发布时间 : 星期六 文章美国文学 期末考试试卷及答案 精品更新完毕开始阅读
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follow on his walk. In reality, it concerns the important decisions which one must make in life, when one must give up one desirable thing in order to possess another. Then, whatever the outcome, one must accept the consequences of one' s choice for it is not possible to go back and have another chance to choose differently.
In the poem, the poet hesitates for a long time, wondering which road to take, because they are both pretty. In the end, he follows the one which seems to have fewer travelers on it. Symbolically, he chose to follow an unusual, solitary life; perhaps he was speaking of his choice to become a poet rather than some commoner profession. But he always remembers the road which he might have taken, and which would have given him a different kind of life.
2. Eugene O' Neill’s Long Day's Journey into Night. (10%)
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Long Day's Journey into Night is somewhat autobiographical. The Tyrones of the play are in fact modeled on the Eugene O' Neill family. The four major characters include James Tyrone, the father, a famous actor, anxious to become rich at the expense of his own talent; Mary Tyrone, the mother, a drug addict; Jamie Tyrone, their elder son, and Edmund Tyrone, their younger son. The Mother becomes mentally ill because she is extremely unhappy with her married life. Young Jamie loses faith in life, while Edmund the wanderer comes back with tuberculosis. All the four suffer frustrations and wish to escape from the harsh reality, James and Jamie look for solace in their cups, while Mary and Edmund seek the protection of the fog which they hope would screen them from the intrusion of the world outside. They meet in the living room of the family' s summer home at 8:30 a. m. of a day in August, 1912, and torment one another and themselves until midnight. The father is angry with the mother for her drug addiction, the mother with his sons for being good for nothing, and the sons with their parents for not being good parents. All are torn in a war between love and hate, and no one is sure which is the stronger emotion. Life is too painful for them even to try and make sense of it. Edmund ' s desperate advice in face of the horrible burden of Time weighing on people ' s shoulders and crushing them to the earth is to lose feeling in their cups and stay always drunk. Thus the long day journeys into night when the tragedy of the
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family is finally enacted. No relief is felt, no light is seen, and all ends in the engulfing darkness.
In a figurative sense, Long Day' s Journey into Night is a metaphor for Eugene 0' Neill' s lifelong endeavor to find truth and the way to acceptance. The former he found, namely, the faithless, fragmentary nature of modern life, whereas the latter he did not; for him all passed into night. In despair Eugene O' Neill thought of the old God of the Catholic church on which, it is ironical to not, he had turned his back long before.
3. Talk about Adgar Allan Poe's social outlook and writings （10%） ? Poe admired aristocratic society，distrusted the leveling tendency of
democracy, and expressed contempt for uplift movements of progress（提高社会地位的进步运动）.He deplored America's increasing industrialization. In his more sardonic comments on democracy, he says that it amounts to the tyranny \1840's and 1850's， who became, in Melville's words , \（孤僻者，与世隔绝者） , \Poe's criticism of contemporary America cut deeper than that of his contemporaries, causing an isolation more nearly absolute than theirs (see Hawthorne). He was more interested in redeeming and refining language. He was called the \
? Poe also dramatizes for us what has been called the demonic side of the
nineteenth century. His tales are filled with assassination and non-escape ,with violence and death. Many of his characters are obsessed with a fear of death. Some of them strive to come back from the tomb; others are terrified of being buried alive or in fact are buried alive like Madeline in \of a general fear of retaining consciousness in a world that is dead.
? Poe was preoccupied with the disintegration of culture, with decadence. He
gives us a vision of \world, machines of sensation and will. They are not willing to live in their own skins. For Poe's characters, the body is a mere machine. It refuses to be reconciled to the flesh and its mortal fate.
? As a consequence , Poe's characters insist on living with an intensity and
fear that has no relation to the limitations imposed by biological and physical laws. They do not seem to eat or drink ,they do not work.
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Occasionally they read or play on musical instruments. They are constantly musing about their lives. They speak to each other intensely and with passion. They live only in their heads—all a matter of intellect and imagination.
Poe's typical heroines are usually afflicted with mysterious diseases. They visibly waste away before their lovers’ eyes. Their lovers or husbands can see that they are perishing and the heroines themselves are thoroughly aware of it, but the process cannot be halted. But they are not willing to let go of their lovers.
His characters fear the final moment, which constantly threatens them while they are alive, since they have no contact with the world of nature or with religion, being just sheer intelligence which is not connected with anything providing life or spiritual fulfillment. One critic has written :\is not interested in anything that is alive. Everything in Poe is dead —the houses, the rooms, the furniture.\Death is a predominant theme of Poe's poetry. The setting of \Raven,\his most celebrated poem, is like that of his tales : the unhappy, unresolved lover sits in an elaborately furnished room, trying to find peace from sorrow in his books and conducting a curious dialogue with his midnight visitant ,a black, deathlike symbol—the raven. Death is also the theme of the curious poem, \尤拉鲁姆)\and \to recognize the impulse,always kept hidden, to kill, even to do violence to one's own nature.
Yet if the world of Poe's imagination is haunted by death and if the tales in particular seem morbid and obsessed, why did they appeal to the audience of Poe's day? And can they have anything to say to us? The answer would have to be that in spite of their fantastic character they do，at some level, reveal what was going on in the psyche of nineteenth century man. Something like a disintegration of personality was occurring in Poe's life time, and the strange horrors that Poe described produced some echoes in the thoughts of his contemporaries. His audience had a craving for the sensational and the shocking. Writers and sensitive thinkers saw man as spiritually gutted),being pushed into an insane, inhuman world created by the rapidly growing process of industrialization.
Strangely enough, however, Poe had a fascination with the power of reason, despite his emphasis on the irrational. In stories like \Rue Morgue\of a baffling crime. Even a few of Poe's tales of nightmare terror come to
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happy endings precisely because the hero can think his way through a problem. Though the hero of \Pit and the Pendulum\cannot, by his unaided efforts, save himself from the death intended for him, he uses his head to keep himself alive until help from the outside comes. In fact, one kind of Poe's characters must be those who are forced to fall back on the resources of one's mind.
? Just as he was fascinated with the process of reason, Poe was interested in
the deviousness(曲折) of the human soul. He placed emphasis on how the unconscious motivates human beings, not unlike the Romantics of his day, but to a greater extent. Unlike the Romantics, Poe examined irrational drives; he wanted to bring reason to bear on areas which, in his time, were regarded as lying beyond its boundaries or else were ignored altogether. In other words, Poe used his reason to discover the source of the irrational. This is especially evident in \
? Poe's tragic life and his concentration on death were his extreme and poetic
response to that which was elaborated upon, in naturalistic terms, fifty years later. He was unusually sensitive to the world of his own day, affected by it intensely ，causing his isolation. Though he wanted to find his place in a traditional society, his failure to do so may well have heightened his sense of lonely individualism. It is this sense of alienation which has carried itself through the greatest of literature in America.
4. Comment on Hawthorne’s style.（10%）
? His style is also noteworthy for his frequent use of images. Metaphors and
similes abound, most of them stirringly fresh and effective. He makes skillful use of colors as a means for conveying mood. Black ,red and gray predominate.
? Hawthorne's sentences, like his language, show the effects of his long years
of study and practice in writing. There are few of the awkward sentences which may be found in Cooper. The sentences may appear, to a twentieth century reader, to be too consistently long. But they were not abnormally long for their day. In the most complex sentences ,however, grammatical subordination is employed with sufficient logic and variety to make the writing smooth and clear.
? Another reflection of the times in which Hawthorne wrote is seen in his
punctuation. Many of his works are over-punctuated, by modern standards;
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