American Literature (19^th Century Module)

EXAMINATION TEST

2^nd Year B.A. Program

24^th April 2008

VERSION A

name:	family name:	total score/grade:

Objective: The present examination is an important tool helping your teachers to diagnose the development of your knowledge of the history of American Literature. The test will allow us to measure your academic success, but also to map possible gaps in your studies. Such knowledge will also help you streamline your work in the future. Therefore, take a deep breath, concentrate – and break your pen!

Timing: 90 minutes

Principles:

• please, write clearly

• you are not allowed to communicate with other students in the examination room

• any attempt to communicate with others will result in failing the test

• the only objects allowed on your desk are your pens, the exam sheet and scratch paper

• in grading the test, we will only take into account the contents of your examination sheet

• language errors will be taken into account in grading your performance

• results will be announced within a week of the examination

I hereby declare that I fully understand the above rules _____________________________

(student’s signature)

To pass the examination you have to score the minimum of 61 points per 100

GOOD LUCK!

TASK ONE

Maximum score: 20 points	Your score:

Please, identify the passages below by providing the title of the quoted text as well as the name of its author.

1. As this work professes, in its title-page, to be a descriptive tale, they who will take the trouble to read it may be glad to know how much of its contents is literal fact, and how much is intended to represent a general picture. The author is very sensible that, had he confined himself to the latter, always the most effective, as it is the most valuable, mode of conveying knowledge of this nature, he would have made a far better book. But in commencing to describe scenes, and perhaps he may add characters, that were so familiar to his own youth, there was a constant temptation to delineate that which he had known, rather than that which he might have imagined. This rigid adhesion to truth, an indispensable requisite in history and travels, destroys the charm of fiction; for all that is necessary to be conveyed to the mind by the latter had better be done by delineations of principles, and of characters in their classes, than by a too fastidious attention to originals.

Title:_______________________________ Author:_________________________________

1. For all these reasons, then, any way you may look at it, you must needs conclude that the great Leviathan is that one creature in the world which much remain unpainted to the last. True, one portrait may hit the mark much nearer than another, but none can hit it with any very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.

Title:_______________________________ Author:_________________________________

1. Doubtless, however, either of these stern and black-browed Puritans would have thought it quite a sufficient retribution for his sins that, after so long a lapse of years, the old trunk of the family tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should have borne, as its topmost bough, an idler like myself. No aim that I have ever cherished would they recognise as laudable; no success of mine--if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been brightened by success--would they deem otherwise than worthless, if not positively disgraceful. "What is he?" murmurs one grey shadow of my forefathers to the other. "A writer of story books!.

Title:_______________________________ Author:_________________________________

1. I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
   And what I assume you shall assume,
   For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

Title:_______________________________ Author:_________________________________

1. Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances,—master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.

Title:_______________________________ Author:_________________________________

TASK TWO

Maximum score: 5 points	Your score:

Please, match the titles of literary texts listed below to the names of their authors.

Song of Myself The Marble Faun White-Jacket Nature A Week on the and	Herman Melville Ralph Waldo Emerson Henry David Thoreau Nathaniel Hawthorne Walt Whitman

Answer sheet:

a – b – c – d – e –

TASK THREE

Maximum score: 40 points	Your score:

Answer the following questions: What are the most important differences between the central aesthetic and philosophical ideas of the Age of Reason and those of American Renaissance? How do you explain the transformations?

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TASK FOUR

Maximum score: 35 points	Your score:

Select one text from the list of reading assigned for the course. Write a mini-essay addressing the following issues: 1) What is the position of the text in the literary canon of the ? 2) What are the cultural and historical contexts of the work? 3) In what way does the text reflect the central aesthetic ideas of the period? 4) What is the texts’ place in the evolution of American literature? PLEASE, DO NOT USE ANY EXTRA SHEETS OF PAPER.

Author_______________________________Title___________________________________

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