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2.
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6.
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2.
3.
2005
Choose TWO
(30%)
1.
What is
the relationship between Shelley the poet and the
West Wind in
2.
Magwitch the convict in
Great Expectations
takes the
risk of being hanged when he comes back to London
to see Pip. How do you evaluate this
meeting?
3.
Does
4.
Who is the
protagonist in Doris Lessing's short story
(20%)
But
novelists write for countless different reasons:
for money, for fame, for reviewers, for parents,
for friends,
for loved one; for vanity,
for pride, for curiosity, for amusement; as
skilled furniture makers enjoy making
furniture, as drunkards like drinking,
as judges like judging, as Sicilian like emptying
a shotgun into a enemy's
back. I could
fill a book with reasons, and they would all be
true of all. 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.
---John Fowles,
The French
Lieutenant's
Woman (1969)
What does the word
What does
the statement
What do you think of John
Fowles' idea of novel writing?
Write a commentary of about 200 words
on any of the texts in
Selected
Readings in American
Literature
with reference to
its author's handling of SETTING. Sufficient
textual information and
SPECIFIC
examples are required to illustrate your
viewpoints. (50%)
Referring to the passage below
(50%)
Summarize what Woolf
is saying,
Discuss the
debate between modernism and realism in the early
20th century, OR
Discuss the
idea of
Surely
one reason is that the men and women who began
writing novels in 1910 or thereabouts had this
great
difficulty to face -- that there
was no English novelist living from whom they
could learn their business. Mr..
Conrad
is a Pole; which sets him apart, and makes him,
however admirable, not very helpful. Mr.. Hardy
has
written no novel since 1895. The
most prominent successful novelists in the year
1910 were, I suppose, Mr..
Wells, Mr..
Bennett, and Mr.. Galsworthy. Now it seems to me
that to go to these men and ask them to teach
you how to write a novel -0 how to
create characters that are real -- is precisely
like going to a bookmaker and
asking
him to teach you how to make a watch. Do not let
me give you the impression that I do not admire
and
enjoy their books. They seem to me
of great value, and indeed of great necessity.
There are seasons when it is
more
important to have boots than to have watches. To
drop metaphor, I think that after the creative
activity
of the Victorian age it was
quite necessary, not only for literature but for
life, that someone should write the
books that Mr.. Wells, Mr.. Bennett,
and Mr.. Galsworthy have written. Yet what odd
books they are!
Sometimes I wonder if
we are right to call them books at all. For they
leave one with so strange a feeling of
incompleteness and dissatisfaction. In
order to complete them it seems necessary to do
something -- to join a
society, or,
more desperately, to write a cheque. That done,
the restlessness is laid, the book finished; it
can be
put upon the shelf, and need
never be read again. But with the work of other
novelists it is different. Tristram
Shandy or Pride and Prejudice is
complete in itself; it is self-contained; it
leaves one with no desire to do
anything, except indeed to read the
book again, and to understand it better. The
difference perhaps is that both
Stern
and Jane Austin were interested in thing in
themselves; in character in itself; in the book in
itself.
Therefore everything was inside
the book, nothing outside. But the Edwardians were
never interested in
character in
itself; or in the book in itself. They were
interested in something outside. Their books,
then, were
incomplete as books, and
required that the reader should finish them,
actively and practically, for himself.
---Virginia Woolf,
2006
II One from Each sections,
(60%)
Section I.
1.
Compare the
attitudes towards marriage of two female
protagonists from any texts in
Selected
Readings in British
Literature
or
Selected Readings in
American Literature.
2.
In many
literary works, there is a triangular relationship
among characters, that is, a man between two
women, or
a woman between two men. Can
you use a literary work as an example to discuss
the use of triangular
relationship in
it?
Section II.
1.
What does the
title of
2.
Explain the symbolic meanings of the
lamb and the tiger in William Blake's poems.
3.
What is the
meaning of
Great
Expectations?
Section III.
1.
Relate briefly the artistic traits in
Edgar Allan Poe's story
The Cask of
Amontillado
.
2.
Discuss tenets and achievements in the
poetic school of
Imagism
.
3.
How does Toni
Morrison construct African American characters in
her literary writing, such as in the fiction
Recitatif?
3.
Make comments
on the following statements, using at least one
major novel to support your argument. Don't
retell the story. (50%)
In spite of their wide variety of
forms, subjects, and narrative methods and styles,
the novels of the United
States in the
20th century nearly always have had a degree of
pedagogical intent, providing readers with
insights
into the nature of the time
and place in which their American characters find
themselves and how those
conditions
play crucial roles in their lives. Most of these
novels teach readers much about the American
physical
settings, history, politics,
economics, and social conditions that are the
context of the character's experience.
---Emory Elliott
In consequence, the
distinctive modern tradition developed,
marked not just by modern themes, new techniques,
wider availability,
but by a firm break
with past
readership. But that break
was never really to become complete. Many of the
Victorian conventions and myths
continued to haunt the radical surprise
of the modern novel, and Victorian fiction--with
its omniscient and
godlike voice, its
weighty realism, its chronological plotting, its
presiding moral confidence, its role as the
bourgeois epic--
leaves its
lasting imprint on British fiction to this
moment…The modern novel came, but the
Victorian novel did not entirely go
away; and that is one the of essential secrets of
the modern novel.
---Malcolm Bradbury
2007
1.
Give full
names of authors to the following works. (10%)
1.
The Marble Faun
2.
English Traits
3.
4.
Herzog
5.
After the Fall
6.
The Confidence Man
7.
Something
Happened
8.
Paradise
9.
Cathay
10.
Paterson
3.
One from Each
Section (60%)
Section I.
1.
In what way is
the West Wind both a destroyer and a preserver in
Shelley's
2.
Who
kills Paul in
3.
What does the title of
Section II.
1.
How to
understand Ralph W. Emerson's statement
think. This rule, equally arduous in
actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the
whole distinction between
greatness and
meanness,