2) They chose their subjects from the lower ranks of the society and portrayed misery and poverty/poorness;
3) They dealt with the nature of the man of "underdogs" -"bestiality", as an explanation of sexual desire;
4) Their languages were unpolished;
5) The naturalists believed that the real and true nature is hidden from the eyes o the individual, or beyond his control;
6) Naturalism evolved/came from realism, but the tone of the authors were more ironic and pessimistic. (P475-476)

American Literature

Chapter 3 The Modern Period
I. Choose the right answer:
1. Ezra Pound is a leading spokesman of the_________.
A. Imagist Movement  B. Chartist Movement C. Modernist Movement D. Romantic Movement
Answer: A (P553)
2. Strong affinity of the Chinese and Oriental literature can be found in the works of_________.
A. Mark Twain B. Ezra Pound C. Emily Dickinson D. Arthur Miller
Answer: B (P556)
3. In Robert Frost’s famous poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", there are four lines like these: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep,/ And miles to go before I sleep”. The second sleep refers to______.
A. die B. calm down C. fall into sleep D. stop walking
Answer: A (P567)
4. Of the following American poets, whose work was first recognized in England and then in America?
A. Robert Frost B. Walt Whitman  C. Emily Dickinson D. Wallace Stevens
Answer: A (P561)
5. "For I have had too much/ Of apple-picking: I am overtired/ Of the great harvest I myself desired" From these lines we can conclude that the speaker __________.
A. is happy about the harvest B. is tired of the work of apple-picking
C. is not tired when seeing the harvest D. becomes indifferent of the job
Answer: B (P565)

6. In these lines "The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough", Ezra Pound uses the figure of speech of ________.
A. metaphor B. simile C. hyperbole D. contrast
Answer: A (P557)
7. O’Neill’s inventiveness seemingly knew no limits. He was constantly experimenting with new styles and forms for his plays, especially during the twenties when ______was in full swing.
A. Symbolism B. Expressionism C. Romanticism D. Realism
Answer: B (P571)
8. "He got me, aw right. I’m trou. Even him didn’t tink I belonged." In these sentences taken from ’The Hairy Ape’, the words “he” and “him” both refer to__________.
A. Yank B. God C. The ape in the zoo D. A person unnamed
Answer: B (P575)
9. ______is a school of modern painting, whose emphasis is on the formal structure of a work of art and especially on the multiple-perspective viewpoints.
A. Expressionism B. Impressionism C. Cubism D. Imagism
Answer: C (P546)
10. In a class which discuss the Imagist Movement in the United States, we will definitely NOT include________.
A. William Carlos Williams B. Ezra Pound C. Gary Snyder D. Wallance Stevens
Answer: C (P547-548)
11. In which of the following poems by Ezra Pound did you find the allusion to Wi-shang? ____________
A. In a Station of the Metro B. The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter C. A Pact D. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
Answer: B (P559)
12. In 1915, Ezra Pound began writing his great work_______, which spanned from 1917 to 1959.
A. Cantos B. Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound C. Personae D. Hygh Selwyn Mauberley
Answer: A (P554)
13. Robert Frost was the Pulitzer winner on ______ occasions.
A. twoB. Three C. four D. five
Answer: C (P560)

13. The founder of the American drama is _______.
A. Arthur Miller B. Clifford Odets C. Tennesee Williams D. Eugene O’Neill
Answer: D (P568)
14. The first full-length play written by Eugene O’Neill is ______.
A. The Straw B. Beyond the Horizon C. Bound East for Cardiff D. The Hairy Ape
Answer: B (P568)
14. Eugene O’Neill’s ’The Hairy Ape’ explores the problem of________.
A. human disillusionment B. the corruption of human desire  C. human responsibility D. the loss of human identity
answer: D (P572)
15. Fitzgerald’s fictional world is the best embodiment of the spirit of_______.
A. the Jazz age B. the Romantic Period C. the Renaissance Period D. the Neoclassical Period
Answer: A (P577)
16. Fitzgerald wrote the following except_________.
A. The Great Gatsby B. In Our Time C. Tender is the Night D. This Side of Paradise
Answer: B (P578)
17. "There was music from my neighbor’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the chamoagne and the stars...", the two sentences are taken from________.
A. ’The Great Gatsby’ by Fitzgerald B. ’Sister Carrie’ by Theodore Dreiser C. ’Moby-Dick’ by Herman Melville D. ’Daisy Miller’ by Henry James
Answer: A (P583)
18. Which of the following comments on the novel ’The Great Gatsby’ is not true?
A. The Great Gatsby is a novel that is a set against the ending of the war.
B. Gatsby is a mystical figure whose intensity of dream partakes of a state of mind that embodies American itself.
C. Gatsby is the last of the romantic heroes. D. Gatsby is wealthy but unintelligent and brutal.
Answer: D (P581-582)
19. _____is Hemingway’s masterpiece.
A. Farewell to Arms B. For Whom the bell Tolls C. The Sun Also Rises D. The Old Man and the Sea
Answer: D (P601)
20. Which of the following best describes the protagonist of William Faulkner’s "A Rose for Emily"?
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 "I" instead of "I" to refer to himself as a protest against self-importance?
A. Cummings B. Wallance Stevens C. Fitzgerald D. Ernest Hemingway
Answer: A (P548)
22. Who is the author of the writing "The Grapes of Wrath"?
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. "The 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 "In a Station of the Metro" by Ezra Pound. (P557) 2) Here "petals" stands for "human faces". (P557)
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. "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
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 "The Road Not Taken" (P566)
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: "Make good choice of your life." (P555-556)

3. "The 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 "The 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 "party" 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 "The Lost Generation)
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 "seize the day" or "enjoy the present" was pervasive.
(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 "The Great Gatsby" (1925).
(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 "central consciousness" or one character’s point of 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?
Answer:
(1) Darwinism; (2) Karl Marx’s scientific socialism; (3) Freud’s "unconsciousness" and psychoanalysis; (4) William James’ "stream of consciousness"; (5) Carl June’s "collective unconscious", "archetypal symble". (P546)

6. What are the characteristics of the Eugene O’Neill’s plays?
(1) Of all the plays O’Neill wrote, most of them are tragedies, dealing with the basic issues of human existence and predicament: life and death, illusion and disillusion, alienation and communication, dream and reality, self and society, desire and frustration, etc. His characters (The Hairy Ape) in the plays are described as seeking meaning and purpose in their lives in different ways, some through love, some through religion, others through revenge, but all meet disappointment and despair.
(2) Dramatization of man’s effort in finding the secret of life results in a reconciliation with the tragic impossibility.
(3) "The Hairy Ape" is a play that concerns the problem of modern man’s identity. Yank’s sense of belonging nowhere, hence homelessness and rootlessness, is typical of the mood of isolation and alienation in the early twentieth century in the United States and the whole world as well. (P570-571)

7. Analyze "The Hemingway Code Hero"
Answer:
(1) They are always Exposed to and victimized by violence in various forms, Nick becomes the prototype of the wounded hero who, with all the dignity and courage he could muster, confronts situation.
(2) They are a group of wandering, amusing, but aimless people, who are caught in the war and removed from the path of ordinary life.
(3) They are the men trapped both physically and mentally.
(4) God’s design or his beneficence and to suggest that man is doomed to be entrapped.
(5) They believe: life is worth living and there are causes worth dying for.
(6) In a tragic sense, the struggle of Hemingway’s heroes show: it is a representation of life as a struggle against unconquerable natural forces in which only a partial victory is possible. Nevertheless, there is a feeling of great respect for the struggle and mankind.
(7) Hemingway hero of athletic prowess and masculinity and unyielding heroism.
(8) To master the code with the honest, the discipline, and the restrains are Hemingway Code heroes. In the general situation of his novels, life is full of tension and battles; the world is in chaos; man is always fighting desperately a losing battle. However, though life is but a losing battle, it is a struggle man can dominate in such a way that loss becomes dignity; man can be physically destroyed but never defeated spiritually. (P600---603)

8. About William Faulkner:
I. Analyses about his life and his theme:
Answer:1) His works criticizes the stratified society among the aristocrats, the new rich, the poor whites and the blacks.
2) His work shows a panorama of the experience and consciousness of the whole Southern society.
3) His works focus on the collision of the intelligent, sensitive, and idealistic protagonist/hero (Emily) with the society of the twentieth century.
4) Almost all his heroes turn out to be tragic. They are tragic because they are prisoners of the past, or the society, or some social and moral taboos, or of their own introspective personalities.
5) Faulkner suggests that society, which conditions man with its hierarchical stratification and with its laws and institutions, eliminates man’s chance of responding naturally to the experience of his existence, against this imprisoned, confused, fragmented social being is the primitive man who, not conditioned by the civilization and social institutions, accepts the life-death pattern of human existence.
6) By turning away from reality, by alienating himself from truth with his attempts to explain the inexplicable, becomes weak and cowardly, confused and ineffectual.
7) Theme of imprisonment in the past. The past that Faulkner uses in this book to set off the present is not the past of an earlier society or historical period, but the immediate past---the world of childhood, innocent and idealistic. (P612---614)

II. Analyses on Faulkner’s techniques in writing:
Answer:
1) He holds/believes in the infinite possibilities inherent in human life. Therefore a writer should observe with no judgment whatsoever and reduce authorial intrusion to the lowest minimum. The range of narrative techniques used by Faulkner is remarkable. He would never step between the characters and the reader to explain, but let the characters explain themselves and hinder as little as possible the reader’s direct experience of the work of art. (detached)
2) He deliberately broke up the chronology of his narrative by juxtaposing the past with the present.
3) Faulkner was good at presenting multiple points of view. (P615-616)

III. The character analyses about Miss Emily Grierson:

Answer:
1) She is an eccentric spinster who refuses to accept the passage of time or the inevitable change and loss that accompanies it.
2) She is the symbols of the Old South but the prisoners of the past.
3) Something about plots: Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, and she vanquished the people in the town, horse and foot, just as she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell. And she is the victim of the idea of her family: none of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such. Then she fell in love with a Northerner, but some of the ladies began to say that it was a disgrace to the town and a bad example to the young men. (P617)