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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Boorstin say Dostoevsky's novels do to Western values?

2. In what period was the symphony created?

3. Where does Boorstin say Monet's achievement was made?

4. How does Boorstin characterize Of Education?

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

Short Essay Questions

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. What was Gibbon's innovation?

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

9. How does Boorstin characterize Dickens' contribution to imaginative culture?

10. Why does Boorstin say Goethe's Faust is an important work?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Boorstin ends the book with the optimistic description of film and tv as media that will reunite communities by holding people in thrall to the same moving images. Evaluate the value of this conclusion, based on your experiences, and also based on the criteria Boorstin used for evaluating the works he analyzes in the book.

Essay Topic 2

Modern times are often described as either the summit of individual expression or the fragmentation of culture--but these are opposing concepts, and the opposition is always a tricky territory to navigate. How does Boorstin render these two trends, how does he reconcile them, and how does he account for the sense some people have that modern culture is a catastrophe from the perspective of the family or community?

Essay Topic 3

Where is the climax of this book? Are there different climaxes? What questions does each climax resolve? What questions does each climax leave unanswered?

(see the answer keys)

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