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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  31
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] Which of the following statements best describes trie author’s method of argumentation in lines 24-31?
选项 A、The author describes an important standard of evaluation used by critics of Melville and ther attacks that standard.
B、The author admits a contention put forward by critics of Melville but then makes a countercharge against those critics.
C、The author describes a charge advanced by critics of Melville and then points out a logical flaw in this charge.
D、The author provides evidence that seems to support a position held by critics of Melville but then demonstrates that the evidence actually supports a diametrically opposed position.
E、The author concedes an assertion made by critics of Melville but then mitigates the weight of the assertion by means of an explanation.
答案 E
解析 Which answer choice best describes the reasoning in lines 24-32? The author suggests that Melville’s novels can reasonably be called "romances," but also is careful to explain a sense of this designation that still regards Melville’s novels as valid works of literature.
A    The text in lines 24-31 does not describe any standard of evaluation used by Melville’s critics.
B    There is no countercharge against, or even mention of, Melville’s critics in lines 24-31.
C    Again, there is no mention of criticisms  of Melville’s work in the lines 24-31; it follows that the author does not point out a "logical flaw" in such criticisms within lines 24-31.
D    In lines 24-31, the author accepts that Melville’s novels can be called "romances " In lines 24-31, of course, the author presents no evidence to show that Melville’s novels are not romances.
E    Correct. In lines 24-31, the author concedes that Melville’s novels are romances. However, the author argues that it this does not detract from the literary value of Melville’s work.
The correct answer is E.
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