美国文学

三、Poem Appreciation. (15 %)

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

24. Identify the poem and the poet.

It’ s the poem《Stopping by Woods on a Sonwy Evening》writen by Robert Frost.

25. Analyze the poem in terms of theme and artistic features.

Theme of the poem: The poem is primarily oriented towards the pleasures of the scene and the responsibility of life.

artistic features :

Rhyme ：It’s the pome whose rhyme is “aaba,bbcb,ccbc,dddd” .The first stanza rhymes in “aaba” and “b” becomes the new repeated end rhymes in the second stanza. That makes stanza 2 rhyming in “bbcb”. Similarly, the third stanza rhymes in “ccbc”, whereas the very last stanza rhymes in a consistent “d” which brings the poem to a harmonious end.

Rhetorical：

Analogy:

The analogy between the specific experience of the rural traveler and the general experience of any individual whose life is so frequently described as a journey; a journey including pleasures and hardships, duties and distances.

Metaphors:

Promises – Our own promises or duties that we must fulfill.

Miles - experience we must travel through before death

Sleep - death

四、Segment Reading. (15 %)

A prevalent feature in these compositions was a nursed and petted melancholy; another was a wasteful and opulent gush of \"fine language\"; another was a tendency to lug in by the ears particularly prized words and phrases until they were worn entirely out; and a peculiarity that conspicuously marked and marred them was the inveterate and intolerable sermon that wagged its crippled tail at the end of each and every one of them. No matter what the subject might be, a brain-racking effort was made to squirm it into some aspect or other that the moral and religious mind could contemplate

with edification. The glaring insincerity of these sermons was not sufficient to compass the banishment of the fashion from the schools, and it is not sufficient to-day; it never will be sufficient while the world stands, perhaps. There is no school in all our land where the young ladies do not feel obliged to close their compositions with a sermon; and you will find that the sermon of the most frivolous and the least religious girl in the school is always the longest and the most relentlessly pious. But enough of this. Homely truth is unpalatable.

26. Identify the author and the work.

It’ s the biographical from 《The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 》writen by Mark Twain.

27. What idea does the quotation express?

五、 Comments.(20 %)

28. Comment on the theme and writing features of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.

theme: This novel, together with some other of Hawthorne's work, assumes the universality of guilt and explores the complexities and ambiguities of man's choices. It is marked by a depth of psychological and moral insight seldom equaled and never surpassed by any American writer.

In this particular nove1, Hawthorne does not intend to tell a love story nor a story of sin, but focuses his attention on the moral, emotional, and psychological effects or consequences of the sin on the people in general and those main characters in particular, so as to show us the tension between society and individuals. \" To Hawthorne, everybody is potentially a sinner, and great moral courage is therefore indispensable for the improvement of human nature, as is shown in the The Scarlet Letter.