View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does Boorstin say Eliot tried to express in "The Waste Land"?
(a) Sadness.
(b) Incoherence.
(c) Redemption.
(d) Compensation.

2. What does Boorstin say was combined in the skyscraper?
(a) Past and future.
(b) Man and machine.
(c) Water and stone.
(d) Form and function.

3. What was startling about Leaves of Grass in Boorstin's account?
(a) Whitman's apocalyptic prophecies.
(b) Whitman's discontent with the modern world.
(c) Whitman's excessive metaphors.
(d) Whitman's indiscriminate subject matter.

4. In what way does Boorstin say Milton was a strong individual?
(a) He exiled his children for their unconventional religious views.
(b) He never belonged to a sect.
(c) He invented his own mythical characters and religion.
(d) He did not subscribe to conventional religious views.

5. Why did Dickens leave the public sphere?
(a) He was arrested.
(b) He was censored.
(c) He went bankrupt.
(d) His doctor warned him against public readings.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Boorstin say Milton wrote after Comus and Lycidas?

2. How does Boorstin characterize Stravinsky's role in music?

3. What does Boorstin say was Milton's contribution to poetry?

4. How many paintings does Boorstin say da Vinci left?

5. Where did Dostoevsky gain the experience from which he wrote Crime and Punishment?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does Boorstin characterize Milton's contribution to imaginative culture?

2. Where does Boorstin put Kafka in his portrait of imaginative thinkers?

3. What does Boorstin say is Ben Franklin's contribution to the art of imaginative life?

4. What is the skyscraper's role in the development of the human imagination?

5. How did Beethoven change the nature of music according to Boorstin?

6. What, in Boorstin's opinion, is calligraphy's place in the history of human culture?

7. How did visual arts change as artists came to appreciate the power of light?

8. How does Boorstin characterize Johann Sebastian Bach's contribution to human imaginative work?

9. What does Boorstin say is William Wordsworth's contribution to imaginative culture?

10. Where does Melville's Moby Dick fit in Boorstin's narrative?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 688 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample