GRE Literature in English (REA) (29 page)

“No one who had ever seen [X] in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her.”

 

These sentences are the first in

1. Emma.
   
2. Pride and Prejudice
   .
   
3. Sense and Sensibility
   .
   
4. Mansfield Park
   .
   
5. Northanger Abbey.
   

A central theme in many of his novels is man's struggle against the neutral force that rules the universe, a force that is indifferent to man's suffering. This theme is frequently joined to an examination of life's ironies and love's disappointments. One of his novels deals with an intelligent and sensitive girl of humble origins driven to murder and hence to death by hanging by a series of bitterly ironic circumstances and events. Another chronicles the destruction of a villager whose intellectual ambitions are thwarted by his sensuality and by circumstances.

 

This passage describes

1. D. H. Lawrence.
   
2. Thomas Hardy.
   
3. Joseph Conrad.
   
4. Evelyn Waugh.
   
5. Charles Dickens.
   

Where's Héloise, the learned nun,
For whose sake Abeillard, I ween,
Lost manhood and put priesthood on?
(From Love he won such dule and teen!)
And where, I pray you, is the queen
Who willed that Buridan should steer
Sewed in a sack's mouth down the Seine?
But where are the snows of yesteryear?

This poem is structured around

1. incremental repetition.
   
2. mock heroic conventions.
   
3. the “loathly lady” /beautiful princess motif.
   
4. the carpe
   diem
   motif.
   
5. the
   ubi sunt
   motif.
   

Line 3 refers to the fact that Pierre Abelard

1. became a monk in order to avoid corrupting Héloise, who was a nun.
   
2. gave up a promising career at court because he was in love with Héloise, whom he could never marry.
   
3. turned from the masculine pursuits of knighthood, such as warfare, to the less vigorous pursuits of theology after falling in love.
   
4. became a monk after Héloise's uncle had him emasculated.
   
5. became a priest after falling in love with Héloise because he wanted to be as spiritually similar to her as possible.
   

The poem's poignancy derives largely from the author's awareness of

1. the transitory, almost illusory, nature of all earthly beauty.
   
2. the futility of political intrigue.
   
3. the foolishness of theological quarrels.
   
4. the problem of evil in the world.
   
5. endless cycles of death and renewal.
   

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

 

In Brueghel's
Icarus,
for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Which of the following best describes the relationship of the second stanza to the first?

1. The second stanza continues the development of the general idea advanced in stanza one.
   
2. The second stanza proposes a general idea based on the specific examples in stanza one.
   
3. The second stanza provides a specific example of the general idea advanced in stanza one.
   
4. The second stanza proposes a general idea that contrasts with the general idea advanced in stanza one.
   
5. The second stanza uses a specific instance to contradict the general idea advanced in stanza one.
   

What do the children in the first stanza have in common with the plowman in the second stanza?

1. Both refuse to take responsibility for their actions.
   
2. Both believe they are powerless to influence human history.
   
3. They are used as examples of one of man's greatest strengths—the ability to carry on in the face of disaster.
   
4. Both are indifferent to extraordinary events.
   
5. Both would like to take part in the world around them, but realize the futility of any action they might take.
   

Auden uses dogs and a horse (line 12) chiefly to illustrate

1. obliviousness to suffering.
   
2. man's superior rationality in comparison to the animal world.
   
3. the moral superiority of animals to man because of the former's greater innocence.
   
4. the untidiness of nature.
   
5. the necessity of suffering in daily life.
   

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be white, black wires grow on her head.

In these lines, the author is satirizing the use of which of the following by other Elizabethan sonneteers?

1. Hackneyed Petrarchan conceits
   
2. Encomia
   
3. Rhymed quatrains
   
4. Obscure metaphysical conceits
   
5. Love as the subject of sonnets
   

The author of these lines is

1. Wyatt.
   
2. Sidney.
   
3. Raleigh.
   
4. Marlowe.
   
5. Shakespeare.
   

... a kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike ....The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions ... but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and, though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.

The author is discussing

1. the pathetic fallacy.
   
2. Renaissance pastoral poetry.
   
3. metaphysical wit.
   
4. heroic drama.
   
5. Hudibrastic poetry.
   

The author of this passage is

1. Swift.
   
2. Pope.
   
3. Addison.
   
4. Dryden.
   
5. Johnson.
   

He lived amidst th' untrodden ways,
To Rydal Lake that lead,
A bard whom there were none to praise,
And very few to read.

 

These lines parody the first stanza of a poem by

1. Herrick.
   
2. Pope.
   
3. Wordsworth.
   
4. Arnold.
   
5. Yeats.
   

I intend to let Lady Danvers see no farther of my papers, than to her own angry letter to her brother; for I would not have her see my reflections upon it; and she'll know, down to that place, all that's necessary for her curiosity, as to my sufferings, and the stratagems used against me, and the honest part I have been enabled to act: And I hope, when she has read them all, she will be quite reconciled: for she will see it is all God Almighty's doings; and that a gentleman of his parts and knowledge was not to be drawn in by such a poor young body as me...

And so, with my humble duty to you both, and my dear Mr. B___'s kind remembrance, I rest

Your ever-dutiful and gratefully happy Daughter.

The excerpt is from

1. a picaresque novel.
   
2. a novella.
   
3. a Gothic novel.
   
4. an epistolary novel.
   
5. an historical novel.
   

The author of this passage is

1. Defoe.
   
2. Richardson.
   
3. Fielding.
   
4. Smollett.
   
5. Sterne.
   

“Widsith” deals with the life of

1. a Celtic king.
   
2. an Anglo-Saxon scop.
   
3. an Arthurian knight.
   
4. an early Christian missionary.
   
5. a Norman courtier.
   

“Courage is the instrument by which the hero realizes himself. ‘Fate often saves an undoomed man when his courage is good,' says __ in his account of his swimming match: that is, if Fate has not entirely doomed a man in advance, courage is the quality that can perhaps influence Fate against its natural tendency to doom him now.... Doom, of course, ultimately claims him, but not until he has fulfilled to its limits the pagan ideal of a heroic life.”

 

Which of the following correctly completes the second sentence?

1. Cuchulainn
   
2. Odysseus
   
3. Hrothgar
   
4. Beowulf
   
5. Achilles
   

Serious over my cereals I broke one breakfast my fast With something-to-read searching retinas retained by print on a packet;
Sprung rhythm sprang, and I found (the mind fact-mining at last)
An influence Father-[X]-fathered on the copy-writing racket

 

These lines parody the style of (the“X” in line 4)

1. Robinson Jeffers.
   
2. Hilda Doolittle.
   
3. Edna St. Vincent Millay.
   
4. Gerard Manley Hopkins.
   
5. Hart Crane.
   

Gramercy, Good Deeds! Now may I true friends see.
They have forsaken me every one—
I loved them better than my Good Deeds alone.
Knowledge, will you forsake me also?

 

These lines are from

1. The Knight of the Burning Pestle.
   
2. Everyman.
   
3. “The Faerie Queene.”
   
4. The Brome Play of Abraham and Isaac
   .
   
5. Volpone.
   

Which is by William Blake?

Which is by James Baldwin?

Which is by Oscar Wilde?

1. So no wonder that in certain cities of America, in NewYork of course, and New Orleans, in Chicago and San Francisco and Los Angeles, in such American cities as Paris and Mexico, D.F., this particular part of a generation was attracted to what the Negro had to offer. In such places as Greenwich Village, a menage-a-trois was completed—the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life. If marijuana was the wedding ring, the child was the language of Hip for its argot gave expression to the abstract states of feeling which all could share, at least all who were Hip.
   

2. The day of my father's funeral had also been my nineteenth birthday. As we drove him to the graveyard, the spoils of injustice, anarchy, discontent, and hatred were all around us. It seemed to me that God himself had devised, to mark my father's end, the most sustained and brutally dissonant of codas. And it seemed to me, too, that the violence which rose all about us as my father left the world had been devised as a corrective for the pride of his eldest son. I had declined to believe in that apocalypse which had been central to my father's vision; very well, life seemed to be saying, here is something that will certainly pass for an apocalypse until the real thing comes along.
   

3. The Last Judgment is an Overwhelming of Bad Art & Science. Mental Things are alone Real; what is Called Corporeal Nobody Knows of its dwelling Place; it is in Fallacy & its Existence an Imposture. Where is the Existence Out of Mind or Thought? Where is it but in the Mind of a Fool?... “What,” it will be Questioned, “When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?” O no no, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying “Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty.” I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative Eye any more than I would Question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro it & not with it.
   

4. I am not sure when the word “Gothic” was first generically applied to the architecture of the North; but I presume that whatever the date of its original usage, it was intended to imply reproach, and express the barbaric character of the nations among whom that architecture arose. It never implied that they were literally of Gothic lineage, far less that their architecture had been originally invented by the Goths themselves; but it did imply that they and their buildings together exhibited a degree of sternness and rudeness, which, in contradistinction to the character of Southern and Eastern nations, appeared like a perpetual reflection of the contrast between the Goth and the Roman in their first encounter.
   

5. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.