GRE考试阅读理解练习
“I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense.” Virginia Woolf’s provocative statement about her intentions in writing Mrs. Dalloway has regularly been ignored by the critics, since it highlights an aspect of her literary interests very different from the traditional picture of the “poetic” novelist concerned with examining states of reverie and vision and with following the intricate pathways of individual consciousness. But Virginia Woolf was a realistic as well as a poetic novelist, a satirist and social critic as well as a visionary: literary critics’ cavalier dismissal of Woolf’s social vision will not withstand scrutiny.
In her novels, Woolf is deeply engaged by the questions of how individuals are shaped (or deformed) by their social environments, how historical forces impinge on people’s lives, how class, wealth, and gender help to determine people’s fates. Most of her novels are rooted in a realistically rendered social setting and in a precise historical time.
Woolf’s focus on society has not been generally recognized because of her intense antipathy to propaganda in art. The pictures of reformers in her novels are usually satiric or sharply critical. Even when Woolf is fundamentally sympathetic to their causes, she portrays people anxious to reform their society and possessed of a message or program as arrogant or dishonest, unaware of how their political ideas serve their own psychological needs. (Her Writer’s Diary notes: “the only honest people are the artists,” whereas “these social reformers and philanthropists…harbor…discreditable desires under the disguise of loving their kind…”) Woolf detested what she called “preaching” in fiction, too, and criticized novelist D. H. Lawrence (among others) for working by this method.
Woolf’s own social criticism is expressed in the language of observation rather than in direct commentary, since for her, fiction is a contemplative, not an active art. She describes phenomena and provides materials for a judgment about society and social issues; it is the reader’s work to put the observations together and understand the coherent point of view behind them. As a moralist, Woolf works by indirection, subtly undermining officially accepted mores, mocking, suggesting, calling into question, rather than asserting, advocating, bearing witness: hers is the satirist’s art.
Woolf’s literary models were acute social observers like Chekhov and Chaucer. As she put it in The Common Reader, “It is safe to say that not a single law has been framed or one stone set upon another because of anything Chaucer said or wrote; and yet, as we read him, we are absorbing morality at every pore.” Like Chaucer, Woolf chose to understand as well as to judge, to know her society root and branch—a decision crucial in order to produce art rather than polemic.
-
实用的考试进行曲作文(精)
在平平淡淡的日常中,说到作文,大家肯定都不陌生吧,作文是人们把记忆中所存储的有关知识、经验和思想用书面形式表达出来的记叙方式。那么你知道一篇好的作文该怎么写吗?下面是小编为大家收集的考试进行曲作文4篇,供大家参考借鉴,希望可以帮助到有需要的朋友。考试进...
-
一年级下册语文第一次月考试卷(北师大版)
在学习、工作中,我们很多时候都会有考试,接触到试卷,经过半个学期的学习,究竟学到了什么?需要试卷来帮我们检验。什么样的试卷才能有效帮助到我们呢?下面是小编精心整理的一年级下册语文第一次月考试卷(北师大版),供大家参考借鉴,希望可以帮助到有需要的朋友。一、我是...
-
考试后的感想作文400字经典[3篇]
在学习、工作或生活中,大家最不陌生的就是作文了吧,作文是经过人的思想考虑和语言组织,通过文字来表达一个主题意义的记叙方法。一篇什么样的作文才能称之为优秀作文呢?以下是小编整理的考试后的感想作文400字3篇,欢迎阅读,希望大家能够喜欢。考试后的感想作文400字...
-
小学二年级上册语文期考试卷练习题
现如今,我们需要用到练习题的情况非常的多,通过这些形形色色的习题,使得我们得以有机会认识事物的方方面面,认识概括化图式多样化的具体变式,从而使我们对原理和规律的认识更加的深入。什么样的习题才是好习题呢?以下是小编精心整理的小学二年级上册语文期考试卷练习...