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. Emily Dickinson was sometimes curious about the feeling of death and in one of her poems she wrote about1--

 

   the.    A      of death, the title of the poem is "I heard a Fly buzz when I died".

    A. moment     B. suffering      C. happiness      D. meaning

2. Theodore Dreiser belonged to the school of literary      A    which emphasized heredity and environment

  as important deterministic forces shaping individualized characters who were presented in special and detailed circumstances.

    A. naturalism     B. realism      C. determinism      D. humanism

3. More than five hundred poems that Dickinson wrote are about nature, in which her general       A   about the relationship between man and nature is well expressed.

    A. skepticism     B. eulogy      C. happiness     D. denial

4. "This is my letter to the World" is a poem expressing Emily Dickinson's      C   about her communication with the outside world.

    A. happiness     B. anger     C. anxiety     D. sorrow

5. Though secluded herself in her own house, Emily Dickinson was never really indifferent of the outside world, as could be seen in her poems such as"I like to see it lapthe Miles", which describes a(n)      D    , an embodiment of modern civilization.

    A. snake     B. animal       C. the road       D. train

6. In all his novels Theodore Dreiser set himself to project the materialistic American values. For example, in Sister Carrie, there is not one character whose status is __B____not determined

A. hereditarily   B. economically    C. by his or her literalness    D. historically

7. Theodore Dreiser was influenced by many writers whose

       works he had read  But his true literary influences did

       not come from     D

    A. Balzac      B. Charles Darwin     C. Herbert Spencer      D. Ralph Waldo Emerson

8. After The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Twain gives a literary independence to Tom's buddy Huck in a book called __C____.

    A. Life on the Mississippi River        B. The Gilded Age

    C. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn     D. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

9. Winterbourne is used as a        C   in Henry James's Daisy Miller.

     A. protagonist                         B. narrator of the events

     C. a character of central consciousness     D. persona

10. One of the characteristics that have made Mark Twain one of the major literary figures in the 19th century American literature is the use of ____A__.

     A. vernacular    B. interior monologue    C. point of view     D. photographic description

11. The novelistic technique of projecting the narrative through feelings and thoughts of the characters, reached a perfected form in the works of ____A___.

     A. Henry James   B. William Dean Howells    C. Washington Irving    D. Emily Dickinson

12. Emily Dickinson's verse is most aptly characterized as  D

     A. exposing the evils of the society

     B. paving the way for the following generation of free versa poets

     C. sharing the same poetic conventions as Walt Whitman

     D. exhibiting a sensitiveness to the symbolic implications of experience, such as love, death, immortality and etc.

13. Of the following combinations of the works and their authors, the one which is incorrectly paired is__A____.

     A. The Fall of the House of Usher--Frank Norris    B. Sister Carrie--Theodore Dreiser

     C. The Red Badge of Courage--Stephen Crane      D. The Americans--Henry James

14. The author of The Portrait of a Lady is best at ___C_____.

     A. probing into the unsearched secret part of human life

     B. a truthful delineation of the motives, the impulses, the principles that shape the lives of actual men and women

     C. a dramatizing the collisions between two very different cultural systems on an international scene

     D. disclosing the social injustices and evils of a civilized society after the Civil War

15. Generally speaking, all those writers with a naturalistic approach to human reality are _C_____.

     A. transcendentalists     B. idealists     C. pessimists     D. impressionists

B. Blank-filling:

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

1. Two of the most outstanding features of James' techniques are __ point of view,

___ and ___ psychological approach

___.

2. In her little lyrics Emily Dickinson addresses those issues that

    concern the whole human beings, which include __ religion, death, immortality, love _____, _______, ______, _______, and nature.

3. As a genre,     naturalism       emphasized heredity and environment as important deterministic forces shaping individualized characters who were presented in special and detailed circumstances.

4. The Post-Civil War era is generally recognized as an age of transformation because of the changes that took place, and it is also called _____ the Gilded Age ___.

5. Winterbourne is      an American expatriate in Europe     in Europe, who has lived there long and can hardly understand Daisy, whose behavior proves to be totally different from that of his.

6. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,  Mark Twain skillfully worked out the juxtaposition between wilderness and civilization, or between freedom and restriction in the paralleled relationship of __river and shore /_____.

 

C. T-F statements:

1. Though Mark Twain was writing in a ,totally different style from that of Henry James, both of them shared the same concern that literature should be able to produce some moral or social effects on the readers at large.   T

2. Huck fears God's punishment so he decides to turn Jim over to his master, however, he makes the right the choice because he eventually comes to know the evil of the slavery system and the wrong it does to the blacks as a whole.  F

3. Twain depicts the typical American boy, while James portrays the typical American girl, for both of the imaginative figures stand for some of the important values that are dear to American people.T

4. Dickinson's poems are usually short and unrhymed, but she never fails to entitle her poems herself with the first line of each of the poems. F

5. The Financier, The Titan, and The Genius are called Theodore Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire. F  

6. winterbourne is used in Daisy Miller as a narrator of the whole story, who endeavors to put Daisy in a sort of formula and comments now and then on her behavior.    F

 

D. Identify the author of each of the following:

1. The Portrait of a Lady1. Henry James

 

2. Life on the Mississippi2. Mark Twain

 

3. "This is my letter to the World"3. Emily Dickin~n

 

4. Sister Carrie4. Theodore Dreiser

 

5. The Turn of the Screw5. Henry James

 

E. Define the following literary terms:

1. The local color

2. American literary naturalism

3. American literary realism

F. Give brief answers to the following questions:

1. In what way is Twain's realism different from James's realism? Twain's realism is tainted with local color, while James's realism is concerned with psychology. Twain's language is simple and colloquial filled with fun and humor; whereas James's is elaborate and refined with lengthy psychological analyses. Thus, one is said to be lowbrow, the other is said to be highbrow. However different, both have moral problems and humanities as the very focus of their literary creation.

 

2. What are the most important themes of Emily Dickinson's poetry? As a secluded woman poet Dickinson usually bases her poems on her own experiences, her sorrows and joys. But she does not limit herself to the daily routines of life. In her poems she addresses many issues that concern human beings as a whole, which include religion, immortality, love, and nature. Of all these thematic concerns Emily Dickinson has been very personal and meditative.

 

3. Why is Sister Carrie considered a naturalistic novel? Theodore Dreiser belonged to the school of literary naturalism, which as a genre emphasized heredity and environment as important deterministic forces shaping individualized characters who were presented in special and detailed circumstances. Dreiser's naturalism found expression in almost every novel that he wrote. In Sister Carrie Dreiser expressed his naturalistic pursuit by expounding the purposelessness of life and attacking the conventional moral standards. Carrie obtains her success because she behaves according to the desires and aspirations in her heart. Yet Hurstwood loses his wealth, social position, pride and eventually his life also because of uncontrolled desires.

 

G. Reading comprehension:

( 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. )

1. "We passed the school, where the Children strove

   At Recess--in the Ring--

   We passed the Field of Gazing Grain--

   We passed the Setting Sun--"1.The lines are taken from "Because I could not stop for Death" by Emily Dickinson.  In this stanza the first person plural "we" refers to the persona (possibly the poet herself) and the personified death. The two are on their way to the tomb. This trip can be understood as a process of one's whole life, or as an inevitable journey to death, or to nowhere, for Emily Dickinson tends to be ambiguous and skeptical at the end of the poem.

 

2. "Poor Winterbourne was amused, perplexed.., above all he was charmed. He had never yet heard a young girl express herself in just this fashion; never at least save in cases where to say such things was to have at the same time some rather complicated consciousness about them. And yet was he to accuse Miss Daisy Miller of an actual or a potential arriere-pensee, as they said at Geneva? He felt he had lived at Geneva so long as to have morally muddled; he had lost sense for the young American tone..." 2. As a. long, time Europeanized American, Winterbourne is faced with a problem to truly understand Daisy Miller. He is attracted to Daisy because she is a free spirit, active and energetic, totally different from those who are sophisticated and entrapped in the conventions. He tries to see and appreciate Daisy in her unique individuality. However, he succumbs to the European society that tends to stereotype Daisy as a disreputable girl. He struggles most of tile time against such stereotyping, even though he himself is extremely conventional. But when he mistakenly takes Daisy's behavior on the occasion of her midnight excursion to the Colosseum as a confirmation of the stereotype of her later on in the story, he becomes the agent of a society that is harmful, even evil in its determination to type people and to shun those who do not conform.

 

3. "I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking---thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time, in the day, and in the nighttime, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but the only other kind  and then I happened to look around, and see that paper.

         It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: 'All right, then, I'll go to hell--and tore it up. '"3. The selection is taken from Chapter 31, one of the most important places where Mark Twain highlights the moral growth of Huckleberry Finn. He grows in a way his moral conscience gets the upper hand of his social conscience; his heart wins over his head. Ironically, Huck still thinks he is wrong while he is doing the right thing. Twain's manipulation of the language here helps bring to life an uneducated boy who grows up in the Mississippi valley and is brought :up with falsehood and lies about the white and the black.

 

II. Essay questions:

1. Give a brief analysis of the character Huckleberry Finn. The significance of Huckleberry Finn as the American Boy can be traced in the following aspects: his desire for freedom, his rebellion against the social constraints, his sympathy for Jim, his belief in heart rather than head, his moral improvisation, especially his moral growth at the moment when he decides to go to hell. He is morally sound because his moral conscience triumphs over his social conscience.

2. What is Daisy Miller's dilemma as an American Girl in Europe, the Old World?Daisy Miller is the prototypical international theme story, and Daisy herself is the paradigm of the international American Girl, noted for her innocence, her spirited independence, her defiance of the social conventions, yet crippled by ignorance and caught in an entrapping world. We can learn from the whole story that Daisy's headstrong failure to heed warnings about nighttime excursions in malarial Rome results in her death and, more generally, that her utter disregard of convention makes it impossible for her to get into effective relation with other people, thus isolating her from the community whose values and norms she ignores.

 

3. Is there any difference between naturalistic writers and realistic writers in their focus of interest when they approach the human reality? If there is, please give a brief comment with reference to at least two individual works. Realistic writers and naturalistic writers hold quite different views about human reality, especially during the late 19th century. A clear analysis of the different pursuit of each school is necessary. But the bottom-line is they think differently about the free will of human beings and their concern about human responsibility proves to be different, too. Works by Mark Twain, Henry James, Theodore Dreiser could be taken as case studies.