Home
Ⅳ.Topic Discussion(20 points in all, 10 for each)
Write no less than 150 words on each of the following topics in English in the corresponding space on the answer sheet.
49.How is Romanticism different from Neoclassicism?Provide brief evidence from the literary works you know best.
a. Neoclassicists upheld that artistic ideals should be order,logic,restrained emoticon and accuracy,and that literature,should be judged in terms of its service to humanity,and thus,literary expressions should be of proportion,unity,harmony and grace.Pope's An Essay on Criticism advocates grace,wit (usually though satire/humour),and simplicity in language(and the poem itself is a demonstration of those ideals,too);Fielding's Tom Jones helped establish the form of novel;Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' displays elegance in style,unified structure,serious tone and moral instructions.
b. Romanticists tended to see the individual as the very center of all experience,including art,and thus,literary work should be “spontaneous overflow of strong feelings,”and no matter how fragmentary those experiences were (Wordsworth's “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” or “The Solitary Reaper,) or Coleridge's “Kubla Khan”),the value of the work lied in the accuracy of presenting those unique feelings and particular attitudes.
c. In a word, Neoclassicism emphasized rationality and form but Romanticism attached great importance to the individual's mind (emotion, imagination, temporary experience…)
50.Summerize the story of Mark twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in about 100 words,and comment on the theme of the novel.
A.Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a Sequa to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.The Story takes place along the Mississippi River before the Civil War in the United States, around 1850.
Along the river, floats a small raft, with two people on it; One is an ignorant,uneducated black slave named Jim and the other is little uneducated outcast white boy about the age of thirteen, called Huckleberry Finn or Huck Finn.
The novel relates the story of the escape of Jim from slavery and ,more important, how Huck Finn, floating along with Jim and helping him as best he could, changes his mind ,his prejudice, about Black people, and comes to accept Jim as a man and as a close friend as well.
During their journey, they experience a series of adventures:coming across two fraud, the “Duke” and the “King”,witnessing the lynching and murder of a harmless drunkard, being lost in a fog and finally Tom's coming to rescue.
B. The theme of the novel may be best summed in a word “freedom”: Huck wants to escape from the bond of civilization and Jim wants to escape from the yoke of slavery. Mark Twain uses the raft's journey down the Mississippi River to express his thematic contrasts between innocence and experience, nature and culture, wilderness and civilization.
Write no less than 150 words on each of the following topics in English in the corresponding space on the answer sheet.
49.How is Romanticism different from Neoclassicism?Provide brief evidence from the literary works you know best.
a. Neoclassicists upheld that artistic ideals should be order,logic,restrained emoticon and accuracy,and that literature,should be judged in terms of its service to humanity,and thus,literary expressions should be of proportion,unity,harmony and grace.Pope's An Essay on Criticism advocates grace,wit (usually though satire/humour),and simplicity in language(and the poem itself is a demonstration of those ideals,too);Fielding's Tom Jones helped establish the form of novel;Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' displays elegance in style,unified structure,serious tone and moral instructions.
b. Romanticists tended to see the individual as the very center of all experience,including art,and thus,literary work should be “spontaneous overflow of strong feelings,”and no matter how fragmentary those experiences were (Wordsworth's “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” or “The Solitary Reaper,) or Coleridge's “Kubla Khan”),the value of the work lied in the accuracy of presenting those unique feelings and particular attitudes.
c. In a word, Neoclassicism emphasized rationality and form but Romanticism attached great importance to the individual's mind (emotion, imagination, temporary experience…)
50.Summerize the story of Mark twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in about 100 words,and comment on the theme of the novel.
A.Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a Sequa to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.The Story takes place along the Mississippi River before the Civil War in the United States, around 1850.
Along the river, floats a small raft, with two people on it; One is an ignorant,uneducated black slave named Jim and the other is little uneducated outcast white boy about the age of thirteen, called Huckleberry Finn or Huck Finn.
The novel relates the story of the escape of Jim from slavery and ,more important, how Huck Finn, floating along with Jim and helping him as best he could, changes his mind ,his prejudice, about Black people, and comes to accept Jim as a man and as a close friend as well.
During their journey, they experience a series of adventures:coming across two fraud, the “Duke” and the “King”,witnessing the lynching and murder of a harmless drunkard, being lost in a fog and finally Tom's coming to rescue.
B. The theme of the novel may be best summed in a word “freedom”: Huck wants to escape from the bond of civilization and Jim wants to escape from the yoke of slavery. Mark Twain uses the raft's journey down the Mississippi River to express his thematic contrasts between innocence and experience, nature and culture, wilderness and civilization.