GRE Literature in English (REA) (40 page)

 

143.
(D)

Lippo Lippi's patron was extremely influential; hence, Lippo Lippi's mention of his connection with the Medici causes the police to treat him with greater deference.

 

144.
(C)

Lippo Lippi suggests to the officer in charge of the patrol that he must be concerned about the manner in which his subordinates behave because their behavior will reflect on him. It can be deduced that Lippi is talking to a policeman.

 

145.
(E)

“This,” in line 14, refers to this poem, and it is this poem that gives life to the beloved as long as the poem survives and is read. The beloved's “eternal summer” will fade, when that eternal summer is conceived in physical terms, because time destroys all youth and beauty, but the beloved's eternal summer has been preserved in this poem and is, thus, no longer subject to the ravages of time.

 

146.
(C)

The first two quatrains compare the beloved to a summer's day, emphasizing the imperfection and changeability of summer. Line 9 introduces the chief thought of the poem that will be developed through line 14—the notion that the beloved's beauty can triumph over time by being captured in poetry. The first eight lines emphasize impermanence; the last six emphasize permanence. The final couplet completes the thought begun in line 9.

 

147.
(A)

Although the sonnet appears at the beginning to be an elaborate compliment that compares the beloved favorably to a summer's day, it uses that comparison to make a larger point about the permanence of poetry, one vehicle that allows man to triumph over death and time. The poem moves steadily from the beauty of the beloved to a stronger preoccupation with the power of poetry.

 

148.
(D)

The author argues that women who depend entirely on beauty for power must expect to lose their power when beauty fades. Hence, full humanity must result from such things as independent reasoning. The author is not advocating abolishing the roles of daughters, wives, and mothers, but rather building different foundations for those roles.

 

149.
(B)

The passage is from Mary Wollstonecraft's A
Vindication of the Rights of Women
. Lady Montagu (A) is known for her letters on traveling in Turkey. Mary Shelley (C) is best known for
Frankenstein
, which has a male narrator. Chopin (D) and Woolf (E) are too contemporary to be considered as authors of this piece.

 

150.
(A)

The passage is from Plato's
Republic,
in which he disallows epic and lyric poetry a place in his Utopian state. Aristotle (B) is better known for his analysis of drama, rather than poetry. Horace (C) was a lyric poet. Quintilian (D) wrote about the practice of oratory, while Boethius (E) wrote about logic and ethics.

 

151. (
B)

The passage is from Longinus'
On the Sublime
, the source of much later discussion of the sublime in the arts, especially in the eighteenth century.

 

152.
(D)

A famous criticism from
Aspects of the Novel
, well worth studying, together with Forster's comments on story, plot (“The King died” is a story... “The Queen then died of grief” is a plot), and time structure. He divides famous literary characters into “flat and round” and shows how they function within their particular novel structure.

 

153.
(A)

If you do not know this climactic scene in Faulkner's short story, eliminate the others. Chopin's Mrs. Mallard (D) comes down from her room to die. Mr. Rochester opens Bertha Rochester's cell (E) to show Jane Eyre and the wedding guests the “bride” he is forced to live with; Miss Haversham's whole house (B) is a tomb; and Isabel Archer (C) looks into the tiny room that symbolizes her husband's world.

 

154.
(C)

For a number of poets, Byzantium embodies the Golden Age, civilization and richness. Yeats elaborated one stage further and endowed it with a holiness which, as the comment suggests, makes for a transfiguration of the body's spirituality and physicality. Think of the options and poems associated with them—Byzantium is the only choice.

 

155.
(B)

John Webster is most famous for
The Duchess of Malfi
, perhaps the darkest of all the Jacobean revenge tragedies. If you do not know the playwright, think of the plays in the body of work of the other choices. All of them are renowned for their light comedies, particularly Gay (C) and Farquhar (D), both of whom have had plays turned into operas.

 

156.
(C)

Thomas Pynchon deftly manipulates a Jacobean revenge plot within his own plot of the Trystero. If you do not know the novel, think of the other choices and analyze if the authors use the other genre. (D) and (E) might be possibilities, but those works deal with the darkness of a man's possessiveness of his wife and a “detective story” within a monastery.

 

157.
(C)

This passage is from
On the Pleasure of Hating
, 1821. A fine critical intellect at work here should be a clue, as well as a hatred for hypocrisy. The language is too anachronistic for the more contemporary voices of Hammett (A) and Kafka (D). The vitriol in this passage does not match Eliot (B). Although Stevenson (E) wrote critical essays, he is better known for his adventure novels.

 

158.
(D)

This is from Poe's obituary in the
New York Tribune
, 1849. Poe was known as morbid even in his own time. What is less well known to contemporary readers was his professional life: important editorships won and lost, and power in literary circles wielded, at times, in a formative and forceful manner.

 

159.
(B)

In reference to the tragic love affair, “fatal” here is an important clue. The “Epistle to Miss Blount” (A) is told by a detached voice. Works (C) and (D) adopt a more general philosophical tone, and (E) is a mock epic poem.

 

160.
(B)

This is the author's central point. The supposition is that an ideal image of the soul can be constructed. Mythological figures are used for comparison in this passage, but mythology is not a central point of the passage [eliminating choices (C) and (E)].

 

161.
(A)

This is from Plato's
The Beast and the God in Man
. Implicit here is that reality and the ideal differ significantly, since reality is a vague reflection of the ideal—a key Platonic point. Aristotle (B) viewed the soul as a mechanism by which all senses and experiences were tied together. Christianity (C) and Gnosticism (D) separate the earthly from the spiritual completely.

 

162.
(D)

This is a reference to Ecclesiastes XII—referring to the “words of the wise.” The word “temple” might lead to the wrong choice of answer (B), while answer (C) is a trap for those who fixate on the use of the word “gold.”

 

163.
(B)

A paean is a choral song in honor of a great person. Elegies (A) and encomia (D) also praise figures, but serve as eulogies to the departed person. There is nothing in the passage that suggests a satiric (E) tone.

 

164.
(C)

This is an excerpt from Lowell's A
Fable for Critics
, published in 1848, which was written in praise of various authors. Thoreau's (A) pieces are more contemplative. Bryant (B) and Whitman (D) often wrote works praising nature, rather than specific people. Whittier (E) often described pastoral scenes in his poetry.

 

165.
(C)

Although the use of the name “Benvolio” might cause one to immediately think of (B), this is a trap. (A) refers to another Shakespeare play, and (D) and (E) are other characters from the play
Doctor Faustus.

 

166.
(B)

This passage is from Marlowe's
Doctor Faustus,
IV, iii. Since these questions are somewhat connected, (C) seems to be the obvious choice. Jonson (A) is better known for his comedies, while Campion (D) and Herrick (E) were poets rather than dramatists.

 

167.
(E)

Iambic pentameter (A) would require lines of ten syllables with alternating unstressed and stressed syllables. Blank verse (B) would be iambic pentameter without rhyme. A ballad stanza (C) would be a quatrain rhyming
abcb.
Sprung rhythm (D) is a somewhat eccentric meter devised by Hopkins, basically iambic pentameter with numerous substitutions creating longer and irregular lines. Since the poem has neither meter nor rhyme, it is best classified as free verse.

 

168.
(D)

An elegiac tone (A) would express sorrow at the death of a loved one or with respect to some other profound loss. The emphasis would be on the transience of worldly things. A sarcastic tone (B) would be typical of satire. One might expect sarcasm if the poet were ridiculing politicians, pedants, quacks, hypocrites or other traditional targets of satire. A laudatory tone (C) would be appropriate to a poem praising the deeds or virtues of exemplary individuals, those who have exhibited great courage in war or in other stressful situations. A devotional tone (E) would be appropriate to a religious poem in which the poet expresses personal religious feeling or relates religious experiences. This poem is not theological or patriotic or satirical. It is not about death. The tone is rather playful, which is appropriate for a very positive statement about children and spring. It is, thus, best described as whimsical.

 

169.
(C)

The speaking voice of Mark Twain's hero, Huckleberry Finn, is characterized by colloquial diction and syntax. The themes of “good behavior,” discipline, and religion are also typical. Huck resists the civilizing influences of Miss Watson and the widow. The author implies that if Huck is to be influenced at all, it will be more through the positive and gentle approach of the widow than through the more rigid approach of Miss Watson. Through his own voice, Huck reveals himself to be a character of genuine and spontaneous virtue, a nature neither refined nor corrupted by civilization.

 

170.
(B)

These are the opening lines of Carl Sandburg's “Chicago.” He celebrates the modern city's energy, industry, and productivity. It is a very positive statement about the city. He sees it as a center of life and creativity. The poem is full of the concrete imagery typical of modern poetry. Sandburg uses colloquial diction and free verse.

 

 

171.
(E)

The comparison of fog to a cat is by Carl Sandburg. The poem is typical of Sandburg's free-verse style and of his celebration of urban imagery. Dickens (A) and Hemingway (B) are known for their prose, not their poetry. Sandburg's use of urban imagery differs from Eliot's (C) view of urban life, and Frost (D) utilizes more pastoral images.

 

172.
(E)

In this passage, Auerbach discusses a feature of epic style: the tendency to identify every character, every object even, in terms of history, both its past history and its future destiny. The same stylistic feature can be found in the English epic
Beowulf.
As in the
Odyssey
, characters are introduced in terms of their family lineage. Digressions explain the origin of a sword of the destiny of a mead hall. As in the
Odyssey,
there is a continual opening up of the story and no attempt to create suspense by withholding information concerning the ultimate fate of anyone. In contrast, in
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
(D), a romance from the fourteenth century, meaning is determined not by history, but by symbolism, by imbuing characters and objects with a special significance, symbolic colors like red and green, symbolic plants like the holly, and symbolic images like the five-pointed star. In Chaucer's “The Miller's Tale” (C), characters are described in terms of their nature, but not in terms of history. Meaning in the fabliau depends to a large extent on the implicit contrast with the serious romance genre, the juxtaposition with the “The Knight's Tale.” In Spenser's Renaissance allegory, “The Faerie Queene” (B), symbolism becomes, if anything, more self-conscious, more complex. As for Shakespeare (A), although he often uses history for subject matter, the dramas have a classical balance of symbolism and realism. In none of these other works is there the continual insistence on history, the continual digression or epithet that ties each character and object into the web of time. This feature is characteristic of the epic.