GRE Literature in English (REA) (41 page)

 

173.
(B)

Pope's “Essay on Criticism” best illustrates this definition of neoclassicism. Donne's “The Ecstasy” (C) is characterized by metaphorical density and complexity of statement rather than by clarity of statement. Blake's “Jerusalem” (A) is characterized by a complex personal symbolism, rather than clarity of statement. Smart's “A Song to David” (D) and Traherne's “Wonder” (E) both express intense personal religious emotion, not objectivity and reason. Blake's and Smart's poems have long lines of varying lengths, not balance and symmetry of form.

 

174.
(B)

Among the works of literature listed, the one that comes closest to illustrating the aesthetic ascribed to the Gothic cathedral is
The Canterbury Tales
by Chaucer. Like the cathedral, Chaucer's collection of tales is an unfinished work. It has a beginning and an end, but it is unfinished from within. In this way it points, like the cathedral, beyond itself from the finite to the infinite. This idea is expressed in the other works, but in
The Canterbury Tales,
Chaucer expresses the idea through the structure of the work.

 

175.
(E)

Roland Barthes is a major figure in deconstructionism. This school of criticism traces its philosophical origins back to the linguistic theories of Saussure. In particular, deconstruction applies to literary criticism, the linguistic notion that the meaning of a word depends in part on the implied contrast between the word and other words that might be used in its place.

 

176.
(A)

The passage is from a prefatory note to Milton's
Paradise Lost
. The note is entitled “Verse.” In the note, Milton justifies his use of blank verse in the epic with the argument that Greek and Latin poets did not use rhyme.

 

177.
(A)

The poem is organized around a sequence of metaphors. The metaphor in the second quatrain compares the poet to a town that is governed by usurping power. The rightful governor is God. As his representative, God has given the poet reason. The poet's reason, however, has not proved strong enough or loyal enough to defend the poet against evil. Thus, the best paraphrase is that the poet's mind is “overpowered by evil motives.” The particular evil is not specified. It is not necessarily adultery or love with another woman (B). The political references in the poem are all part of the metaphor (C). The poet is not referring to political policies, or to London (E) or any other town. The poet expresses his need for God's help, not any dissatisfaction with organized religion (D) or any concern over religion as a cause of conflict.

 

178.
(A)

In the sestet, the poet continues with a metaphor comparing himself to a bride about to marry someone she does not love, someone referred to as “your enemy” in line 10. Since, from the first line on, the poem is addressed directly to God, “your” means “God's.” Thus, the enemy is God's enemy, Satan, not the enemy of England in a war (B). The poet, John Donne, converted to the Anglican church and became a famous preacher. He would not have considered the Anglican church (C) to be God's enemy; in any case, the poem is not about conflicts between religions. It is not a poem about a rival poet (D). The marriage in the sestet is metaphorical and, thus, does not refer to the poet's literal marriage (E) .

 

179.
(E)

The philosophical position could best be classified as nominalism, the view that abstract concepts are merely words and have no other existence. It is not stoicism (A), a classical philosophy that taught the patient endurance of suffering and bad fortune, and the cultivation of moral self-discipline. Stoicism is associated with Roman patriotism. Falstaff's lack of interest in honor is the antithesis of Roman stoicism. The Donatist heresy (B) is an early variant of Christianity, according to which offices performed by heretical or corrupt clergy were deemed invalid. According to orthodox theology, the spiritual condition of the clergy is irrelevant to the efficacy of the sacrament. In any case, it is not a question with which Falstaff is concerned. According to Calvinism (C), the religious teachings of John Calvin, salvation is predestined by God and not determined by good works. Falstaff is not concerned with such questions. Neo-Platonism (D) is a Renaissance variation of Plato's philosophy. While Plato taught that art was an imitation of an imitation, and thus a further step removed from the “reality” of ideal forms, neo-Platonists believed that art could mediate between ordinary experience and ideal forms. Falstaff's nominalism is directly opposed to any form of Platonism, since it denies reality to an abstraction.

 

180.
(C)

The theory of tragedy as offering the audience a “catharsis” of emotions is presented by Aristotle in
Poetics.
Sidney in his
Defence of Poesie
(A) argues for the superiority of poetry over history and philosophy. He is not specifically concerned with drama. Tolstoy in
What Is Art?
(B) argues in favor of folk art, in favor of authenticity generally, and against the cultivation of highbrow art as a social affectation. He does not present a theory of tragedy per se. Freud (D) in
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life
is concerned with slips of the tongue and lapses of memory, not with theories of tragedy. Bradley in
Shakespearean Tragedy
(E) analyzes Shakespeare's plays, focusing particularly on characterization. He does not present a theory of tragedy based on catharsis.

 

181.
(D)

Austen's title implies a balance between hard-headed reason and emotion. “Sensibility” refers to the refinement of emotional sensibility that was much in vogue at the time. Austen views its excesses as a form of foolish self-indulgence. She opposes it to “sense” which, thus, refers to “a practical and reasonable regard for one's own self-interest.”

 

182.
(C)

These are the final lines of Keats' “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The quotation marks imply that the final words are not spoken by the urn. If they are spoken by the poet to the urn, then “ye” refers to the urn and the final lines imply the urn's limitations. Elsewhere in the poem, however, the urn is referred to as “thou,” the singular second person pronoun. Why should the poet shift from singular to plural or from informal to formal in addressing the urn? If the words are spoken either by the urn to humanity or by the poet to his readers, then the lines have a very different meaning. The lines then imply that the urn's message is the only truth we can know or need to know. The nightingale figures, of course, in Keats' “Ode to a Nightingale,” not this poem. Here the subject referred to by “ye” is either the urn or humanity, not a nightingale, a rose, or a woman, none of which are topics of the ode.

 

183.
(C)

The alternation of heroic and comic scenes is typical of Elizabethan drama, and many examples can be found in the writings of William Shakespeare. Sophocles (A) was a fifth-century B.C. Athenian playwright. He wrote tragedies and did not include comic scenes in his plays. Congreve (E) wrote Restoration comedy and did not include serious or heroic scenes. Racine (B) wrote classic French tragedy and did not include comic scenes. Dryden (D) followed the strict neoclassical format and did not mix comic and tragic material. Good examples from Shakespeare would be the alternation of tavern and court or battlefield scenes in
Henry IV, Parts One and Two
, the gravedigger scene in
Hamlet,
the porter scene in
Macbeth,
and the scene between the nurse and Mercutio in
Romeo and Juliet.

 

184.
(A)

The ascension of James I united the kingdoms of England and Scotland. Shakespeare shifted his attention from questions of Tudor legitimacy going back to fifteenth-century English politics, to matters of Scottish history. James based his claim to the Scottish throne back to Banquo and the opposition to the supposed usurper, Macbeth. In showing Macbeth as a villain, Shakespeare was supporting the new King of England. James also had an interest in witchcraft, making it a suitable topic for the play.

 

185.
(C)

Of the works listed, the one that could best be characterized as existentialist would be Sartre's
No
Exit
. According to existentialism, of which Sartre is a principal exponent, the material world exists without meaning, and the meaning is provided by individual human beings in their exercise of free choice and moral responsibility. The play
No
Exit
is about an imaginary afterlife in which three people are stuck in a room forever together, an inescapable damnation. The imaginary afterlife contrasts with this life, in which, Sartre implies, one is always free to leave. The works by Milton (B), Dante (D), and Marlowe (E) would not be existentialist because, even though all three emphasize the importance of free choice, the meaning of every choice, its implications, are already determined according to theology: salvation or damnation in the afterlife. In contrast, Tolstoy's novel (A) supports a thesis of historical determinism that tends to minimize the importance of individual choice.

 

186.
(E)

In the context, “success” means the result or outcome of the action. This is a meaning that was current for Shakespeare, but that now is archaic and no longer in use. The results that Macbeth is referring to would apparently be additional murders, the murder of Macbeth himself perhaps, in imitation of this murder. Macbeth worries that having once set the example, he and Lady Macbeth will become the next victims. He sees a contradiction between his plan to break the law in order to get power and his subsequent need to maintain law and order when he wants to keep power. This is one of the central themes of the play.

 

187.
(A)

The comparison is between the withdrawing ocean wave and a general loss of religious faith. The passage does not convey the sense of personal change that the other four answers imply.

 

188.
(C)

In “Mowing,” Frost states that there was “never a sound beside the wood but one,” and this was the sound of man laboring. His central question, however, is: “What did it whisper?”—in other words, what is the purpose of labor and what is his place in nature's universe? The laborer is sensitive enough to know that a “hidden message” exists (it is “whispered,” he can guess at it, though he “knows not well”); this knowledge alone is what gives him his sense of purpose and place. Ultimate knowledge, however, resides in the hidden processes of nature (what and how the hay “makes”). He can only appreciate the mystery.

 

189.
(B)

The pattern for most pastoral elegies on the Classical model (from Bion's s the
Lament for Bion
) does not include any admonition to Death. Rather, there is a realization of grief and an inquiry into the causes of Death. This is an important difference in posture and speaks to these poets' belief in the place of man within the universe.

 

190.
(B)

Dickinson's poetry is known for its need to instruct (didacticism) . While she has empathy for the greater world (C), her notorious reclusiveness intervened. There is no pointed emphasis on nature (A). The poet does not seem to be lamenting (E) or reclusive (D) in this poem.

 

191.
(C)

Writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, Dickinson, like many writers, employed remnant conventions—like the capitalization of important words. This often resulted in personification, but just as often it did not. Free verse (D) does not have rhyming lines, but the passage does.

 

192.
(E)

Dickinson's biblical tone is derived from the sermons and hymns of the Amherst Church and the late Puritan literary climate that spawned her contemporaries Thoreau and Emerson. The tone does not match the rationalist ideas of (A) and (B), nor does the passage contain any materialist ideas (C).

 

193.
(C)

Emily Dickinson is the author. Whitman (A) has somewhat similar sentiments but does not use this conceit of capitalization. Nash (D) often employed unusual techniques for comic effect, and Sandburg (E) often wrote in free verse.

 

194.
(D)

Both the concentration on nature and an appreciation of the miraculous quality of the ordinary identify the sentiments in the poem as Romantic. It was written by Wordsworth in 1834. Johnson (A) and Dickinson (E) often wrote with a more didactic tone.

 

195.
(B)

The passage is taken from Chapter 1 of Aristotle's
On the Art of Poetry,
entitled “The Media of Poetic Imitation.” Imitation of a more fixed “ideal” is characteristic of Aristotle's teacher, Plato. Expressionism (A) involves an attempt to concretely display abstract emotion in art. Pindar (C) is known for his lyrical odes. Impressionism (D) eschews imitation in favor of a capturing of spontaneity. Atomism (E) deals with the manner in which all items in the universe are related.