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Critics maintain that the fiction of Herman Melville (1819–1891) has limitations, such as its lack of inventive plots after Moby-Dick (1851) and its occasionally inscrutable style. A more serious, yet problematic, charge is that Melville is a deficient writer because he is not a practitioner of the "art of fiction," as critics have conceived of this art since the late nineteenth- century essays and novels of Henry James. Indeed, most twentieth-century commentators regard Melville not as a novelist but as a writer of romance, since they believe that Melville's fiction lacks the continuity that James viewed as essential to a novel: the continuity between what characters feel or think and what they do, and the continuity between characters` fates and their pasts or original social classes. Critics argue that only Pierre (1852), because of its subject and its characters, is close to being a novel in the Jamesian sense.
However, although Melville is not a Jamesian novelist, he is not therefore a deficient writer. A more reasonable position is that Melville is a different kind of writer, who held, and should be judged by, presuppositions about fiction that are quite different from James's. It is true that Melville wrote "romances"; however, these are not the escapist fictions this word often implies, but fictions that range freely among very unusual or intense human experiences. Melville portrayed such experiences because he believed these best enabled him to explore moral questions, an exploration he assumed was the ultimate purpose of fiction. He was content to sacrifice continuity or even credibility as long as he could establish a significant moral situation. Thus Melville's romances do not give the reader a full understanding of the complete feelings and thoughts that motivate actions and events that shape fate. Rather, the romances leave unexplained the sequence of events and either simplify or obscure motives. Again, such simplifications and obscurities exist in order to give prominence to the depiction of sharply delineated moral values, values derived from a character's purely personal sense of honor, rather than, as in a Jamesian novel, from the conventions of society.
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300难题 GWD
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The author draws which of the following conclusions about the fact that Melville's fiction often does not possess the qualities of a Jamesian novel?
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300难题
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The author probably mentions Melville's Pierre to
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300难题 GWD
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Which of the following can logically be inferred from the passage about the author`s application of the term "romance" to Melville's work?
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300难题
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Which of the following can most logically be inferred about the author's estimation of the romantic and novelistic traditions of fiction?
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300难题
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According to the passage, the dynamical evidence referred to in lines 9–10 supports which of the following?
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300难题 GWD
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According to the passage, the hominid australopithecine most closely resembled a modern human with respect to which of the following characteristics?
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300难题
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The main idea of the second paragraph is that
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300难题
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According to the passage, a major concern of the unenthusiastic book reviewers mentioned in line 33 was to
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300难题
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The passage provides information to answer which of the following questions?
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300难题
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The passage suggests which of the following about book review readers?
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300难题
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Which of the following words, if substituted for “brilliant” in line 26, would LEAST change the meaning of the sentence?
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There are two theories that have been used to explain ancient and modern tragedy. Neither quite explains the complexity of the tragic process or the tragic hero, but each explains important elements of tragedy, and, because their conclusions are contradictory, they represent extreme views. The first theory states that all tragedy exhibits the workings of external fate. Of course, the overwhelming majority of tragedies do leave us with a sense of the supremacy of impersonal power and of the limitation of human effort. But this theory of tragedy is an oversimplification, primarily because it confuses the tragic condition with the tragic process: the theory does not acknowledge that fate, in a tragedy, normally becomes external to the hero only after the tragic process has been set in motion. Fate, as conceived in ancient Greek tragedy, is the internal balancing condition of life. It appears as external only after it has been violated, just as justice is an internal quality of an honest person, but the external antagonist of the criminal. Secondarily, this theory of tragedy does not distinguish tragedy from irony. Irony does not need an exceptional central figure: as a rule, the more ignoble the hero the sharper the irony, when irony alone is the objective. It is heroism that creates the splendor and exhilaration that is unique to tragedy. The tragic hero normally has an extraordinary, often a nearly divine, destiny almost within grasp, and the glory of that original destiny never quite fades out of the tragedy.
The second theory of tragedy states that the act that sets the tragic process in motion must be primarily a violation of moral law, whether human or divine; in short, that the tragic hero must have a flaw that has an essential connection with sin. Again it is true that the great majority of tragic heroes do possess hubris, or a proud and passionate mind that seems to make the hero's downfall morally explicable. But such hubris is only the precipitating agent of catastrophe, just as in comedy the cause of the happy ending is usually some act of humility, often performed by a noble character who is meanly disguised.
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300难题 GWD
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The author objects to the theory that all tragedy exhibits the workings of external fate primarily because
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300难题 GWD
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The author contrasts an honest person and a criminal (see lines 19–21) primarily to
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OG21 OG2022
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The market for so-called functional beverages, drinks that promise health benefits beyond their inherent nutritional value, nearly doubled over the course of four years, in rising from $2.68 billion in 1997 to be $4.7 billion in 2000.
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OG21 OG2022
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To show that it is serious about addressing the state's power crisis, the administration has plans for ordering all federal facilities in California to keep thermostats at 78 degrees Fahrenheit and shutting down escalators during electricity shortages this summer.
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OG21 OG2022
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Once made exclusively from the wool of sheep that roam the Isle of Lewis and Harris off the coast of Scotland, Harris tweed is now made only with wools that are imported, sometimes from the mainland and sometimes they come--as a result of a 1996 amendment to the Harris Tweed Act--from outside Scotland.
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OG21 OG2022
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Satellite radio transmissions, a popular feature in car stereos, differ from those of AM and FM radio, which is sent directly from earthbound towers and then to a car stereo.
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OG21 OG2022
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Although the company's executives have admitted that there had been accounting irregularities involving improper reporting of revenue, as well as of failure to record expenses, they could not yet say precisely how much money was involved.
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