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  3. Critics maintain that the fiction of Herman Melville (1819-1891) has limitations

Critics maintain that the fiction of Herman Melville (1819-1891) has limitations

游客2024-01-12  12
问题 Critics maintain that the fiction of Herman Melville (1819-1891) has limitations, such as its lack of inventive plots after Moby-Dick (1851) and its occasionally inscrutable style. A more serious, yet problematic, charge is that Melville is a deficient writer because he is not a practitioner of the "art of fiction," as critics have conceived of this art since the late nineteenth-century essays and novels of Henry James. Indeed, most twentieth-century commentators regard Melville not as a novelist but as a writer of romance, since they believe that Melville’s fiction lacks the continuity that James viewed as essential to a novel: the continuity between what characters feel or think and what they do, and the continuity between characters’ fates and their pasts or original social classes. Critics argue that only Pierre (1852), because of its subject and its characters, is close to being a novel in the Jamesian sense.
    However, although Melville is not a Jamesian novelist, he is not therefore a deficient writer. A more reasonable position is that Melville is a different kind of writer, who held, and should be judged by, presuppositions about fiction that are quite different from James’s. It is true that Melville wrote "romances"; however, these are not the escapist fictions this word often implies, but fictions that range freely among very unusual or intense human experiences. Melville portrayed such experiences because he believed these best enabled him to explore moral questions, an exploration he assumed was the ultimate purpose of fiction. He was content to sacrifice continuity or even credibility as long as he could establish a significant moral situation. Thus Melville’s romances do not give the reader a full understanding of the complete feelings and thoughts that motivate actions and events that shape fate. Rather, the romances leave unexplained the sequence of events and either simplify or obscure motives. Again, such simplifications and obscurities exist in order to give prominence to the depiction of sharply delineated moral values, values derived from a character’s purely personal sense of honor, rather than, as in a Jamesian novel, from the conventions of society.  [br] The author probably mentions Melville’s Pierre to
选项 A、refute those literary critics who have made generalizations about the quality of Melville’s fiction
B、argue that the portrayal of characters is one of Melville’s more accomplished literary skills
C、give an example of a novel that was thought by James to resemble his own fiction
D、suggest that literary critics find few exceptions to what they believe is a characteristic of Melville’s fiction
E、reinforce the contention of literary critics
答案 D
解析 Why does the author of the passage mention Pierre? The final sentence of the first paragraph reads: Critics argue that only Pierre (1852), because of its subject and characters, is close to being a novel in the Jamesian sense.
This statement indicates that literary critics regard Pierre as the only possible exception to their negative characterization of Melville’s fiction as romance because Pierre has at least some of the properties that James considered essential to novels of literary value.
A    This is not a purpose of mentioning Pierre. The passage does not cite any critics who claim that most of Melville’s novels satisfy Jamesian criteria.
B    This is not a purpose of mentioning Pierre. The author of the passage does not endorse the view that character portrayal is a particular strength of Melville’s novels. In fact, the author suggests that Melville’s novels tend to give questionable portrayals of what characters feel or think.
C    The passage lacks any information indicating James’s personal view of Pierre. Given the information in the passage, it is entirely possible that James never even read Pierre.
D    Correct. The critics of Melville’s novels generally characterize them as "romances" rather than "novels" given that they lack certain properties Henry James regarded as essential to novels. The mention of Pierre shows that the critics see it as the only one of Melville’s novels that might fit the Jamesian criteria.
E    In the sentence in which Pierre is mentioned, the author of the passage does not endorse criticism suggesting that Melville’s works are romances rather than novels. Furthermore, the sentence is not intended to endorse a contention of any other type of literary critic.
The correct answer is D.
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