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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. Where does Boorstin say Kafka's charm is to be found?
(a) In his restraint from suicide.
(b) In his affection for his own demise.
(c) In his absurdism.
(d) In his ambiguity.

2. How did Dostoevsky view Western science according to Boorstin?
(a) As social Darwinism.
(b) As materialistic determinism.
(c) As primitive superstition.
(d) As a denial of freedom.

3. When did Goethe start Faust?
(a) 1770.
(b) 1812.
(c) 1832.
(d) 1776.

4. How does Boorstin say Proust created life?
(a) In ritual.
(b) In space.
(c) In action.
(d) In time.

5. What does Boorstin say artists began to see in modern art?
(a) Evanescent moments.
(b) Platonic forms.
(c) Traditions.
(d) Transcendent forms.

6. In what period was the symphony created?
(a) Gothic.
(b) Romantic.
(c) Renaissance.
(d) Baroque.

7. What did Gibbon say was the essence of history?
(a) Wars and elections.
(b) Political movements.
(c) Human habits and utterances.
(d) Economies.

8. How does Boorstin characterize "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"?
(a) The first post-modern poem.
(b) The first confessional poem.
(c) The first modernist poem.
(d) The last Medieval chanson.

9. What did the Slavonic Dostoevskian character represent for the Western imagination according to Boorstin?
(a) Experiences at the heart of Western consciousness.
(b) Experiences beyond the Western consciousness.
(c) The duality present in Western consciousness.
(d) The primitive memories out of which Western consciousness arose.

10. What does Boorstin say Dostoevsky's novels do to Western values?
(a) Annihilate them.
(b) Besiege them.
(c) Embrace them.
(d) Reject them.

11. What does Alphonse Daudet claim music is in his epigraph to Part 9?
(a) Another planet.
(b) The perfection of human emotion.
(c) The essence of language.
(d) A religion.

12. What does Chaucer say in the epigraph to Part 8?
(a) That life is short and craft is hard to learn.
(b) That the lives of the common people are themselves art.
(c) That history is made on the backs of common men.
(d) That a liar is the most honest of men.

13. To what condition does art aspire according to Pater's epigraph for Part 9?
(a) Science.
(b) Democracy.
(c) Music.
(d) Religion.

14. What did Kafka believe about the inner and outer selves according to Boorstin?
(a) They were bent on destroying each other.
(b) They ran in separate ways.
(c) They were mutually exclusive.
(d) They were capable of mystical harmonies.

15. What did William Henry Fox Talbot discover?
(a) A process for capturing images on glass.
(b) A process for retouching negatives.
(c) A process for using silver nitrate to make copies.
(d) A process for capturing sharp contrasts between black and white on photographic film.

Short Answer Questions

1. How does Boorstin characterize the form of Whitman's poetry?

2. Why did Dickens leave the public sphere?

3. What does Boorstin say Eliot tried to express in "The Waste Land"?

4. To what does Melville say the sea and land are analogous in the epigraph to Part 12?

5. Whom does Boorstin say was the first biographer?

(see the answer keys)

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