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; form hells heart I stab at thee; for hates sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, while still chasing thee though tied to thee, thou damned whale!." This selection is from Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Ahab as a man who wills his death, in that he exerts power over something that is beyond human limitation, which is considered to be the sin of pride that defies God in a biblical sense. He is a man aflamed with the fire of hatred and revenge, so obsessed with his selfish and willful pursuit that finally he is driven to the edge of insanity and stripped of humanity. Without love and sympathy, Ahab dies a lonely hero.

 

5. ".,. On the Sabbath-day, when the congregation were singing a holy psalm, he could not listen, because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear, and drowned all the blessed strain. When the minister spoke from the pulpit, with power and fervid eloquence, and, with his hand on the open bible, of the sacred truths of our religion, and of saint-like lives and triumphant deaths, and of future bliss or misery unutterable, then did Good man Brown turn pale, dreading, lest the roof should thunder down upon the gray blasphemer and his hearers. Often, awakening suddenly at midnight, when the family knelt down at prayer, he scowled, and muttered to himself, and gazed sternly at his wife, and turned pale. Present in the selection is a nightmarish journey to the forest, a confrontation of Goodman Brown with the devilish beings in the forest; his initiation into the evil in the world and Hawthorne's vision of sin and evil at the core of human heart.

 

G. Give brief answers to the following questions:

1. What are some of the general artistic features of Walt Whitman's poetry? Walt Whitman was an important poet in American literary history. His originality lies first of all in his use of the poetic form free verse, by means of which he becomes conversational and casual. He usually uses the first person pronoun "I" to stress individualism, and oral language to acquire sympathy from the comon reader. His topics are sometimes sexual but his themes are far more than sexual.

 

2. What is generally the view Washington Irving expressed in his "Rip Van Winkle" about the radical changes that happened to the American society in his time? He laments the changes in his time, for he thinks that that changes have taken away some of the most endeared values in American life.

 

3. How important is Walden, or Life in the Woods written by Henry David Thoreau? The book can be considered a spiritual autobiography dramatized in a symbolic fashion; an effort on the part of Thoreau to actualize Emersonian Transcendentalism, especially the idea of self-reliance; a demonstration of Thoreau's different approach to nature.

 

4. Can we say that when Brown enters the dark forest he is really entering his own evil mind? If yes (or no), please explain. Hawthorne's stories are generally read as allegories symbolic of human experience, so is "Young Goodman Brown". Allegorically Brown's night journey to the forest could be taken as a journey of the mind into the dark region of evil. It is especially true if we allow for some very important details about the light and the shadow, the dreamlike atmosphere, the words and phrases he uses to describe what Brown has experienced in the forest, none of which seems to be substantially solid or physically present.

 

H. Essay questions:

1. Some of the big issues that the 19th-century American writers are generally concerned about are the relationships between man and nature, man and society, and sometimes the relationship between head and heart. Please focus on one issue and discuss it in relation to at least two individual works. Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown", Emerson's Nature, and Melville's Moby-Dick could be used as good examples to demonstrate the points here.

 

2. Symbolism is an extremely important literary practice in literature and it has been widely used by the American writers from the colonial times onwards, especially by those who were writing in the Romantic period. Please discuss the significance of the use of symbolism and the ways it is used in one or two books of those you have covered so far. Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and Melville's Moby-Dick could be selected for discussion and comparison; besides, Whitman's use of symbols in his poems and Emerson's grand theme of nature as symbolic of the Spirit are also worth considering in the discussion.