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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What made Lyrical Ballads revolutionary according to Boorstin?
(a) It turned each individual into a microcosm of the universe.
(b) It made poetry closer to lived experience.
(c) It attributed unheard-of political agency to each individual.
(d) It refined poetic forms in their most perfect crystallization.

2. When did Goethe finish Faust?
(a) 1812.
(b) 1776.
(c) 1832.
(d) 1848.

3. What does Boorstin say T.S. Eliot believed poetry was about?
(a) The fulfillment of Biblical prophecy.
(b) The poet's self-fulfillment.
(c) The evolution of society.
(d) The extinction of the poetic self.

4. What was novel about the essay according to Boorstin?
(a) It preserved traditional confessional literary traditions in a new form.
(b) It was combined fiction and non-fiction.
(c) It celebrated the self.
(d) It allowed for new definitions of community.

5. How does Boorstin characterize Stravinsky's role in music?
(a) The prophet of harmony.
(b) The philosopher of sound.
(c) The voice of the past.
(d) The apostle of modernism.

Short Answer Questions

1. How does Boorstin characterize Wordsworth's best work?

2. Mozart composed eight symphonies, four divertimentos and some sacred works in a few months at what age?

3. What is the relationship between teacher and learner according to the Koestler quote in the epigraph to Book 3?

4. To what condition does art aspire according to Pater's epigraph for Part 9?

5. In what does Zola say man DID NOT stop believing in the epigraph to Book 3?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Boorstin say is Rousseau's contribution to the art of autobiography?

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

3. What does Boorstin say is Dostoevsky's contribution to imaginative literature?

4. How does Boorstin describe the evolution of the orchestra over time?

5. How does Proust change the way we understand imagination in modern times?

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

7. What does Boorstin say Pickering and Prescott have in common, and what is their role in the development of the Western imaginative consciousness?

8. How did dance change during the transition into modernity?

9. In what way did T. S. Eliot change the course of literature's evolution?

10. When does Boorstin say authors became the subject of their own writing?

(see the answer keys)

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