Faulkner’s \
A. She is a conservative aristocrat. B. She is a wealth lady. C. She is a prisoner of the past. D. She has good taste. Answer: C (P617)
21. Who, disregarding grammar and punctuation, always used \of \A. Cummings B. Wallance Stevens C. Fitzgerald D. Ernest Hemingway Answer: A (P548)
22. Who is the author of the writing \
A. John Steinbeck B. Eugene O’Neill C. Fitzgerald D. Theodore Dreiser Answer: A (P548-549)
II. Read the quoted part and answer the questions:
1. \apparition of these faces in the crowded; / Petals on a wet, black bough.\
1) From which poem does the stanza come? Who is the author?2) What does the “petals”mean?3) Briefly interpret the two lines.
Answers: 1) The lines are taken from \a Station of the Metro\by Ezra Pound. (P557) 2) Here \3) The two lines compare human faces to petals on a wet, black bough. This way of making poetry comes from Chinese poetics. (P557)
2. \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\
Questions:
1) Please identify the poem and the poet; 2) Please briefly interpret this poem. Answers:
1) It is taken from Robert Lee Frost’s \ 2) In this meditative poem, the speaker tells us how the course of his life determined when he came upon two rods that diverged in a wood. Forced to choose, he “took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”He seems to be giving a suggestion to the reader: \good choice of your life.\
3. \caterwauling horns had reached a crescendo and I turned away and cut across the lawn toward home. I glanced back once. A wafer of a moon was shining over Gatsby’s house, making his still glowing garden. A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the lost, who stood on the porch, his stand up in a formal gesture of farewell.\Questions:
1) Name the author and the title of the novel from which this passage is taken.
2) What is the setting of the novel?
3) What implied meaning can you get from reading this passage? Answers:
1) The passage comes from \Great Gatsby\written by Fitzgerald. (P597)
2) The Great Gatsby is a novel that is set against the ending of the war. (P581)
3) The passage hints at the meaninglessnes, spiritual emptiness and vanity of such a lift of pleasure-seeking. There is a tragic sense that the \will be over. Gatsby’s failure magnifies to a great extent the end of the American Dream. (However, the affirmation of hope and expectation is self-asserted in Fitzgerald’s artistic manipulation of the central symbol in the novel, the green light). (P582)
III Questions and answers:
1. Analyze the background of the Modern Period. Answer:
(1) The U.S. participated in The First World War marked a crucial stage in the nation’s evolution/development to a world power.
(2) The technology has brought about great changes in the life of the American people. (P544)
2. The ideology analyses about the people and especially the authors. (The ideology analysis of \Answer:
(1) People became less certain about what might arise in this changing world and more cynical about accepted standards of honesty and morality. The idea of \(2) There was a decline in moral standard and the first few decades of the twentieth century was described as a spiritual wasteland. The
censor/standard of a great civilization being destroyed or destroying itself, social breakdown, and individual powerlessness and hopelessness became part of the American experience as a result of the First World War, with resulting feelings of fear, loss, disorientation and disillusionment.
(3) Disillusioned and disgusted by the frivolous, greedy, and heedless way of life in America, they began to write and they wrote from their own experience in the war.
(4) The sense of loss and despair prevails among the post-war generation who are physically and psychologically scarred; Faulkner creates his own mythical kingdom that mirrors not only the decline of the Southern society but also the spiritual wasteland of the whole American society. (5) The world is even more disintegrating and fragmentary and people are even more estranged and despondent.
(6) These writers shared almost the same belief that human beings are trapped in a meaningless world and that neither God nor man can make sense of the human condition.
(7) In general terms, much serious literature written from 1912 onwards attempted to convey a vision of social breakdown and moral decay and the writer’s task was to develop techniques that could represent a break with the past. (P545-552)
3. List some characteristic writers you know in the Modernism. Answer:
(1) The spirit of frivolity and carelessness is brought vividly to life in \
(2) Faulkner’s footsteps in portraying the decadence and evil in the Southern society in a Gothic manner.
(3) Salinger is considered to be a spokesman for the alienated youth in the post-war era and his The Catcher in the Rye is regarded as a students’ classic.
(4) O’Neill is remembered for his tragic view of life and most of his plays are about the root, the truth of human desires and human frustration. (P548---549)
4. What are the styles of the modernists in writing? Answer:
(1) The defining formal characteristics of the modernistic works discontinuity and fragmentation.
(2) The biggest shift is from the external to the internal, from the public to the private, from the chronological to the psychic, from the objective description to the subjective projection.
(3) Modern American writers in general emphasize the concrete sensory images or details as the direct conveyer of experience.
(4) Their language is direct, compressive, vivid and sparing of words. (5) Modern fiction tended to employ the first person narration or limit the reader to the \view. This limitation accorded with the modernistic vision that truth does not exist objectively but is the product of a personal interaction with reality. (P552---553)
5. Some theories and ideologies influenced the Modernists, what are they?