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英语语言文学专业
英美文学（50分）
Match each of the following ten passages with its author. There are more authors than passages here, and one author may be matched with more than one passage. Write the passage number (1–10) and the corresponding author letter (A–L) for each answer.
For example, the following is Passage 2: Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.
And its author is [M] Fowles. Then your answer should be : 2M.
Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.
It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger—but I done it, and I weren’t ever sorry for it afterwards, neither. I didn’t do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn’t done that one if I’d known it would make him feel that way.
While arranging my hair, I looked at my face in the glass and felt it was no longer plain; there was hope in its aspect and life in its colour; and my eyes seemed as if they had beheld the fount of fruition and borrowed beams from the lustrous ripple. I had often been unwilling to look at my master, because I feared he could not be pleased at my look; but I was sure I might lift my face to his now, and not cool his affection by its expression.
Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire,
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is;
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Another thing in Joe that I could not understand when it first began to develop itself, but which I soon arrived at sorrowful comprehension of, was this: As I became stronger and better, Joe became a little less easy with me.
All Nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good;
And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,
One truth is clear; whatever is, is right.
The grass-plot before the jail, in Prison Lane, on a certain summer morning, not tell than two centuries ago, was occupied by a pretty large number of the inhabitants of Boston, all with their eyes intently fastened on the iron-clamped oaken door. Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of New England, the grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good people would have augured some awful business in hand.
A. Henry David Thoreau B. William Wordsworth C. Charles Dickens
D. Alexander Pope E. Francis Bacon F. Charlotte Brontë
G. Percy Bysshe Shelley H. Robert Frost I. Mark Twain
J. William Shakespeare K. Nathaniel Hawthorne L. Ralph W. Emerson
M. William Blake
1. Summarize the plot of the following story in your own words. (30 points)
2. Defin the major theme of the following short story. (40 points)
3. Make a brief comment on the characterization of the man and his wife. (30 points)
4. Comment on the ending part of the story. (20 points)
Jim and Irene Westcott were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins.They were the parents of two young children, they had been married nine years, they lived on the twelfth floor of an apartment house near Sutton Place, they went to the theater on an average of 10.3 times a year, and they hoped someday to live Westchester. Irene Westcott was a pleasant, rather plain girl with soft brown hair, and a wide, fine forehead upon which nothing at all had been written, and in the cold weather she wore a coat of fitch skins dyed to resemble mink. You could not say that Jim Westcott looked younger than he was, but you could at least say of him that he seemed to feel younger. He wore his graying hair cut very short, he dressed in the kind of clothes his class had worn at Andover, and his manner was earnest, vehement, and intentionally naive. The Westcotts differed from their friends, their classmates, and their neighbors, only in an interest they shared in serious music. They went to a great many concerts—although they seldom mentioned this to anyone—and they spent a good deal of time listening to music on the radio.
Their radio was an old instrument, sensitive, unpredictable, and beyond repair. He promised to buy Irene a new radio, and on Monday when he came home from work he told her that he had got one. He refused to describe it, and said it would be a surprise for her when it came.
The radio was delivered at the kitchen door the following afternoon, and with the assistance of her maid and the handyman Irene uncrated it and brought it into the living room. She was struck at once with the physical ugliness of the large gumwood cabinet. Irene was proud of her living room, she had chosen its furnishings and colors as carefully as she chose her clothes, and now it seemed to her that her new radio stood among her intimate possessions like an aggressive intruder. She was confounded by the number of dials and switches on the instrument panel, and she studied them thoroughly before she put the plug into a wall socket and turned the radio on. The deals flooded with a malevolent green light, and in the distance she heard the music of a piano quintet. The quintet was in the distance for only an instant; it bore down upon her with a speed greater than light and filled the apartment with the noise of music amplified so mightily that it knocked a china ornament from a table to the floor. She rushed to th instrument and reduced the volume. The violent forces that were snared in the ugly gumwood cabinet made her uneasy. Her children came home from school then, and she took them to the park. It was not until later in the afternoon that she was able to return to the radio.
The maid had given the children their suppers and was supervising their baths when Irene turned on the radio, reduced the volume, and sat down to listen to a Mozart quintet that she knew and enjoyed.The music came through clearly. The new instrument had a much purer tone, she thought, than the old one. She decided that tone was most important and that she could conceal the cabinet behind the sofa.But as soon as she had made her peace with the radio, the interference began. A crackling sound like the noise of a burning powder fuse began to accompany the singing of the strings. Beyond the music, there was a rustling that reminded Irene unpleasantly of the sea, and as the quintet progressed. these noises were joined by many others. She tried all the dials and switches but nothing dimmed the interference, and she sat down, disappointed and bewildered, and tried to trace the flight of the melody. The elevator shaft in her building ran beside the living-room wall, and it was the noise of the elevator that gave her a clue to the character of the static. The rattling of the elevator cables and the opening and closing of the elevator doors, were reproduced in her loudspeaker, and, realizing that the radio was sensitive to electrical currents of all sorts, she began to discern through the Mozart the ringing of telephone bells, the dialing of phones, and the lamentation of a vacuum cleaner. By listening more carefully, she was able to distinguish doorbells, elevator bells, electric razors, and Waring mixers, whose sounds had been picked up from the apartments that surrounded hers and transmitted through her loudspeaker. The powerful and ugly instrument, with its mistaken sensibility to discord, was more than she could hope to master, so she turned the thing off and went into the nursery to see her children.
When Jim came home that night, he was tired, and he took a bath and changed his clothes. Then he joined Irene in the living room. He had just turned on the radio when the maid announced dinner, so he left it on, and Irene went to the table.
Jim was too tired to make even pretense of sociability, and there was nothing about the dinner to hold Irene’s interest, so her attention wandered from the food to the deposits of silver polish on the candlesticks and from there to the music in the other room. She listened for a few minutes to a Chopin prelude and then was surprised to hear a man’s voice break in. “For Christ’s sake, Kathy,” he said, “do you always have to play the piano when I get home?” The music stopped abruptly. “It’s the only chance I have,” the woman said. “So am I,” the man said. He added something obscene about an upright piano,and slammed a door. The passionate and melancholy music began again.
“Did you hear that?” Irene asked.
“What?” Jim was eating his dessert.
“The radio. A man said something while the music was still going on—something dirty.”
“It’s probably a play.”
“I don’t think it is a play,” Irene said.
They left the table and took their coffee into the living room. Irene asked Jim to try another station.He turned the knob. “Have you seen my garters?” A man asked. “Button me up,” a woman said. “Have you seen my garters?” the man said again. “Just button me up and I’ll find your garters,” the woman said. Jim shifted to another station. “I wish you wouldn’t leave apple cores in the ashtrays,” a man said. “I hate the smell.”
“This is strange,” Jim said.
“Isn’t it?” Irene said.
Jim turned the knob again. “On the coast of Coromandet where the early pumpkins blow,” a woman with a pronounced English accent said, “in the middle of the woods lived the Yonghy-Bonghy Bo. Two old chairs, and half a candle, one old jug without a handle...”
“My God!” Irene cried. “That’s the Sweeneys’ nurse.”
“These were all his worldly goods,” the British voice continued.
“Turn that thing off,” Irene said. “Maybe they can hear us.” Jim switched the radio off. “That was Miss Armstrong, the Sweeneys’ nurse,” Irene said. “She must be reading to the little girl. They live in 17-B. I’ve talked with Miss Armstrong in the park. I know her voice very well. We must be getting other people’s apartment.”
“That’s impossible,” Jim said.
“Well, that was the Sweeneys’ nurse,” Irene said hotly. “I know her voice.! know it very well. I’m wondering if they can hear us.” Jim turned the switch. First from a distance and then nearer, nearer, as if borne on the wind, came the pure accents of the Sweeneys’ nurse again; “Lady Jingly! Lady Jingly!” she said, “sitting where the pumpkins blow, will you come and be my wife, said the Yonggy-Bonggy-Bo...”
Jim went over to the radio and said “Hello” loudly into the speaker.
“I am tired of living singly,” the nurse went on, “on this coast so wild and shingly, I’m aweary of my life; if you’ll come and be my wife, quite serene would be my life...”
“I guess she can’t hear us,” Irene said. “Try something else.”
Jim turned to another station, and the living room was filled with the uproar of a cocktail part that had overshot its mark. Someone was playing the piano and singing the “Whiffenpoof Song,” and the voices that surrounded the piano were vehement and happy. “Eat some more sandwiches,” a woman shrieked. There were screams of laughter and a dish of some sort crashed to the floor.
“Those must be the Fullers, in 11-E,” Irene said. “I knew they were giving a party this afternoon.I saw her in the liquor store. Isn’t this too divine? Try something else. See if you can get those people in 18-C.”
The Westcotts overheard that evening a monologue on salmon fishing in Canada, a bridge game running comments on home movies of what had apparently been a fortnight at Sea Island, and a bitter family quarrel about an overdraft at the bank. They turned off their radio at midnight and went to bed,weak with laughter.
The following morning, Irene cooked breakfast for the family—the maid didn’t come up from her room in the basement until—she braided her daughter’s hair, and waited at the door until her children and her husband had been carried away in the elevator. Then she went into the living room and tried the radio. “I don’t want to go to school,” a child screamed. “I hate school. I won’t go to school. I hate school.” “You will go to school,” an enraged woman said. “We paid eight hundred dollars to get you into that school and you’ll go if it kills you.” The next number on the dial produced the worn record of the “Missouri Waltz.” Irene shifted the control and invaded the privacy of several breakfast tables. She overheard demonstrations of indigestion, carnal love, abysmal vanity, faith, and despair. Irene’s life was nearly as simple and sheltered as it appeared to be, and the forthright and sometimes brutal language that came from the loudspeaker that morning astonished and troubled her. She continued to listen until her maid came in. Then she turned off the radio quickly, since this insight, she realized, was a furtive one.
Irene had a luncheon date with a friend that day, and she left her apartment a little after twelve.
Irene had two Martinis at lunch, and she looked searchingly at her friend and wondered what her secrets were. They had intended to go shopping after lunch, but Irene excused herself and went home.She told the maid that she was not to be disturbed; then she went into the living room, closed the doors, and switched on the radio. She heard, in the course of the afternoon, the halting conversation of a woman entertaining her aunt, the hysterical conclusion of a luncheon party, and hostess briefing her maid about some cocktail guests. “Don’t give the best Scotch to anyone who hasn’t white hair,” the hostess said. “See if you can get rid of the liver paste before you pass those hot things, and could you lend me five dollars? I want to tip the elevator man.
As the afternoon waned, the conversations increased in intensity. From where Irene sat, she could see the open sky above the East River. There were hundreds of clouds in the sky, as though the south wind had broken the winter into pieces and were blowing it north, and on her radio she could hear the arrival of cocktail guests and the return of children and businessmen from their schools and offices. “I found a good-sized diamond on the bathroom floor this morning,” a woman said. “It must have fallen out of the bracelet Mrs. Dunston was wearing last night.” “We’ll sell it,” a man said. “Take it down to the jeweler on Madison Avenue and sell it. Mrs. Dunston won’t know the difference, and we could use a couple of hundred bucks...” “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s” the Sweeneys’ nurse sang. “Half-pence and farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s. When will you pay me? Say the bells at old Bailey...” “It’s not a hat,” a woman cried, and at her back roared a cocktail party. “It’s not a hat, it’s a love affair. That’s what Walter Florell said. He said it’s not a hat, it’s a love affair,” and then, in a lower voice, the same woman added, “Talk to somebody, for Christ’s sake, honey, talk to somebody. If she catches you standing here not talking to anybody, she’ll take us off her invitation list, and I love these parties.”
Jim came home at about six the next night. Emma, the maid, let him in, and he had taken off his hat and was taking off his coat when Irene ran into the hall. Her face was shining with tears and her hair was disordered. “Go up to 16-C, Jim!” she screamed. “Don’t take off your coat. Go up to 16-C. Mr. Osborn’s beating his wife. They’ve been quarreling since four o’clock, and now he is hitting her. Go up there and stop him.”
From the radio in the living room, Jim heard screams, obscenities, and thuds. “You know you don’t have to listen to this sort of thing,” he said. He strode into the living room and turned the switch. “It’s indecent,” he said. “It’s like looking into windows. You know you don’t have to listen to this sort of thing. You can turn it off.”
“Oh, it’s so terrible, it’s so dreadful,” Irene was sobbing. I’ve been listening all day, and it’s so depressing.
“Well, if it’s so depressing, why do you listen to it? I brought this dammed radio to give you some pleasure,” he said. “I paid a great deal of money for it. I thought it might make you happy. I wanted to make you happy.”
“Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t quarrel with me,” she moaned, and laid her head on his shoulder. “All the others have been quarreling all day. Everybody’s been quarreling. They’re all worried about money.Mrs. Hutchinson’s mother is dying of cancer in Florida and don’t have enough money to send her to the Mayo Clinic. At least, Mr. Hutchinson says they don’t have enough money. And some woman in this building is having an affair with the handyman—with that hideous handyman. It’s too disgusting. And Mrs. Melville has heart trouble, and Mr. Hendricks is going to lose his job in April and Mrs. Hendricks is horrid about the whole thing and that girl that plays the “Missouri Waltz” is a whore, a common whore, and the elevator man has tuberculosis and Mr. Osbom has been beating his wife. She wailed, she trembled with grief and checked the stream of tears down her face with the heel of her palm.
“Well, why do you have to listen?” Jim asked again. “Why do you have to listen to this stuff if it makes you miserable?”
“Oh, don’t, don’t, don’t” she cried. “Life is too terrible, too sordid and awful. But we’ve never been like that, have we, darling? Have we? I mean, we’ve always been good and decent and loving to one another, haven’t we? And we have two children, two beautiful children. Our lives aren’t sordid, are they, darling? Are they?” She flung her arms around his neck and drew his face down to hers. “We’re happy, aren’t we, darling? We are happy, aren’t we?”
“Of course we’re happy,” he said tiredly. He began to surrender his resentment. “Of course we are happy. I’ll have that dammed radio fixed or taken away tomorrow.” He stroked her soft hair. “My poor girl,” he said.
“You love me, don’t you?” She asked. “And we’re not hypercritical or worried about money or dishonesty, are we?”
“No, darling,” he said.
A man came in the morning and fixed the radio. Irene turned it on cautiously and was happy to hear a California-wine commercial and a recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, including Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” She kept the radio on all day and nothing untoward came toward the speaker.
A Spanish suite was being played when Jim came home. “Is everything all right?” he asked. His face was pale, she thought. They had some cocktails and went to dinner to the “Anvil Chorus” from 77 Trovatore. This was followed by Debusy’s “La Mer.”
“I paid the bill for the radio today,” Jim said. “It cost four hundred dollars. I hope you’ll get some enjoyment out of it.
“Oh, I’m sure I will,” Irene said.
“Four hundred dollars is a good deal more than I can afford,” he went on. “I wanted to get something that you’d enjoy. It’s the last extravagance we’ll indulge in this year. I see that you haven’t paid your clothing bills yet. I saw them on your dressing table.” He looked directly at her. “Why did you tell me you’d paid them? Why did you lie to me? ”
“I just didn’t want you to worry, Jim,” she said. She drank some water. “I’ll be able to pay my bills out of this month’s allowance. There were the slipcovers last month, and that party.”
“You’ve got to learn to handle the money I give you a little more intelligently, Irene,” he said.“You’ve got to understand that we don’t have as much money this year as we had last. I had a very sobering talk with Mitchell today. No one is buying anything. We’re spending all of our time promoting new issues, and you know how long that takes. I’m not getting any younger you know. I’m thirty-seven. My hair will be gray next year. I haven’t done as well as I hoped to do. And I don’t suppose things will get any better.”
“Yes, dear,” she said.
“We’ve got to start cutting down,” Jim said. “We’ve got to think of the children. To be perfectly frank with you, I worry about money a great deal. I’m not at all sure of the future. No one is. If anything should happen to me, there’s the insurance, but that won’t go very far today. I’ve worked awfully hard to give you and the children a comfortable life,” he said bitterly. “I don’t like to see all of my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coast and radios and slipcovers and—”
“Please Jim,” she said. “Please. They’ll hear us.”
“Who’ll hear us? Emma can’t hear us.”
“The Radio.”
“Oh, I’m sick!” He shouted. “I’m sick to death of your apprehensiveness. The radio can’t hear us.Nobody can hear us. And what if they can hear us? Who cares?”
Irene got up from the table and went into the living room. Jim went to the door and shouted at her from there, “Why are you so Christly all of a sudden? What’s turned you overnight into a convent girl? You stole your mother’s jewelry before they probated her will. You never gave your sister a cent of that money that was intended for her—not even when she needed it. You made Grace Howland’s life miserable, and where was all your piety and your virtue when you went to that abortionist? I’ll never forget how cool you were. You packed your bag and went off to have that child murdered as if you were going to Nassau. If you’d had any reasons, if you’d had any good reasons—”
Irene stood for a minute before the hideous cabinet, disgraced and sickened, but she held her hand on the switch before she extinguished the music and the voices, hoping the instrument might speak to her kindly, that she might hear the Sweeney’s nurse. Jim continued to shout at her from the door. The voice on the radio was suave and noncommittal. “An early morning railroad disaster in Tokyo,” the loudspeaker said, “killed twenty-nine people. A fire in a Catholic hospital near Buffalo for the care of blind children was extinguished early this morning by nuns. The temperature is forty-seven. The humidity is eighty-nine.”
1. L 2. I 3. F 4. E 5. H 6. M 7. G 8. C 9. D 10. K
1. Summarize the plot of the following story in your own words. (30 points)
The story focuses on Jim and Irene Westcott, an average couple in all, and their fondness of music,which is to say, their fondness of harmony. When their radio breaks down beyond repair, Jim buys another one as a gift for his wife. Intending to hear music, Irene hears the conversations and quarrels of her neighbors instead from this ugly and enormous radio. The radio exposes the cheating and family violence to Irene.
Soon, Irene begins to take pleasure in eavesdropping on her neighbors, but this perverse fascination soon gives way to an apprehensiveness and even defensiveness on the part of Irene, who insistently maintains that she and Jim are innocent of the hypocrisy, fearfulness, and financial troubles that afflic their neighbors. Ironically, her knowledge of their lives and misfortunes eventually causes friction in her own marriage. Jim, it turns out, worries about growing old and wonders why he has not been as successful as he hoped to be. In a sudden outburst, he cracks Irene’s “Christly” shell, exposing the lies,thefts, and even the abortion.
2. Defin the major theme of the following short story. (40 points)
Although the story begins as a work of conventional realism, its theme can be interpreted allegorically.
The Enormous Radio can be seen as a retelling of the biblical story of man’s fall from innocence and expulsion from the Garden of Eden, in this case, the American garden of middle-class respectability.Tempted by the satanic radio, Irene falls into knowledge, out of love, and perhaps beyond the possibility of redemption as well. More ironically, at the end of the story, the life of the “innocent Irene” is also full of indiscretions. It exists neither the Garden of Eden nor the fall of innocence. The author in effect exposes the underside of the American life that Irene and Jim represent. The comforts of their middleclass life, the author wants to suggest, cannot protect the individuals against either the evil in the world or the evil in themselves.
3. Make a brief comment on the characterization of the man and his wife. (30 points)
The Enormous Radio begins with Jim and Irene Westcott’s appearing like a perfect American family. What is ironic about this story is the Westcotts are far from being perfect.
At first sight, Jim Westcott is a loyal hard-working man who tries to support a lifestyle that exceeds their income. His main goal in life at this time is to do whatever he can to make his wife happy. But it turns out that his deeds don’t match his words and ideas. He is not flawless, as he is indifferent to his neighbors and makes his enraged speech to Irene.
Irene Westcott is self-centered and cares much about others’ opinions on her. Her addiction to the privacy of her neighbors serves two purposes: Firstly, she wants to conform to the community; secondly,she needs the problems, quarrels, cheating and abuse to “prove” her integrity. The coat is “of fitch skins, dyed to resemble mink”. The fact that the coat is dyed to resemble something of higher status than it really is can be used as a metaphor to describe the Westcotts’ nature: one way when presenting themselves to society (high class and socially conscientious, like the coat and their marriage both appeare), and another way when they are in the privacy of their own home (not well made, like the coat and how their marriage really is).
4. Comment on the ending part of the story. (20 points)
The ending part of the story is a quite ironical exposure. As the story goes to the end, Jim, the “ideal”husband, confesses his worry about money and attacks his wife for her extravagance, greed, dishonesty and wickedness. The exposure is like the fall from a state of grace or innocence to a state of catastrophic reveal. The “suave and noncommittal” voice on the radio and the shouting of Jim functions as a striking background to Irene’s desperation. The ending is the shattering of illusions, and it is echoing well with the description of the beginning.