2015年MBA阅读理解强化练习题7
“I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its mostintense.” Virginia Woolf’s provocative statement about her intentions in writing
Mrs. Dalloway has regularly been ignored by the critics, since it highlights an
aspect of her literary interests very different from the traditional picture of
the “poetic” novelist concerned with examining states of reverie and vision and
with following the intricate pathways of individual consciousness. But Virginia
Woolf was a realistic as well as a poetic novelist, a satirist and social critic
as well as a visionary: literary critics’ cavalier dismissal of Woolf’s social
vision will not withstand scrutiny.
In her novels, Woolf is deeply engaged by the questions of how individuals
are shaped (or deformed) by their social environments, how historical forces
impinge on people’s lives, how class, wealth, and gender help to determine
people’s fates. Most of her novels are rooted in a realistically rendered social
setting and in a precise historical time.
Woolf’s focus on society has not been generally recognized because of her
intense antipathy to propaganda in art. The pictures of reformers in her novels
are usually satiric or sharply critical. Even when Woolf is fundamentally
sympathetic to their causes, she portrays people anxious to reform their society
and possessed of a message or program as arrogant or dishonest, unaware of how
their political ideas serve their own psychological needs. (Her Writer’s Diary
notes: “the only honest people are the artists,” whereas “these social reformers
and philanthropists… harbor… discreditable desires under the disguise of loving
their kind…”) Woolf detested what she called “preaching” in fiction, too, and
criticized novelist D. H. Lawrence (among others) for working by this
method.
Woolf’s own social criticism is expressed in the language of observation
rather than in direct commentary, since for her, fiction is a contemplative, not
an active art. She describes phenomena and provides materials for a judgment
about society and social issues; it is the reader’s work to put the observations
together and understand the coherent point of view behind them. As a moralist,
Woolf works by indirection, subtly undermining officially accepted mores,
mocking, suggesting, calling into question, rather than asserting, advocating,
bearing witness: hers is the satirist’s art.
Woolf’s literary models were acute social observers like Chekhov and
Chaucer. As she put it in The Common Reader, “It is safe to say that not a
single law has been framed or one stone set upon another because of anything
Chaucer said or wrote; and yet, as we read him, we are absorbing morality at
every pore.” Like Chaucer, Woolf chose to understand as well as to judge, to
know her society root and branch — a decision crucial in order to produce art
rather than polemic.
1. Which of the following would be the most appropriate title for the
text?
Poetry and Satire as Influences on the Novels of Virginia Woolf.
Virginia Woolf: Critic and Commentator on the Twentieth-Century
Novel.
Trends in Contemporary Reform Movements as a Key to Understanding
Virginia Woolf’s Novels.
Virginia Woolf’s Novels: Critical Reflections on the Individual and on
Society.
2. In the first paragraph of the text, the author’s attitude toward the
literary critics mentioned can best be described as
disparaging.
ironic.
facetious.
skeptical but resigned.
3. It can be inferred from the text that Woolf chose Chaucer as a literary
example because she believed that
Chaucer was the first English author to focus on society as a whole as
well as on individual characters.
Chaucer was an honest and forthright author, whereas novelists like D.
H. Lawrence did not sincerely wish to change society.
Chaucer was more concerned with understanding his society than with
calling its accepted mores into question.
Chaucer’s writing was greatly, if subtly, effective in influencing the
moral attitudes of his readers.
4. It can be inferred from the text that the most probable reason Woolf
realistically described the social setting in the majority of her novels was
that she
was aware that contemporary literary critics considered the novel to be
the most realistic of literary genres.
was interested in the effect of a person’s social milieu on his or her
character and actions.
needed to be as attentive to detail as possible in her novels in order
to support the arguments she advanced in them.
wanted to show that a painstaking fidelity in the representation of
reality did not in any way hamper the artist.
5. Which of the following phrases best expresses the sense of the word
“contemplative” as it is used in line 2, paragraph 4 of the text?
Gradually elucidating the rational structures underlying accepted
mores.
Reflecting on issues in society without prejudice or emotional
commitment.
Avoiding the aggressive assertion of the author’s perspective to the
exclusion of the reader’s judgment.
Conveying a broad view of society as a whole rather than focusing on an
isolated individual consciousness.
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