综合练习五

综合练习五

“美国文学”综合练习五

Chapter 11 Beat Generation

Complete the sentence with proper words or expressions.

1. The word “Beat” is originally a jazz term for rhythm.

When it applies to the Beats, the word is used as a ( ). First, it can

mean beaten down, destroyed, and demolished. In being beaten

down, the Beats had an experience of beatitude, and beatitude

means blessedness. The shortened form of beatitude is beat, and

thus Beat means “beatific.”In addition, beat means being

inspired with the wonder of life.

2. The Beat Generation was a generation of men and women

in their teens and early twenties who affected an alienation from

general society because they rejected ( ) social and moral values.

They emphasize the ( ) expression of emotions.

3. The Beats rejected ( ) class values, commercialism, and ( ).

4. Beat prose is characteristic of the disappearance of the

“ ( ).” Beat literature uses new forms both in prose and poetry.

5. The most enduring Beat works are represented by ( )’s

On the Road and ( )’s Naked Lunch in prose, and ( )’s Howl and

Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Pictures from the Gone World in poetry.

6. ( ) and ( ) became the pocket Bibles of the Beat Generation.

Howl; On the Road

7. ( ) was the poet Laureate and the spokesman of the Beat

Generation.

8. In 1955, at the Sixth Gallery, an art studio, Allen Ginsberg

read aloud his poem Howl to his friends. That night has been

called the “birth trauma of the ( ).”

9. Howl was written in long, tumbling lines in the poetic

tradition of ( ) and ( ).

10. Jack Kerouac’s experimental writing style is known as ( ),

which enabled him to enjoy a freedom from accepted rules and

limitations in writing.

11. Jack Kerouac is regarded as the founder of the ( )

Movement. Beat

12. ( ) was the best novel Jack Kerouac wrote in his

spontaneous, formless, and unedited style, in which Jack Kerouac

used other prominent Beat writers as major characters.

Decide whether the statements are true or false.

1. The Beat Generation was a social phenomenon rather than

an artistic one. The great emphasis was on the way people lived,

the way the Beats lived.

2. The Beats scorned the middle class by adopting an

“unrespectable” way of life, growing their hair and beards very

long, deliberately remaining poor and dressing like paupers,

living in an unconventional and undisciplined way.

3. The Beats withdrew from politics and from the obligations

of citizenship. By and large they were in favor of peace.

4. The group of Beat writers put on a concerted and well-publicized rebellion against “official”American life and culture.

They struggled in their art and in their lives to discover valid

responses in an anxious time without simply escaping in nihilism.

They preferred to express emotions “raw”, exactly as it was felt,

rather than “cooked”through memory and translation into art.

5. In form and style Beat writings range from the oral

“breath-length”line to a highly controlled prosody, but nearly

all Beat writers followed the tradition of Ezra Pound. Beat poetry

exhibits a high degree of improvisation, “cut-up” effects, a

juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated images, and an erotic

orientation.

6. The long, tumbling lines became Allen Ginsberg’s

signatures.

7. Howl is now regarded a consummate work of carefully

worded invectives, a torrent of deliberate voluble curses,

combining condemnation against the “dull, prosperous

Eisenhower years with exuberant celebration of an emerging

counterculture”.

8. The theory of frank talk that Ginsberg had is very similar

to Emerson’s theory: use the language of common people.

Chapter 12 Women Writers in the USA

Complete the sentence with proper words or expressions.

1. Woman in the Nineteenth Century, written by Margaret

Fuller on questions of gender, friendship, talent, and literary and

social values, was “America’s first landmark ( ) treatise.”

2. American women did not win suffrage till ( ), 50 years after

black males. 1920

3. Women’s Liberation Movement in the ( ) was largely a

movement of ( ) women. It created for its members a new sense

of self-respect and a feeling of community and it fostered a

deeper understanding of the sources of oppression and the

distorting effects that oppression had on its victims. It produced

a new kind of literature, the ( ) literature.

4. Around the 1970s, the women within the racial and ethnic

groups began to write openly and systematically about their “( ),”

being a woman and being a member of a “minority”.

5. The depiction of the long voyage in Ship of Fools, which

symbolizes the path of life, is an insightful revelation of the origin

and potential of human ( ).

6. The third novel of Joanna Russ, The Female Man, was a

significant ( ) novel, which uses science fiction instruments to

make arguments about women’s world and condition, about

four women at four edges of time, representing different stages

of self-realization.

7. ( ) represents Alice Walker’s best in her creative writing.

8. The Color Purple is notable for its imaginative use of ( )

convention to create a richly vernacular speech. epistolary

9. The novel The Color Purple is made up of the heroine

Celie’s despairing letters to ( ) and to her sister Nettie, and of

Nettie’s letters to Celie.

10. In The Color Purple Alice Walker focuses on a specific

aspect of power solution ( ) the black community itself – the

exploitation of black ( ) by black men.

Decide whether the statements are true or false.

1. The mid-19th century conjunction of women’s writing

and a middle-class domestic audience is an event of great

importance in American literary history.

2. From the 1890s, the new woman had a recognized identity

through the literary portrayals by women writers such as Kate

Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Alice James, Ellen Glasgow,

Willa Cather, and Gertrude Stein.

3. Gertrude Stein and Katherine Anne Porter belonged to the

postwar American literary movement called the Lost Generation

which was in fact a community of men.

4. Katherine Anne Porter is often called “a maker of darkish

parables” because she depicted the impoverished spirit of

people in the modern world and repeated the themes of isolation,

guilt, and spiritual denial.

5. Sylvia Plath is often studied as a confessional poet.

6. Joanna Russ emerged as one of the most talented and

provocative writers of science fiction’s New Wave during the

1960s.

Chapter 13 Jewish American Writers

Complete the sentence with proper words or expressions.

1. Jewish literature always reveals a crowded ( ) background.

2. Some of the early Jewish American writers wrote in ( ).

3. The full arrival of competent mature Jewish literature

occurred by the end of the ( ) World War.

4. ( ) is often acclaimed as the best writer after Hemingway

and Faulkner.

5. Saul Bellow follows the ( ) tradition in literature. At the

same time he is influenced by ( ) literature.

6. Bernard Malamud’s stories captured the speech and

manners of the recently immigrated ( ) Jews.

7. Bernard Malamud’s writing is unified by a tone of

resigned and ( ) wisdom and unsentimental cultural compassion.

8. Saul Bellow, Isaac Singer, Bernard Malamud, and Philip

Roth best represent the Jewishness in American literature, but

they reflect on it in their own ways. Bellow stresses the power of

( ) in his novels. Self-teaching is at the heart of all his novels as

his characters seek a rational interpretation of the world through

their own experiences in it. Singer deals with the ( ) society of

religious Jews, their powerful folklore, and their pious, fatalistic

faith in God which imbues every aspect of their life. Malamud

wrote about the very ( ) and made ( ) appear as equal to goodness,

and poverty equal to ( ). In this way Malamud illustrated Jew s’

belief that God has sent perpetual suffering to his Chosen People

to strengthen and purify them. Philip Roth is the foremost author

to use ( ) as a way of humor in his novels since Jews are able to

laugh at themselves. He often makes fun of the Jewish middle

class as they take on bourgeois habits mixed with their traditional

Jewish customs.

9. Jewish American literature after the Second World War is

generally regarded as literature of ( ), because of Jewish religious

beliefs and doctrines.

10. In order to develop the theme of alienation, Jewish

writers portray the alienated characters in alienated society. The

alienated character is anti-hero, in Yiddish, ( ) or schlemiel.

Decide whether the statements are true or false.

1. Saul Bellow’s frequent criticism of modern American life

is both bitter and loving.

2. Although very poor in Europe, Jewish people were highly

educated because their religion always taught a reverence for

words, for scholarship.

3. When Jewish writers began their literary creation in

America, they followed European tradition of realism rather than

American spirit of romanticism. They tried to reflect on what it

means to be a Jew in America.

4. Bellow’s recurrent themes are displacement, alienation,

masochism and modern urban man’s search for meaningful

identity. His fiction is dominated by the marginal man, an

alienated and absurd character caught between his own

inadequacies and those imposed on him by his friends and

society.

5. Bellow’s protagonists are often uncommon thinkers who

long for transcendental existence as they are estranged from the

world around them. Struggling with the impersonality of the

physical world, agonized by their own awareness of morality, his

protagonists laugh at their deficiency with bitter irony because it

relieves despair. They hunger for community, yet they hold back

because that would have to betray the sanctity of their private

self in order to achieve it. Thus they are driven even deeper into

their inner recesses.

6. Bellow is by no means pessimistic because he believes in

the possibility of reason. Even if a man cannot shape his own

destiny, he can still control the manner in which he faces it and

then denies absurdity by his own efforts.

7. With the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, Isaac Singer

established himself as the foremost writer of Yiddish literature in

America. He was also recognized as one of the best in a long

tradition of Yiddish writers.

8. Schlemiel is a uniquely Jewish character type. It means a

person whose luck is always bad. Yet he is able to laugh at himself.

Humor is an important purpose for the portrayal of such a

character. Usually he is treated sympathetically because the

schlemiel shows the reader that what the world considers to be

failure might be a success. He is a wise fool. The schlemiel brings

out an important theme in Jewish literature, the importance of

humility. One has to learn to be humble and thankful for what

one gets in life.

Chapter 14 African American Writers

Complete the sentence with proper words or expressions.

1. The earliest black literature was oral in the form of songs,

ballads, and ( ). With ( ) the black created the spirituals –“sorrow

songs” as W. E. B. Du Bois called it.

2. With freedom after the Civil War came the ( ), which

developed from the work song and “holler,” the call and

response.

3. After the First World War came ( ), which was developed

from blues, though blues has its own continuing existence and

further development.

4. The literary and artistic movement known as ( ) brought

about an upsurge in literary and artisitic creation by blacks in the

1920s.

5. As spokesman for the Harlem literary group, ( ) published

an article “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” which

can be viewed as his pubic declaration of their intent to break

from their literary heritage and to initiate a new trend in black

literature. This is known as Harlem Renaissance.

6. One of the most noticeable elements of Harlem

Renaissance writing is its use of ( ) and ( ) and its identification

with the spirit of ( ).

7. African American literature is patterned on a myth of ( )

from slavery, that of the Hebrew prophet Moses leading the Jews

in their flight from the bondage in Egypt.

8. As the leader of the Harlem writers who created the Black

Literary Renaissance of the 1920s, Hughes was known as the

“Poet Laureate of ( )”and “( ) of Harlem”.

9. Richard Wright’s ( ) made literary history and won him

immediate reputation.

10. Richard Wright is well-known for his ( ) fiction. He made

the first answer in this period to the problems of being black and

being an artist – to protest.

11. James Baldwin wrote in the ( ) tradition of D. H. Lawrence

and James Joyce instead of American ( ) tradition.

12. James Baldwin, along with Ralph Ellison, gave the reader

the second answer to the the racial problem. Like Ellison, he saw

( ) and ( ) as the difficult but necessary way to overcome racial

conflict.

13. Invisible Man is a highly ( ) and ( ) novel which deals with

a nameless southern Negro who leaves the South to Harlem only

to find that he is not seen as a fully individual person but a

creation of the eyes which look at him.

14. Based on a set of symbols on the conscious use of myth,

and on historical allusions, Invisible Man presents the traditional

theme of the search for ( ) and ( ).

15. ( ) embodies the new development of black literature at

the end of the 20th century. She has shifted her focus onto a

black ( ). Her interest is not in explaining or justifying herself to

anyone, but, as she puts it, in “talking to the tribe.”

16. Toni Morrison’s ( ) is seen as another milestone in

African American literature after Native Son and Invisible Man. It

tells the story of an African American trying to recover his family

roots.

17. Toni Morrison’s fifth novel ( ) is generally regarded as

her best.

Decide whether the statements are true or false.

1. The spirituals express the sorrow of the singer’s earthly

condition, but point to the “freedom” in the next world.

2. Richard Wright began the black literary tradition of violent

self-assertion. He remains a father figure to modern black writers

such as James Baldwin

3. Invisible Man is not a racial protest novel, but a novel

about the existentialist crisis of modern man. Ellison intended his

black protagonist to symbolize all people in a dehumanized

society with their aspirations and frustrations.

4. Toni Morrison’s work aims to empower the black people

to act for themselves, to recognized their own world, their own

history, and their own reality.

5. Toni Morrison has been working self-consciously in search

for her own style.