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  3. Critics maintain that the fiction of Herman Melville (1819-1891) has limitations

Critics maintain that the fiction of Herman Melville (1819-1891) has limitations

游客2024-01-12  69
问题 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.  [br] 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?
选项 A、Literary critics should no longer use Jamesian standards to judge the value of novels.
B、Literary critics who have praised Melville’s fiction at the expense of James’s fiction should consider themselves justified.
C、Literary critics should no longer attempt to place writers, including Melville and James, in traditions or categories.
D、Melville and James should be viewed as different sorts of writers and one should not be regarded as inherently superior to the other.
E、Melville and James nevertheless share important similarities and these should not be overlooked or slighted when literary critics point out differences between the two writers.
答案 D
解析 Which among the answer choices is a conclusion drawn by the author of the passage regarding the contrast between Melville s fiction and that of James? The second sentence of the final paragraph states this: Melville is a different kind of writer, who held, and should be judged by, presuppositions about fiction that are quite different from James’s. In other words, Melville held different standards regarding fiction and one needs to evaluate Melville on these standards rather than on James’s standards.
A    The passage suggests that Jamesian standards may be inappropriate for Melville’s novels. However, it does not suggest that Jamesian standards are necessarily invalid for judging the value of other novels.
B    The passage mentions nothing about critics who have praised Melville’s novel; at the expense of James’s novels. In fact, the passage never mentions James’s novels.
C    The passage does not suggest that critics should avoid categorization of writers. In fact, the passage in lines 19-20 states that Melville is not a Jamesian novelist, which is in itself such a categorization.
D    Correct. This accurately expresses a conclusion drawn by the author, namely that Melville and James have valid, if different, approaches to fiction writing.
E    The author indicates no important similarities between Melville and James’ s writing. In fact, the author emphasizes certain key differences between the two authors’ work.
The correct answer is D.
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