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南京大学

2010年硕士研究生入学考试试题

英语语言文学专业

英美文学(150分)

Ⅰ. Fill in the blanks. (20 points)

1. Keats’ major achievement, and one of the major achievements in English literature, is the sequence of“_____ that he wrote in his time.

2. Thomas Gray was the leader of the sentimental poetry, known as “_____.”

3. Theodore Dreiser’s first novel is_____.

4. Eugene O’Neill’s is a play that concerns the problem of Yank’s identity.

5._____of the 1920s characterized by frivolity and carelessness is brought vividly to life in The Great Gatsby (1925).

6. The term “_____” is commonly used to name the work of the 17th-century writers who wrote under the influence of John Donne.

7._____defines the poet as“man speaking to men,” and poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings which originates in emotion recollected in tranquility.”

8. The most clearly defined Romantic literary movement in the U.S. is New England_____.

9. Walt Whitman is radically innovative in term of the form of his poetry. What he prefers for his new subject and new poetic feelings is “_____.”

10. In English literature,_____’s novels blend industrial and rural settings magnificently. He had written about the frustration of desires and there is obvious sexual application in his work.

Ⅱ. Read the following excerpts and identify their authors and the titles from which they are excerpted. Give full name of the author and full title of the work. (50 points)

1. Author _____ Title_____

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than the rule. There is the man and his virtues. Men do what is called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade.

2. Author _____ Title_____

It was a circumstance to be noted, on the summer morning when our story begins its course, that the women, of whom there were several in the crowd, appeared to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal infliction might be exected to ensue. The age had not so much refinement, that any sense o impropriety restrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingale from stepping forth into the public ways, and wedging their not unsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into the throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution.

3.Author _____ Title_____

It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at the precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden passionate, corporal animosity; and when he receive the stroke that tore him, he probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more.

4. Author _____ Title_____

What the hammer? What the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? What dread grasp

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

5.Author _____ Title_____

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,

So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,

The smiles that win, the tints that glow,

But tell of days in goodness spent,

A mind at peace with all below,

A heart whose love is innocent!

6. Author _____ Title_____

If only she hadn’t been that robust woman but a woman, in her middle years, with an incurable complaint of the heart. Then of course it wouldn’t have been terrible or even difficult to have made that decision that night, it wouldn’t even have been the source for ever afterwards of confusion,mystery and remorse.

7.Author _____ Title_____

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near,

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

8. Author _____ Title_____

In the day time the street was dusty, but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference. The two waiters inside the cafe knew that the old man was a little drunk, and while he was a good client they knew that if he became too drunk he would leave without paying, so they kept watching on him.

9. Author _____ Title_____

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted

Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

10.Author _____ Title _____

Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humour, reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three and twenty years had been insufficient to make his wife understand his character.Her mind was less difficult to develop. She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper.

11. Author _____ Title_____

“Every one asks me what I ‘think’ of everything,” said Spencer Brydon; “and I make answer as I can—begging or dodging the question, putting them off with any nonsense. It wouldn’t matter to any of them really,” he went on, “for, even were it possible to meet in that stand-and-deliver way so silly a demand on so big a subject, my ‘thoughts’ would still be almost altogether about something that concerns only myself.”

12. Author _____ Title_____

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,

My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,

The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done.

From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;

13. Author _____ Title_____

In fairness to Charles it must be said that he sent to find Sam before he left the White Lion. But the servant was not in the taproom or the stables. Charles guessed indeed where he was. He could not send there; and thus he left Lyme without seeing him again. He got into his four-wheeler in the yard,and promptly drew down the blinds.

14.Author _____ Title_____

I found Simon Wheeler dozing comfortably by the bar-room stove of the old, dilapidated tavern in the ancient mining camp of Angel’s, and I noticed that he was fat and bald-headed, and had an expression of winning gentleness and simplicity upon his tranquil countenance. He roused up and gave me good-day.

15. Author _____ Title_____

Yossarian let his eyes fall closed and hoped they would think he was unconscious.

“He’s fainted,” he heard a doctor say. “Can’t we treat him now before it’s too late? He really might die.”

“All right, take him. I hope the bastard does die.”

16.Author _____ Title_____

I can give you that historical bird’s eye view. But I cannot explain the mystery of Leonard Side’s inheritance. Most of us know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back,forever; we go back all of us to the very beginning; in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings.

17.Author _____ Title_____

The store in which the Justice of the Peace’s court was sitting smelled of cheese. The boy, crouched on his nail keg at the back of the crowded room, knew he smelled cheese, and more; from where he sat could see the ranked shelves close-packed with the solid, squat, dynamic shapes of tin cans whose labels his stomach read, not from the lettering which meant nothing to his mind...

18. Author _____ Title_____

My mother danced all night and Roberta’s was sick. That’s why we were taken to St. Bonny’s.People want to put their arms around you when you tell them you were in a shelter, but it really wasn’t bad. No big long room with one hundred beds like Bellevue.

19.Author _____ Title_____

He had rolled a handkerchief round his head, and his face was set and lowering in his sleep. But he was asleep, and quietly too, though he had a pistol lying on the pillow. Assured of this, I softly removed the key to the outside of this door, and turned it on him before I again sat down by the fire.Gradually I slipped from the chair and lay on the floor. When I awoke, without having parted in my sleep with the perception of my wretchedness, the clocks of the Eastward churches were striking five, the candles were wasted out, the fire was dead, and the wind and rain intensified the thick bla darkness.

20. Author _____ Title _____

He felt that his luck was better than usual today. When he had reported for work that morning he had expected to be shut up in the relief office at a clerk’s job, for he had been hired downtown as a clerk,and he was glad to have, instead, the freedom of the streets and welcomed, at least at first, the vigor of the cold and even the blowing of the hard wind. But on the other hand he was not getting on with the distribution of the checks.

21. Author _____ Title_____

Three men were at work on the roof, where the leads got so hot they had the idea of throwing water on to cool them. But the water steamed, then sizzled; and they make jokes about getting an egg from

some women in the flats under the flats under them, to poach it for their dinn.

22.Author _____ Title_____

The three women sat in the little room, imagined not remembered. Veronica detected in her mother’s cream-coloured dress just a touch of awkwardness, her grandmothers ineptness at a trade for which she was not wholly suited, a shoulder out of true, a cuff awry, as so many buttons and cuffs and waistbands had been during the making-do in the time of austerity.

23.Author _____ Title_____

Unmarried men are best friends, best masters, best servants, but not always best subjects, for they are light to run away, and almost all fugitives are of that condition.

24. Author _____ Title_____

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

25.Author _____ Title_____

Spite, spite, is the word of your undoing! And when you’re down and out, remember what did it.When you’re rotting somewhere beside the railroad tracks, remember, and don’t you dare blame it on me.

Ⅲ. For the following two sections, you are required to choose ONE from each and give your answer to it. (30 points)

SectionⅠ

1. Briefly state the main ideas of Benjamin Franklin’s The Autobiography and give your comments on them.

2. What are the qualities that Granny Weatherall has? In what way do such qualities help her live successfully?

3. What does “the green light” symbolize in The Great Gatsby ? Does it exist in reality? Explain your answer.

SectionⅡ

1. What does T. S. Eliot’s idea of “an objective of correlative” mean to you?

2. What does Virginia Woolf use to present the life of the titled character in her Mrs.Dalloway ?

3. What do you find admirable in Robinson Crusoe? Discuss briefly some of his trait

Ⅳ. Compare Grief with Tears, Idle Tears , commenting particularly on the treatment of their themes. (30 points)

1. Grief

By Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I tell you hopeless grief is passionless;

That only men incredulous of despair,

Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air

Beat upward to God’s throne in loud access

Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness

In souls, as countries, lieth silent-bare

Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare

Of the absolute heavens. Deep-hearted man, express

Grief for thy dead in silence like to death;

Most like a monumental statue set

In everlasting watch and moveless woe

Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.

Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet—

If it could weep, it could arise and go.

2. Tears, Idle Tears

Tears, idle tears. I know not what they mean,

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

Rise in the heart and gather to the eyes.

In looking on the happy Autumn-fields.

And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail.

That brings our friends up from the underworld,

Sad as the last which reddens over one

That sinks with all we love below the verge;

So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns

The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds

To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;

So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,

And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned

On lips that are for others; deep as love,

Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;

O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

Ⅴ. Write a critical essay on the following topic. (30 points)

Modernism is a reaction against realism. Discuss the features of modernism and illustrate your point with examples.

参考答案与解析

Ⅰ. Fill in the blanks. (10 points)

1. odes

2. the Graveyard School

3. Sister Carrie

4. The Hairy Ape

5. The Jazz Age

6. The metaphysical poetry

7. William Wordsworth

8. Transcendentalism

9. free verse

10. D.H. Lawrence

Ⅱ. Read the following excerpts and identify their authors and the titles from which they are excerpted. Give full name of the author and full title of the work. (50 points)

1. Ralph waldo Emerson, Self-reliance

2. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

3. Herman Melville, Moby Dick

4. William Blake, Tiger

5. George Gordon Bryon, She Walks in Beauty

6. Graham Swift, Our Nicky’s Heart

7. Robert Frost, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

8. Ernest Hemingway, A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

9. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan

10. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

11. Henry James, The Jolly Corner

12. Walt Whitman, O’Captain! My Captain!

13. John Fowls, The French Lieutenant’s Woman

14. Mark Twain, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

15. Joseph Heller, Catch-22

16. V. S. Naipaul, A Way in the World

17. William Faulkner, Barn Burning

18. Toni Morrison, Recitatif

19. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

20. Saul Bellow, Looking for Mr. Green

21. Dorris Lessing, A Woman on a Roof

22. A.S. Byatt, Rose-coloured Teacups

23. Francis Bacon, Of Marriage and Single Life

24. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 18

25. Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

Ⅲ. For the following two sections, you are required to choose ONE from each and give your answer to it. (30 points)

SectionⅠ

1. Briefly state the main ideas of Benjamin Franklin’s The Autobiography and give your commentson them.

The Autobiography of Franklin is an inspiring account of a poor boy’s rise to wealth and fame and the fulfillment of the American dream. It is a book on the art of self-improvement. This book also speaks out the American enlightenment. Using his life story as a shinning example, Franklin eloquently demonstrates all the major principles of the enlightenment in America. Franklin embodies the transition from Puritan piety, idealism and provincialism to the more secular, utilitarian, and cosmopolitan values of the American enlightenment.

2. What are the qualities that Granny Weatherall has? In what way do such qualities help her live successfully?

Granny’s last name, “Weatherall,” is significant: She has weathered all kinds of difficulties and can’conceive of ever giving up the fight. She is a strong and capable matriarch. She is a funny woman, for example, who finds excessively good behavior annoying everyone, including her children. She is also a smart woman, perceptive about people other than herself and capable of cracking jokes minutes before death. In short, Granny Weathefall thinks of herself as a gritty survivor. Her strength and endurance help her to overcome the difficulties, and her competence ensures her a successful life

3. What does “the green light” symbolize in The Great Gatsby ? Does it exist in reality? Explain your answer.

The green light is probably one of the most important symbols in The Great Gatsby. Green is the color of hope and it first appears when Gatsby stares across the bay towards a green light at the end of a dock. So the green light represents Gatsby’s hopes and dreams for the future. Gatsby associates it with Daisy, and in Chapter 1, he reaches toward it in the darkness as a guiding light to lead him to his goal.Because Gatsby’s quest for Daisy is broadly associated with the American dream, the green light also symbolizes that more generalized ideal. In Chapter 9, Nick compares the green light to how America,rising out of the ocean, must have looked to early settlers of the new nation.

I think the green light exists in reality. Hope could be anything that is beautiful and attractive.

SectionⅡ

1. What does T. S. Eliot’s idea of “an objective of correlative” mean to you?

The objective of correlative is something (such as a situation, a chain of events, or a set of objects) that symbolizes or objectifies a particular emotion and that may be used in creative writing to evoke a desired emotional response in the reader. According to Eliot, the only way a writer can express emotion in the form of art is by identifying the proper objective correlative. But in my view, one possible flaw of Eliot’s theory might be that an author’s intentions concerning expression would be understood or not.Although Eliot once said that there was a verbal formula for any given state of emotion which, when found and used, would evoke that state and no other, the fact is that droplets of rain, for example, doesn’t mean the emotion of sadness to everyone. So the objective correlative is a good way of expression, but it can also leave the audience without an emotional reaction or invoke the wrong emotion.

2. What does Virginia Woolf uses to present the life of the titled character in her Mrs. Dalloway?

In Mrs. Dalloway all of the action except flashbacks, takes place on a day in June. Virginia Woolf uses the stream of consciousness to present the life of Mrs. Dalloway: Every scene closely tracks the momentary thoughts of a particular character. Woolf blurs the distinction between direct and indirect speech throughout the novel, alternating her narration with omniscient description, indirect interior monologue, direct interior narration at least twenty characters in this way hut the bulk of the novel is spent with Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith.

3. What do you find admirable in Robinson Crusoe? Discuss briefly some of his trait

While he is no flashy hero or grand epic adventurer, Robinson Crusoe displays character traits that I find very admirable. His perseverance in spending months making a canoe, and in practicing pottery making until he gets it right, is praiseworthy. Additionally, his resourcefulness in building a home, dairy,grape arbor, country house, and goat stable from practically nothing is clearly remarkable. Crusoe’s business instincts are also very impressive: He manages to make a fortune in Brazil despite a twentyeight-year absence and even leaves his island with a nice collection of gold. Moreover. Crusoe is never interested in portraying himself as a hero in his own narration. He does not boast of his courage in quelling the mutiny. And he is always ready to admit unheroic feelings of fear or panic, as when he finds the footprint on the beach. Crusoe prefers to depict himself as an ordinary sensible man, never as an exceptional hero.

Ⅳ. Compare Grief with Tears, Idle Tears , commenting particularly on the treatment of their themes. (30 points)

Mrs. Browning’s Grief and Lord Tennyson’s Tear,Idle Tears are both the poems on sadness. To Mrs. Browning, great loss would rob us of our passions and leave us mute and virtually paralyzed,so the great and hopeless grief is passionless. In her poem, she doesn’t explain what the cause of the grief is, while instead Mrs. Browning expresses the theme by contrasting and comparing. The loud and demonstrative grief is contrasted with the deep-hearted grief to show that the former is futile. The true and greatest grief is compared to “a monumental statue in everlasting watch,” “moveless woe” and with dry eyelids. Just like still water runs deep, the deepest sadness is the grief in silence and stillness.

Lord Tennyson, however, sings of the baseless and inexplicable tears that rise in his heart and pour forth from this eyes when he looks out on the fields in autumn and thinks of the past. The cause of his tear is also the theme of this poem. But the theme is not clearly expressed, as the author uses the paradox to convey it. The speaker states that he cries these tears while “looking on the happy autumn-fields.” At first, it seems strange that looking at something happy would elicit tears, but the fact that these are field of autumn suggests that they hear the memories of a spring and summer that have vanished, leaving the poet with nothing to look forward to except the dark and cold of winter. In this way, Tennyson laments “the days that are no more” and describes the past as a “Death in Life”. The poem is about “the passion of the past and the abiding in the transient”.

Ⅴ. Write a critical essay on the following topic. (30 points)

Modernism literature was characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th-century traditions and of their consensus between author and reader, the conventions of realism were abandoned by modernism writers.Modernist writers tended to see themselves as an avant-garde disengaged from bourgeois values, and disturbed their readers by adopting complex and difficult new forms and styles. In fiction, the accepte continuity of chronological development was upset by Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, while James Joyce and Virginia Woolf attempted new ways of tracing the flow of the character’s thoughts in their stream-of-consciousness styles. In poetry, Ezra Pound and Eliot replaced the logical exposition of thoughts with collages of fragmentary images and complex allusions.

Modernist writing is predominantly cosmopolitan, and often expresses a sense of urban cultural dislocation, along with an awareness of new juxtaposition and multiple points of view challenge the reader to reestablish a coherence of meaning from fragmentary forms, which we can see from Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land. uuQBf9fm6xyppaG1q+opameJhceCjjWWUofZs6GWfgiAmpDfSEFgQpzylRmTwXKh

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