GRE Literature in English (REA) (56 page)

 

155.
(D)

The important point in the last two lines is that Proteus and Triton are sea gods. Wordsworth conjectures that a pantheist religion would make possible a more intense enjoyment of nature. The modern meaning of “protean” (variable) derives from the ability of the sea god, Proteus, to change shape. This is illustrated in the account when Menelaus tells Telemachos of his encounter with Proteus. Wordsworth is not concerned here with the modern meaning of “protean” (A), the episode from the
Odyssey
(E), or with the meanings of the prefixes “pro” (C) and “tri” (B).

 

156.
(D)

Human sacrifice is a theme in
Iphigenia in Aulis
by Euripides. In this play, Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, in order to propitiate Artemis and gain favorable winds for the Greek fleet setting sail for Troy. The murder of their daughter becomes an issue between Agamemnon and his wife, Clytemnestra, throughout the Mycenian legend. Revenge for the sacrifice is part of Clytemnestra's motivation in murdering Agamemnon when he returns from Troy. The other Greek plays [(A), (B), and (C)] deal with various forms of murder, death, and execution, but not with human sacrifice per se.
The Dead
(E) by James Joyce depicts contemporary life in modern Ireland and is the last story in his collection,
Dubliners.

 

157.
(A)

In these lines, Johnson sets pride in opposition to reason, and notes that it is by following pride that humanity creates many problems for itself. There is no indication that mankind ever uses too much reason (B). Johnson laments the infrequency with which humanity follows reason. These problems are the result, not of institutions and customs (C), but of human nature itself. The problems are not limited to China and Peru (D). The phrase “from China to Peru” implies that this condition is utterly universal and includes the whole world. There is no indication in this passage that humanity can change this condition through education or technology (E).

 

158.
(E)

The correct term for the break is “caesura.” The artful variation of this caesura is considered one of the important technical problems in the writing of eighteenth-century rhymed couplets. Enjambment (A) refers to the running of the syntactic unit beyond the end of the line, so that the sentence continues through the rhyme and on into the next line. A troche (B) is a metrical foot with two syllables, the first stressed and the second unstressed. An elision (C) is the omission of an unstressed vowel or syllable so that the line fits the meter. Ellipsis (D) is the omission of words or phrases that are understood or implied in context.

 

159.
(E)

The reference is to the Wife of Bath. Muscatine refers to “The Wife of Bath's Prologue” in which the Wife of Bath presents a history of her five marriages and gives her views on the relationship between the sexes. In her fifth marriage, she ripped up her husband's book, which gave examples of wicked wives, and this lead to a fight between husband and wife. Muscatine sees these actions as symbolic of the conflict between experience and authority, between feminism and masculine domination.

 

160.
(C)

“The Reeve's Tale” is an example of a fabliau. “The Pardoner's Tale” (A) consists of a sermon, the “spiel” used by the Pardoner to sell pardons, illustrated by a moral exemplum, the story of the three revelers who kill each other over the gold that they find. “The Nun's Priest's Tale” (B) is an animal fable. “The Monk's Tale” (D) is a series of “tragedies,” each one an example of the fall of a great person. “The Knight's Tale” (E) is a romance.

 

161.
(C)

A rigorous defense of the unities is to be found in Dryden's
An Essay of Dramatic Poesy
. Dryden is writing from a later seventeenth-century neoclassical point of view. Artaud's essay (A) is a somewhat incoherent manifesto of the theater of the absurd and has nothing to do with unities. Johnson (B) defends Shakespeare's violations of the unities of time and place and argues that they are artificial notions of no real importance in the drama. Neither Eliot (D) nor Sidney (E) are particularly concerned with drama or with dramatic unities.

 

162.
(D)

“Fealty” and “demesne” are terms derived from medieval feudalism. “Fealty” is the loyalty pledge by a subject to a lord in the feudal system. “Demesne” refers to the land controlled by an individual within the feudal system. In this sonnet, the poet, John Keats, uses “fealty” to refer to the loyalty of the poet to his art as represented by Apollo, the Greek god of poetry, among other things. Keats uses “demesne” to refer to the poet's works. This metaphor of poetry as land is extended in the general metaphor of the poem, in which reading is discussed as a form of traveling and exploring.

 

163.
(C)

Balboa, not Cortez, discovered the Pacific. This sort of error is referred to as poetic license, implying that it is a minor detail irrelevant to the overall effect of the poem. The intentional fallacy (A) occurs when the reader focuses on what an author supposedly meant to say rather than on what he actually did say. The pathetic fallacy (B) is the author's use of nature to heighten emotional intensity, as for example, a sudden thunderstorm during a murder scene. Poetic justice (D) refers to the rewarding of good and the punishing of bad characters in the outcome of a narrative. Romantic irony (E) is the undercutting of artistic illusion by the self-conscious intrusion of the artist revealing himself as creator. Examples would be Sterne's
Tristram Shandy
and Byron's
Don Juan.

 

164.
(A)

This is the opening quatrain from Robert Frost's sonnet, “Design.” Features that are typical of Frost's style are the detailed observation of nature, the detached and ironic reflections on those observations, and the traditional meter and rhyme scheme.

 

165.
(D)

The passage is from Jonathan Edwards' sermon
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
. Edwards was an eighteenth-century American Protestant theologian. He was part of an eighteenth-century religious revival known as the Great Awakening.

 

166.
(A)

Of these works of literature, the one that makes the most elaborate use of number symbolism, especially of the number three, is Dante's
Divine Comedy
. The work is divided into three books: Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Each book consists of thirty-three cantos with one introductory canto to make an even hundred. The cantos are written in terza rima, three-line stanzas with an interlacing rhyme scheme:
aba bcb cdc
...etc.

 

167.
(D)

In this passage, Danby discusses the character of the fool in Shakespeare's
King Lear
. In particular, Danby considers the disappearance of the fool from the play after Act III. He explains this disappearance in thematic terms.

 

168.
(E)

Dante is guided through Hell by Virgil. In the Middle Ages, Virgil was considered to be the foremost of classical writers. The Greek language and Greek literature were not widely known in western Europe during the Middle Ages. Among Latin authors, Virgil was revered for his high seriousness and patriotism. His works were read as allegorized foreshadowings and prophesies of Christianity. Ovid's works (D) were perceived as less serious, more licentious, and he was more popular in the Renaissance. Beatrice (C) is the woman who inspires Dante and who guides him in Heaven. It is appropriate that his guide in Hell should be pre-Christian.

 

169.
(A)

Eliot refers here to Mark Twain's use of colloquial language, the language of everyday conversation. Shakespeare used colloquial language, especially in comic scenes, but in this respect he was not really different from other Elizabethan dramatists. Both Chaucer (D) and Shakespeare (C) used language that was contemporary for their time, but it has since grown out of style. Spenser (E), on the other hand, used an archaic style. His language was just the opposite of “up-to-date.” James Joyce (B) pioneered the style of stream-of-consciousness, but it was not the language itself that was unusual but the idea of presenting characterization through the free association of thoughts. Eliot's point, then, applies to Mark Twain because Twain bridged the gap between current style and what was considered in nineteenth-century America to be “literary” language. Mark Twain violated the notion of correct literary language by making literature out of ordinary language. Other writers had done this before, but in the nineteenth century it came as a shock to many readers. It was in this sense that he brought his language, that is to say, the accepted literary language, “up-to-date.”

 

170.
(D)

William Blake was a visionary poet. He reacted against the rationalism of the eighteenth century, especially against the influence of Newton and Locke. He stressed the importance of the imagination in shaping the human condition. In this he was similar to other Romantic poets. For Blake, however, the products of the imagination seemed as real, or even more real, than the material world. This was reflected in complicated personal symbolism of his poetry. He had a number of visions and he took them quite literally.

 

171.
(D)

Double entendre
is a phrase meaning “twofold meaning” or “pun.” Thus, the editor implies that Shakespeare used the phrase “lie with” with the intention of creating ambiguity. The phrase can mean both “tell an untruth to” and “have sexual relations with.” Both meanings make sense in the context.

 

172.
(A)

The “-ed” in “unlearned” is pronounced as an unstressed syllable. In Elizabethan English, poets exercised an option either to pronounce “-ed” as a separate syllable or to elide the “e.” The “e” is elided in “untutored” (line 3) and in “suppressed” (line 8). This is determined by the meter and with the rhyme with “best.” In line 4, however, the unstressed syllable is needed for the meter. The pronunciation was in transition and both forms were acceptable variations.

 

173.
(E)

The standard definition of a sonnet requires that the poem have fourteen lines. Shakespeare's sonnets end with a couplet (A), but the Italian form with a sestet is typical. Petrarch's sonnets were about love (B), and this was the typical subject matter of the sonnet throughout the Renaissance. Other topics were possible, however. John Donne wrote sonnets about religion, William Wordsworth about nature. Shakespeare's sonnets have three quatrains (C) and then a couplet, but the Italian form has only two quatrains before the sestet. Wit and irony (D) are typical of much Renaissance poetry, especially seventeenth-centurypoetry. Wit and irony are not, however, essential to the genre. They are lacking, for example, in the sonnets of Romantic poets like Keats and Wordsworth.

 

174.
(A)

Molière's
Tartuffe
is a satire of religious hypocrisy. Tartuffe himself is the hypocrite. The other plays are satirical, but they are not directed specifically at religious hypocrisy. Jonson's
Volpone
(B) is a satire of avarice. Wycherley's
The Country-Wife
(C) is a Restoration comedy satirizing adultery, marriage, and relations between the sexes. Aristophanes'
The Clouds
(D) is a Greek comedy satirizing Socrates, philosophy, and education. Sheridan's
The Rivals
(E) is a late eighteenth-century comedy about, like Wycherley's play, relations between the sexes.

 

175.
(C)

Kafka, in works like
The Trial
, presents a view of the human condition as an absurd and meaningless predicament. All of the other authors wrote within the framework of cultural and philosophical assumptions that provided meaning to human experience. Virgil (E) viewed human experience from the perspective of Roman patriotism, and classical mythology and philosophy. Dante (D) viewed human experience from the point of view of medieval Christian theology. Tolstoy (A) viewed human experience from the point of view of historical determinism, and Zola (B) from the point of view of naturalism.

 

176.
(C)

Ben Jonson wrote many masques, but
Volpone
(A) is not one of them.
Volpone
is a five-act satirical drama. Shakespeare included a masque as an entertainment in
The Tempest. As You Like It
(D), however, is a full-length comedy. Congreve's
The Way of the World
(E) is a Restoration comedy, and
Everyman
(B) is a medieval morality play. The masque was a short play, usually including music and dance, written for private entertainment at a court or household and performed by members of the household, not a professional acting troupe. Milton's
Comus
is an example.