GRE Literature in English (REA) (16 page)

Which best defines the metaphor at work in the last few lines?

1. The metaphor of the past
   
2. The metaphor of design
   
3. The metaphor of a painting
   
4. The metaphor of summer
   
5. The metaphor of a portrait
   

He once called her his basil plant; and when she asked for an explanation, he said that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man's brain.

 

Which author owes a debt to which poet for this allusion?

1. Joseph Conrad to Edgar Allan Poe
   
2. Graham Greene to Yeats
   
3. George Eliot to Keats
   
4. George Sand to Tennyson
   
5. H.G. Wells to Blake
   

Under his pillow lay the New Testament. He picked it up mechanically.The book belonged to her; it was the same book from which she had read the raising of Lazarus to him. At the beginning of his prison life he had feared that she would drive him frantic with her religion, that she would talk constantly about the gospels, and would force her books on him. But, to his amazement, she had never spoken to him about it, and had not even offered him the New Testament. He had asked for it himself shortly before his illness. He had never opened it till now.

The “he” referred to is

1. Pierre in
   War and Peace.
   
2. Jude in
   Jude the Obscure.
   
3. Raskolnikov in
   Crime and Punishment.
   
4. Vronsky in
   Anna Karenina.
   
5. Dick Diver in
   Tender is the Night.
   

In the above passage, why is the reference to Lazarus important?

1. The man has recently found religion and is now a believer like Lazarus.
   
2. The man has ignored God and might be struck down as Lazarus was.
   
3. The man is on death row but may gain a reprieve as Lazarus did.
   
4. The man has recently undergone a form of resurrection of spirit and feels new life as Lazarus did.
   
5. The man has recently been ill and now feels raised from the dead as Lazarus was.
   

This middle-class notion about the immobility of the soul was transplanted to the stage, where the middle-class element has always held sway. There a character became synonymous with a gentleman fixed and finished once for all—one who invariably appeared drunk, jolly, sad. And for the purpose of characterization nothing more was needed than some physical deformity like a club-foot, a wooden leg, a red nose; or the person concerned was made to repeat some phrase like “That's capital!” or “Barkis is willin',” or something of that kind.

The author is

1. stating that characters are drawn too much from the middle-class and that does not mean real life.
   
2. criticizing playwrights who concentrate on the physical and not the psychological aspects of character.
   
3. suggesting that Naturalist playwrights do not know how to convey realistic characters.
   
4. arguing that characters should not be stock types, but show the full range of human variety.
   
5. suggesting that characters should be shown in the process of change.
   

Whose character says “Mr. Barkis is willin'”?

1. Dickens' in
   David Copperfield
   
2. Thackeray's in
   Vanity Fair
   
3. Shaw's in
   Major Barbara
   
4. Samuel Butler's in
   The Way Of All Flesh
   
5. Sterne's in
   Tristram Shandy
   

Chaucer's story describes three rogues who set out to find Death. An old man directs them to a pile of gold florins over which they quarrel and kill one another, thus indeed finding death. However, the greatest irony of the story involves the pilgrim who recounts it.

The tale is

1. the Merchant's.
   
2. the Pardoner's.
   
3. the Miller's.
   
4. the Wife of Bath's.
   
5. the Host's.
   

Which best describes the irony behind the above storyteller?

1. He rants against the evils of money but is very wealthy himself.
   
2. He preaches against physical love but bears a motto: “Love Conquers All.”
   
3. He preaches against avarice but has revealed how he himself cheats the common folk out of their money.
   
4. He is a successful businessman, yet his tale advocates the idle life of the inns.
   
5. He preaches against carousing in inns but is a prodigious drinker himself.
   

Which did Virginia Woolf write?

1. [The] queen, mindful of customs, gold-adorned, greeted the men in the hall; and the noble woman offered the cup first to the keeper of the land...
   

2. “Put it down there,” she said, helping the Swiss girl to place gently before her the huge brown pot in which was the Boeuf en Daube... And she peered into the dish, with its shiny walls and its confusion of savoury brown and yellow meats and its bay leaves and its wine, and thought. This will celebrate the occasion...
   

3. The Professor was not a very strict Hindu—he would take tea, fruit, soda-water, and sweets, whoever cooked them, and vegetables and rice if cooked by a Brahman; but not meat, not cakes lest they contained eggs, and he would not allow anyone else to eat beef: a slice of beef upon a distant plate would wreck his happiness.
   

4. Then delicacies and dainties were delivered to the guests, Fresh food in foison, such freight of full dishes
   That space was scarce at the social tables
   For the several soups set before them in silver
   On the cloth
   

5. Leela was taken away and Ganesh was left alone to face the kedgeree-eating ceremony the next morning.
   

   Still in all his bridegroom's regalia, satin robes, and tasselled crown, he sat down on some blankets in the yard, before the plate of kedgeree. It looked white and unpalatable, and he knew it would be easy to resist any temptation to touch it.
   

Thou then take my brand Excalibur,
Which was my pride: for thou rememberest how
In those old days, one summer noon, an arm
Rose up from out the bosom of the lake,
Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful,
Holding the sword—and how I row'd across
And took it, and have worn it, like a king:
And, wheresoever I am sung or told
In aftertime, this also shall be known.
But now delay not: take Excalibur,
And fling him far into the middle mere:
Watch what thou seest, and lightly bring me word.

Who is speaking to whom?

1. King Arthur to Sir Galahad
   
2. Sir Gawain to Gringolet
   
3. King Arthur to Sir Bedivere
   
4. Sir Lancelot to Guinevere
   
5. Hrothgar to Beowulf
   

Which best explains the word “samite” in line 5?

1. Heavily gem-encrusted armor
   
2. Silver gossamer-like material
   
3. Highly decorated damask
   
4. Silk material interwoven with gold and silver thread
   
5. Simple white muslin interwoven with heraldic devices
   

What happens to the speaker?

1. He dies and three gloriously apparelled women lead him to the underworld.
   
2. The white samite-clad arm draws him down into the Lake of Forgetfulness.
   
3. He falls asleep and dreams that a barge drawn by swans takes him away from the battle ground.
   
4. A barge with weeping queens on board takes him and the other man into the Vale of Avalon.
   
5. He dies and a funeral barge with three weeping queens takes him to the island valley of Avalon.
   

The author of the passage is

1. Wordsworth.
   
2. Malory.
   
3. Yeats.
   
4. John Gardner.
   
5. Tennyson.
   

And I said his opinion was good:
What shold he study and make himselven wood
Upon a book in cloistre alway to pure
Or swinken with his handes and laboure
As Austin bit? How shall the world be served?
Let Austin have his swink to him reserved!

Because of the vowel shift in the fifteenth century, Chaucer's pronunciation of “how” and “be” in line 5 would be closest to the modern pronunciation of

1. “who” and “buy.”
   
2. “hoe” and “bay.”
   
3. “hah” and “bah.”
   
4. “hoe” and “buy.”
   
5. “who” and “bay.”
   

In this passage, Chaucer is describing

1. the Parson.
   
2. the Pardoner.
   
3. the Monk.
   
4. the Clerk.
   
5. the Friar.
   

In context, the passage could best be described as

1. ridiculing hypocrisy.
   
2. anti-intellectual.
   
3. attacking religion.
   
4. a Protestant attack on Catholicism.
   
5. an expression of Lollardism.
   

HARLEM

 

What happens to a dream deferred?

 

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

 

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

 

Or does it explode?

The principal rhetorical device used in this poem is

1. antithesis.
   
2. irony.
   
3. simile.
   
4. personification.
   
5. understatement.
   

The topic of the poem is

1. Freudian dream theory.
   
2. adolescent frustration.
   
3. pollution of Nature.
   
4. the transience of love.
   
5. the consequences of racism.
   

The phrase “nature red in tooth and claw” is from

1. Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey.”
   
2. Tennyson's
   In Memoriam A.H.H.
   
3. Blake's
   The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
   
4. Yeats' “Sailing to Byzantium.”
   
5. T. S. Eliot's “The Waste Land.”
   

A man can hold land if he can just eat and pay taxes; he can do that.

Yes, he can do that until his crops fail one day and he has to borrow money from the bank.

But—you see, a bank or a company can't do that, because those creatures don't breathe air, don't eat side-meat. They breathe profits; they eat the interest on money. If they don't get it, they die the way you die without air, without side-meat.

—Steinbeck,
Grapes of Wrath

The repetition of “he can do that” and the use of the second person pronoun

1. are errors in grammar, showing the speaker is illiterate.
   
2. are colloquial.
   
3. represent dialect.
   
4. are ironic, showing that the author is actually ridiculing the ideas being expressed.
   
5. are stylistic devices that add emphasis.
   

Events referred to in the passage are associated with what historical period?

1. The economic depression of the 1930s
   
2. The frontier in the nineteenth century
   
3. The gold rush in California
   
4. Slavery in the antebellum South
   
5. The pre-revolutionary colonies
   

The ideas underlying the text show the influence of

1. Henry David Thoreau.
   
2. Rousseau.
   
3. Karl Marx.
   
4. Sigmund Freud.
   
5. John Stuart Mill.
   

But I may not stand, mine head works so. Ah Sir Launcelot, said King Arthur, this day have I sore missed thee: alas, that ever I was against thee, for now have I my death, whereof Sir Gawaine me warned in my dream. Then Sir Lucan took up the king the one part, and Sir Bedivere the other part, and in the lifting the king swooned; and Sir Lucan fell in a swoon with the lift, that the part of his guts fell out of his body, and therewith the noble knight's heart brast.

—Malory,
Le Morte D'Arthur

 

In context, the above passage could best be classified as

1. an example of verbal irony.
   
2. mock epic.
   
3. a tragic and heroic passage from a romance.
   
4. estates satire.
   
5. a parody of medieval literature.