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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2025-02-25  1
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 can logically be inferred from the passage about the author’s application of the term "romance" to Melville’s work?
选项 A、The author uses the term in a broader way than did Melville himself.
B、The author uses the term in a different way than do many literary critics.
C、The author uses the term in a more systematic way than did James.
D、The author’s use of the term is the same as the term’s usual meaning for twentieth-century commentators.
E、The author’s use of the term is less controversial than is the use of the term "novel" by many commentators.
答案 B
解析 Which of the following conclusions regarding the term "romance" as applied to Melvilles work is most strongly supported by the information in the passage? The author of the passage uses the term without the negative connotation that the passage suggests the term carried for many twentieth-century critics of Melville.
A    There is no information in the passage regarding how, or even whether, Melville used the term "romance."
B    Correct. The author of the passage will call Melville’s novels romances provided this term is used without the disparaging connotations of this term (particularly as used by many critics of Melville’s work).
C    Nothing in the passage specifies James’s use of the term "romance."
D    The author of the passage specifically applies the term "romance" in a way that avoids the disparaging connotations of escapism present in the use of the term by some critics of Melville’s work
E    The passage provides no information by which we can gauge how controversial the author’s use of "romance" as applied to Melville’s works is, relative to other commentators’ use of the term "novel."
The correct answer is B.
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