英美文学选读自考历年真题及答案
comparison .Prufrock imagines himself as a kind of insect pinned on the wall and struggling in vain to get free.This image vividly shows Prufrock's current predicament.
43.A.Washington Irving:“Rip Van Winkle”.
B.The social environment is changed.
C.When Rip is back home after a period of 20 years,he finds thta everything has changed.All those old values are gone,and he can hardly feel at home in a changed society.One of the functions that Rip serves in the story is to provide a measuring stick for change. It is through him that Irving drives home the theme that a desire for change,improvement,and progress could subvert stable society.
44.A.Robert Frost:“The Road Not Taken”.
B.Many many years later.
C.The speaker is telling his experience of making the choice of the roads.But he is conscious of the fact that his choice will have made all the difference in his life.He seems to be giving a suggestion to the reader.“Make good choice of your life.”
Ⅲ.Questions and Answers (24 points in all,6 for each)
45.A.Buyan's pilgrim's Progress and Spenser's The Faerie Queene.
B.It is usually concerned with moral ,religious,political,symbolic or mythical ideas.
46.A.The French philosopher,Jean Jacques Rousseau and the German writer Johna Wolfgan von Goethe.
B.It is Rousseau who established the cult of the individual and championed the freedom of the human spirit;his famous announcement was “I felt before I thought.”Goethe and his compatriots extolled the romantic spirit.
47.A.To Ahab,the whale is either an evil creature itself or the agent of an evil force that controls the universe,or perhaps both.
B.To Ishmale,the whale is an astonishing force,an immense power,which defies rational explanation due to a sense of mystery it carries. It is beautiful,but malignant at the same time. It also represents the tremendous organic vitality of the universe,for it has a life force that surges onward irresistibly, impervious to the desires or wills of men.
C.As to the reader, the whale can be viewed as a symbol of the physical limits that life imposes upon man. It may also be regarded as a symbol of nature, or an instrument of God's vengeance upon evil man. In general,the multiplicity and ambivalence of the symbolic meaning of the whale is such that it becomes a source of intense speculation, an object or profound curiosity for the reader.
48.A.The Oversoul is believed to be an all-pervading power for goodness,omnipresent and omnipotent from which all things come and of which all are a part. It exists in nature and man alike and constitutes the chief element of the universe.
B.According to Emerson,it is a supreme reality of mind, a spiritual unity of all beings, and a religion regarded as an emotional communication between an individual soul and the universal Over-soul of which it is a part.
C.He holds that intuition is a more certain way of knowing than reason and that the mind could intuitively perceive the existence of the Oversoul and of certain absolutes.
Ⅳ.Topic Discussion (20 points in all, 10 for each)
49.a.Neoclassicists upheld that artistic ideals should be order,logic,restrained emoticon and accuracy,and that literature,should be judged in terms of its service to humanity,and thus,literary expressions should be of proportion,unity,harmony and grace.Pope's An Essay on Criticism advocates grace,wit (usually though satire/humour),and simplicity in language(and the poem itself is a demonstration of those ideals,too);Fielding's Tom Jones helped establish the form of novel;Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' displays elegance in style,unified structure,serious tone and moral instructions.
b.Romanticists tended to see the individual as the very center of all experience,including art,and thus,literary work should be “spontaneous overflow of strong feelings,”and no matter how fragmentary those experiences were (Wordsworth's “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” or “The Solitary Reaper,) or Coleridge's “Keble Khan”),the value of the work lied in the accuracy of presenting those unique feelings and particular attitudes.
c.In a word, Neoclassicism emphasized rationality and form but Romanticism attached great importance to the individual's mind (emotion, imagination, temporary experience…)
50.A.Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a Sequa to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.The Story takes place along the Mississippi River before the Civil War in the United States, around 1850.