Student Center
|
information center view
|
Home
Contexts for Criticism, 4/e
Student Center
General Essay Ques...
Gilman Bio
Keats Bio
Melville Bio
Shakespeare Bio
Choose a Chapter
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter Objectives
Multiple Choice Quiz
Essay Questions
Critic Bios
Sites of Interest
Feedback
Help Center
Historical Criticism II: Culture as Context
Multiple Choice Quiz
1
Richard Ellmann's classic biography of James Joyce opens with the sentence: "We are still learning to be Joyce's contemporaries." How would a New Historicist critic translate this statement?
A)
we are still discovering new parallels between
Ulysses
and
Finnegans Wake
that allow us to read these two works as one continuous work (as Joyce himself would have read them)
B)
in order to understand Joyce fully, we must read him as his contemporary audience might have read him (specifically, from the perspective of his fellow writers in the Modernist movement -- who would have best understood the rationale behind his experiments)
C)
we are still learning to read Joyce from our own current perspectives as historians (there is some irony in Ellmann's statement; it is not possible to become Joyce's contemporaries by reconstructing
the
cultural milieu of 1920's Paris)
D)
what we know about the meaning of Joyce's work must necessarily derive from our reading of texts whose authors Joyce considered to be his contemporaries (Flaubert, Dujardin, and even Shakespeare and Dante)
2
How would a New Historicist critic interpret Derrida's statement, "there is nothing outside the text"?
A)
historicist critics should restrict their attention to a culture's literary productions; all other data is irrelevant to the critic's task
B)
language conditions the way we see the world, and there is no reality beyond the "prison house" of language
C)
there is no meaning outside of textual meaning (contrary to the mimeticist's position)
D)
"literature" encompasses all cultural artifacts and all of the values, power relations, and ways of seeing reflected in those artifacts; there is nothing outside of the "text" broadly conceived
3
Which of the following theses would be considered an example of New Historicist criticism as applied to Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
?
A)
the formation of the Boy Scouts in the first decade of the twentieth century helped to establish the discourse of "sublimated savagery" in a Europe which feared both the depravity of a Mr. Kurtz and the decadent "softness" of the over-civilized man
B)
the character of Marlowe represents the voice of Conrad himself
C)
Conrad is known to have read Max Nordau's popular book
Degeneration
, and
Heart of Darkness
may be considered an exploration of Conrad's own anxieties over Nordau's Darwinian argument
D)
Conrad's novella is about the metaphorical "heart of darkness" within every reader who is seduced by the appeal of Kurtz's Faustian iconoclasm
4
Which of the following would not be invoked to describe a form of New Historicist criticism?
A)
cultural materialism
B)
archaeology of social constructs
C)
poststructural recovery of authorial intent
D)
geneaology of patriarchal discourse
2003 McGraw-Hill Higher Education
Any use is subject to the
Terms of Use
and
Privacy Policy
.
McGraw-Hill Higher Education
is one of the many fine businesses of
The McGraw-Hill Companies
.
2003 McGraw-Hill Higher Education