美国文学复习资料题(有标准答案版)

美国文学复习提纲

第一部分 连线题（1*10=10’）

1. Thomas Jefferson

2. Walt Whitman 3. Mark Twain 4. Robert Frost 5. Ezra Pound 6. Carl Sandburg 7. Saul Bellow 8. Ernest Hemingway 9. John Steinbeck 10. Jack London 11. Sinclair Lewis

The Declaration of Independence

O’ Captain, My Captain

Jumping Frog

Mending Wall

In a Station of the Metro

Chicago

The Adventure of Augie March

Men without Women

The Grape of Wrath

The Call of the Wild

Babbit

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12. Flannery O’ Connor A Good Man Is Hard to Find

13. O. Henry The Last Leaf

14. Jerome David Salinger The Catcher in the Rye

15. William Falkner The Sound and the Fury

第二部分 单项选择 (1.5*20=30’)

1. Anne Bradstreet was a Puritan poet. Her poems made such a stir in England that she became known as the “________” who appeared in America.

A. Tenth Muse B. Ninth Muse C. Best Muse D. First Muse

2. In American literature, the 18th century was the age of the Enlightenment. ________ was the dominant spirit.

A. Humanism B. Rationalism C. Revolution D. Evolution

3. Which of the following stirred the world and helped form the American republic?

A. The American Crisis B. The Federalist

C. Declaration of Independence D. The Age of Reason

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4. At the Reason and Revolution Period, Americans were influenced by the European movement called the ________.

A. Chartist Movement B. Romanticist Movement

C. Enlightenment Movement D. Modernist Movement

5. Thoreau was often alone in the woods or by the pond, lost in spiritual communication with ________.

A. nature B. transcendentalist ideas

C. human beings D. celestial beings

6. ________tells a simple but very moving story in which four people living in a puritan community are involved in and affected by the sin of adultery in different ways.

A. Twice-Told Tales B. The Scarlet Letter C. The House of the Seven Gables D. The Marble Faun 7. Washington Irving’s social conservation and literary for the past is revealed, to some extent, in his famous story, ________.

A. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow B. Rip Van Winkle

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C. The Custom-house D. The Birthmark 8. The convention of the desire for an escape from society and a return to nature in American literature is particularly evident in ________.

A. Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales B. Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter

C. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass

D. Irving’s Rip Van Winkle

9. As a philosophical and literary movement, ________ flourished in New England from 1830s to the Civil War.

A. modernism B. rationalism

C. sentimentalism D. transcendentalism 10. Edgar Allan Poe mainly writes __________.

A. poems B. literary critic theories C. short stories D. dramas

11. In Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, “A” may stand for ________ .

A. Adultery B. Angel C. Amiable D. All the above

12. The period before the American Civil War is generally referred to as

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________ .

A. the Naturalist Period B. the Modern Period

C. the Romantic Period D. the Realistic Period

13. In the following works, which signs the beginning of the American literature?

A. The Sketch Book B. Leaves of Grass

C. Leatherstocking Tales D. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 14. The main theme of Emily Dickinson is the following except ________.

A. war and peace religion

B. love and marriage C. life and death D.

15. Emily Dickinson’s poetic idiom is noted for the following except ________.

A. brevity B. directness C. plainest words D. obscure

16. The publication of ________ established Emerson as the most eloquent spokesman of New England Transcendentalism.

A. Nature B. Self-Reliance

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C. The American Scholar D. The Over-Soul

17. The Age of Realism in the literary history of the United States refers to the period from ________ to ________.

A. 1861…1914 B. 1863…1918 C. 1865…1914 D. 1865…1918

18. ________ is considered to be Theodore Dreiser’s greatest work.

A. An American Tragedy B. Sister Carrie C. The Financier D. The Titan 19. ________ is a novella about a young American girl who gets “killed” by the winter in Rome, and it brought Henry James international fame for the first time.

A. The American B. The Europeans C. Daisy Miller D. The Portrait of a Lady 20. ________ is described by Mark twain as a boy with “a sound heart and a deformed conscience”.

A. Tom Sawyer B. Huckleberry Finn C. Jim D. Tony

21. Mark Twain wrote most of his literary works with a ________ language.

A. grand B. pompous C. simple D. vernacular

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22. The book from which “all modern American literature comes” refers to ________.

A. The Great Gatsby B. The Sun Also Rises

C. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn D. Moby-Dick

23. In which of the following works Hemingway presents his philosophy about life and death through the depiction of the bull-fight as a kind of microcosmic tragedy?

A. Death in the Afternoon B. The Snows of Kilimanjaro C. To Have and Have Not D. The Green Hills of Africa

24. ________ is Hemingway’s first true novel in which he depicts a vivid portrait of “The Lost Generation”.

A. The Sun Also Rises

B. A Farewell to Arms

C. In Our Time D. For Whom the Bell Tolls

25. Robert Frost combined traditional verse forms—the sonnet, rhyming couplets, blank verse—with a clear American local speech rhythm, the speech of ________ farmers with its idiosyncratic diction and syntax.

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A. Southern B. Western C. New Hampshire D. New England

26. ________, one of the most important poets in his time, is a leading spokesman of the “Imagist Movement”.

A. J. D. Salinger B. Ezra Pound C. Richard Wright D. Ralph Ellison

27. “Tender Is the Night” is a ________ by Fitzgerald.

A. short story B. novella C. poem D. novel

28. ________ is said to be a “historical novel” by Faulkner.

A. Go Down, Moses B. Light in August C. The Sound and the Fury D. Absalom 29. ________ stems from the ambiguity of the speaker’s choice between safety and the unknown.

A. Mending the wall B Home Burial

C. The Road not Taken Evening

D. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy

30. Hemingway’s writing style, together with his theme and the hero, is

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greatly and permanently influenced by his experiences ________.

A. in his childhood Africa

B. in the war C. in America D. in

31. The following writers were awarded Nobel Prize for literature except ________.

A. William Faulkner B. F. Scott Fitzgerald

C. John Steinbeck D. Ernest Hemingway

32. ________ is not considered to be one of the masters in the field of American fiction in the modernistic period.

A. F. Scott Fitzgerald B. Ernest Hemingway

C. Arthur Miller D. William Faulkner

33. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood and sorry I could not travel both…” In the above two lines of Robert Frost’s “The Road not Taken”, the poet, by implication, was referring to ________.

A. one’s course of life B. a marriage decision

C. a middle-age crisis D. a travel experience

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34. Most of the writers in the modern period were able to probe into the inner world of human reality on the base of ________.

A. William James’ “stream of consciousness”

B. Carl Jung’s “collective unconscious” and “archetypal symbol”

C. Sigmund Freud’s “interpretation of dreams”

D. All of the above

35. Writers of the second postwar era self-consciously acknowledged that they were ____________.

A. a Lost Generation B. a Beat Generation

C. a Jazz Generation D. none of the above

36. In 1862, President Lincoln exclaimed: “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!” The book refers to ________.

A. Uncle Tom’s Cabin B. Beloved

C. Pride and Prejudice D. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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37. In Leaves of Grass, _______ is all that concerned Whitman.

A. individualism B. freedom

C. democracy D. all the above

38. It is not surprising to find in _______’s fiction a world of jungle, where “kill or to be killed” was the law.

A. Mark Twain B. Emily Dickinson

C. Theodore Dreiser D. Henry James

39. Which one of the following statements is NOT true of William Faulkner?

A. He is master of stream-of-consciousness narrative.

B. His writing is often complex and difficult to understand.

C. He often depicts slum life in New York and Chicago.

D. He represents a new group of Southern writers

40. The setting of the novel The Scarlet Letter is in ________.

A. England during World War I

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B. Paris during the French Revolution

C. Puritan America

D. America after the Revolutionary War

第三部分 判断对错 (1*15=15’)

(T)1. The Calvinist doctrine of “original sin” exerted great influence upon Hawthorne.

(T)2. To Hawthorne sin will get punished, one way or another.

(T)3. Roger Chillingworth, the scholar, the embodiment of pure intellect, committed the “Unpardonable Sin”.

(F)4. Emily Dickinson didn’t like using capital letters where small ones are needed.

(T)5. Walt Whitman used parallelism and refrain in his poems.

(T)6. Walt Whitman was regarded as the Zenith in American romantic poetry.

(T)7. Dickinson was original. She never imitates others.

(T)8. Allan Poe defined poetry as the rhythmical creation of beauty.

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(F)9. O. Henry seldom wrote about poor people.

(T)10. According to Poe, art serves for pleasure. The chief aim of poetry is beauty, namely, to produce a feeling of beauty in the reader.

(T)11. According to Dickinson, death means immortality.

(F)12. According to Poe, truth is beauty, beauty truth.

(T)13. According to Henry James, the aim of the novel is to reflect life reality.

(T)14. James wrote mostly of the upper reaches of American society, and Howells concerned himself chiefly with middle class life whereas Twain dealt largely with the lower strata of society.

(F)15. American writers, especially novelists were rather experimental after the World Wars.

(T)16. O. Henry’s short stories are famous for their surprising endings.

(T)17. Allen Ginsberg was the representative of the Beat Generation.

(T)18. Allan Poe exerted great influence upon many southern American writers, especially William Faulkner.

(F)19. Emily Dickinson was regarded as the forerunner of symbolism.

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(F)20. Mark Twain never touched upon the problem of slavery system in his novels.

(F)21. Allan Poe was regarded as the forerunner of American Imagism.

(T)22. Mark Twain was the father of American language.

(T)23. Allan Poe advocated “pure” poetry.

(F)24. Mark Twain’s contribution to the development of realism and to American literature as a whole was partly through his theories of localism in American fiction and partly through his themes.

(T)25. Toni Morrison is one of the most famous contemporary women writers.

(T)26. O. Henry was the pen name of William Sidney Porter.

(T)27. Thomas Jefferson was the major writer of The Declaration of Independence (T)28. Henry James discovered the trick of making his characters reveal themselves with minimal intervention of the author.

(T)29. N. Hawthorne was a symbolic writer in some sense.

(T)30. Whitman’s poetry suggests rather than tells.

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第四部分 术语解释 (4*5=20’)

1. Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism refers to the religious and philosophical doctrines of Ralph Waldo Emerson and others in New England in the middle 1800’s, which emphasized the importance of individual inspiration and intuition, the Oversoul, and nature. Other concepts that accompanied Transcendentalism include the idea that nature is ennobling and the idea that the individual is divine and, therefore, self-reliant.

2. Naturalism

Naturalism, a more deliberate kind of realism, usually involves a view of human beings as passive victims of natural forces and social environment. As a literary movement, naturalism was initiated in France and it came to be led by Zola, who claimed at “scientific” status for his studies of impoverished characters miserably subjected to hunger, sexual obsession, and hereditary defects. 3. American Dream

The American Dream is the faith held by many people in the United States of America that through hard work, courage and determination one can achieve a better life for oneself, usually through financial prosperity. These were values held by many early European settlers, and have been passed on to subsequent

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generations.

4. The Lost Generation

The term Lost Generation was coined by Gertrude Stein to refer to a group of American Literary notables who lived in Paris from the time period which saw the end of WWI to the beginning of the Great Depression. Significant members included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein herself. Hemingway likely popularized the term, quoting Stein (“You are all a lost generation”) as epigraph to his novel The Sun Also Rises. More generally, the term is being used for the young adults of Europe

and America during WWI. They were “lost” because after the war many of them were disillusioned with the world in general and unwilling to move into settled life.

5. Modernism

Modern writing is marked by a strong and conscious break with traditional forms and techniques of expression; it believes that we create the world in the act of perceiving it. Modernism implies historical discontinuity, a sense of alienation, of loss, and of despair. It elevates the individual and his inner being over social man and prefers the unconscious to the self-conscious.

6. Puritanism

The principles and practices of puritans were popularly known as Puritanism.

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Puritanism accepted the doctrines of Calvinism: the sovereignty of God; the supreme authority of the Bible; the irresistibility of God’s will for man in ever act of life from cradle to grave. These doctrines led the Puritans to examine their souls to find whether they were of the elect and to search the Bible to determine God’s will.

7. Hemingway Heroes (Code Hero)

“Hemingway Heroes” refer to some protagonists in Hemingway’s works. Such a hero usually is an average man of decidedly masculine tastes, sensitive and intelligent. And usually he is a man of action and of a few words. He is such an individualist, alone even when with other people, somewhat an outsider, keeping emotions under control, stoic and self-disciplined in a dreadful place where one can not get happiness.

8. Jazz Age

“The Jazz Age” describes the period of the 1920s and 1930s, the years between WWI and WWII, particularly in North America; with the rise of the Great Depression, the values of this age saw much decline. Perhaps the most representative literary work of the age is American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, a highlighting what some describe as the decadence and hedonism,

as well as the growth of individualism.

第五部分 选读分析 25’

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Text1.

From the listless repose of the place, and the peculiar character of its inhabitants, who are descendants from[he original Dutch settlers, this sequestered glen has long been known by the name of SLEEPY HOLLOW, and its rustic lads are called the Sleepy Hollow Boys throughout all the neighboring country. Drowsy and dreamy influence seems to hang over the land，and to pervade the very atmosphere. Some say that the place was bewitched by a high German doctor, during the early days of the settlement; others, that an old Indian chief, the prophet or wizard of his tribe, held his powwows there before the country was discovered by Master Hendrick Hudson.

Questions:

(1) Who is the writer of this short story from which the passage is taken?

(2) What is the title of this short story?

(3) Give a definition of “short story”.

Answer:

(1) Washington Irving

(2) The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

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(3) A short story is a brief prose fiction, usually one that can be read in a single sitting. It generally contains the six major elements of fiction—characterization, setting, theme, plot, point of view and style.

Text 2.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

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And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Questions:

(1) Please examine the poetic form (rhyme and meter) (2’)

(2) Describe the similarities and differences of these two roads. Which one does the speaker take? (3’)

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(3) How do you understand the word “sigh”? (4’)

(4) What might the two roads stand for in the speaker’s mind? (2’)

(5) What is the theme of this poem? (2’)

Answer:

(1) It is written in iambic tetrameter and rhymed abaab.

(2) Similarities: both of the roads are beautiful;

Differences: one is quiet and grassy, less-traveled, the other is trodden by many people and flat

He took the less-traveled road.

(3) The word “sigh” is a tricky word. Because sigh can be interpreted into nostalgic relief or regret. If it is the relief sigh, then the difference means the speaker feels glad with the road he took. If it is the regret sigh, then the difference would not be good, and the speaker would be signing in regret. Hence, sigh is ambiguous here for the speaker is not showing whether his choice is right or wrong.

(4) The real road, the life road and the road in career.

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(5) Choices is inevitable but you never know what you choice will mean until you have lived it. This is also the theme of the poem.

Text 3.

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream!

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

And things are not what they seem.

Life is real-life is earnest-

And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

Was not spoken of the soul.

Questions:

(1). Who is the writer of the lines?

(2). What is the title of the whole poem from which the two stanzas are taken?

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(3). Summarize the poet’s advice for living.

Answers:

(1). Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

(2). A Psalm of Life

(3). His optimism which has characterized much of his poetry, also endeared many critics to him. He seemed to have persevered despite tragedy. This poem is the cry of his heart, “rallying from depression”, ready to affirm life, to regroup from losses, to push on despite momentary defeat.

Text 4.

Because I could not stop for Death —

He kindly stopped for me —

The Carriage held but just Ourselves —

And Immortality.

We slowly drove — He knew no haste

And I had put away

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My labor and my leisure too,

For His Civility —

We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess — in the Ring —

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain —

We passed the Setting Sun —

Or rather — He passed Us —

The Dews drew quivering and Chill —

For only Gossamer, my Gown —

My Tippet — only Tulle —

We paused before a House that seemed

A Swelling of the Ground —

The Roof was scarcely visible —

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The Cornice — in the Ground —

Since then — ’tis Centuries — and yet

Feels shorter than the Day

I first surmised the Horses’ Heads

Were toward Eternity —

Questions:

(1) Who wrote this poem? In the poem, what is he/she watching and recording? (3%)

(2) What is death compared to in the poem? (2%)

(3) What does the poet think of eternity? (2%)

(4) What is the attitude of the poet towards death? (2%)

Answer:

(1) Emily Dickinson. She is watching and recording her own funeral.

(2) Death is compared to a polite gentleman or polite wooer.

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(3) The speaker is not quite sure whether there will be eternity after death since she just surmises that “the Horses’ Heads were toward Eternity —”.

(4) She treats death light-heartedly for she believes that death is a necessary step towards eternity or immortality.