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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  38
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 of the passage would be most likely to agree that a writer’s fiction should be evaluated by which of the following criteria?
选项 A、How consistently that fiction establishes credibility with the reader
B、How skillfully that fiction supersedes the presuppositions or conventions of a tradition
C、How completely that fiction satisfies the standards of judgment held by most literary critics
D、How well that fiction fulfills the premises about fiction maintained by the writer of the fiction
E、How well that fiction exhibits a continuity of subject and style over the course of the writer’s career
答案 D
解析 Which criteria would the author of the passage most likely agree to be useful for evaluating a writers fiction? The passage argues that even though Melville’s novels fail to satisfy Henry James’s criteria for literary value in a novel, they still have a different kind of literary value. In particular, they match the criteria set out by Melville’s own conception of fiction.
The author states that Melville sought in his fiction to explore moral questions, an exploration he assumed was the ultimate purpose of fiction. Therefore, the author would likely agree that the literary value of a writer’s fiction is determined by the degree to which the writer’s fiction fulfills the writer’s own conception of what fiction should accomplish.
A    The author of the passage would be unlikely to agree that fiction must establish credibility with the reader. In the passage, the author suggests that Melville was prepared to sacrifice some credibility in his fiction if doing so would help him to establish a significant moral situation.
B    Nothing in the passage suggests that its author would agree with the idea that fiction must "supersede presuppositions or conventions of a tradition." While the author indicates that Melville’s novels do not satisfy James’s criteria for a good literary
novel, this does not indicate that Melville’s work supersedes or replaces any tradition.
C    The author of the passage clearly rejects this criterion and actually argues against the standards of many critics. Note the author’s position that criticisms based on widespread acceptance by literary critics of James’s standards for literary novels are lot necessarily valid for all fiction.
D    Correct. The author of the passage argues that Melville’s fiction must be judged by reference to Melville’s own criteria rather than by those of James or the critics who accepted James’s criteria.
E    Nowhere does the passage mention continuity of style over a career. Therefore, nothing in the passage suggests that the author would accept it.
The correct answer is D.
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