GRE Literature in English (REA) (31 page)

Which of the following best describes the portrait of Telemachus that emerges? He is

1. an ambitious man anxious for his father's throne.
   
2. a hypocrite.
   
3. a virtuous, dutiful, loving son and strong leader of men.
   
4. a potential tyrant who will abuse his authority.
   
5. an able administrator but unexciting man.
   

The speaker expresses

1. fear of death.
   
2. a desire for additional experience.
   
3. a belief in immortality.
   
4. a need for solitary meditation.
   
5. a desire for death.
   

The author of this passage is

1. Coleridge.
   
2. Keats.
   
3. Tennyson.
   
4. Browning.
   
5. Arnold.
   

Which is the “I” of Cather's
My Antonia?

1. I had only to close my eyes to hear the rumbling of the wagons in the dark, and to be again overcome by that obliterating strangeness. The feelings of that night were so near that I could reach out and touch them with my hand. I had the sense of coming home to myself, and of having found out what a little circle man's experience is. For [her] and for me, this had been the road of Destiny; had taken us to those early accidents of fortune which predetermined for us all that we can ever be. Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
   

2. Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time: a small red flame—a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.
   

3. It must be observ'd, that when the old Wretch, my Brother (Husband) was dead, I then freely gave my Husband an Account of all that Affair, and of this Cousin, as I had call'd him before, being my own Son by that mistaken unhappy Match: He was perfectly easy in the Account, and told me he should have been as easy if the old Man, as we call'd him, had been alive; for, said he, it was no Fault of yours, nor of his; it was a Mistake impossible to be prevented; he only reproach'd him with desiring me to conceal it, and to live with him as a Wife, after I knew that he was my Brother, that, he said, was a vile part.
   

4. I planned my death carefully; unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it. My life had a tendency to spread, to get flabby, to scroll and festoon like the frame of a baroque mirror, which came from following the line of least resistance. I wanted my death, by contrast, to be neat and simple, understated, even a little severe, like a Quaker church or the basic black dress with a single strand of pearls much praised by fashion magazines when I was fifteen.... At first I thought I'd managed it.
   

5. In the beginning of the last chapter, I inform'd you exactly when I was born;—but I did not inform you,
   how
   . No; that particular was reserved entirely for a chapter by itself;—besides, Sir, as you and I are in a manner perfect strangers to each other, it would not have been proper to have let you into too many circumstances relating to myself all at once.—You must have a little patience. I have undertaken, you see, to write not only my life, but my opinions also; hoping and expecting that your knowledge of my character, and of what kind of a mortal I am, by the one, would give you a better relish for the other.
   

I on my horse, and Love on me doth try
Our horsemanships, while by strange work I prove
A horseman to my horse, a horse to Love;
And now man's wrongs in me, poor beast, descry.

The poet's portrayal of “Love” in this stanza is an example of

1. personification.
   
2. metonymy.
   
3. synecdoche.
   
4. apostrophe.
   
5. dead metaphor.
   

“Horsemanships” in line 2 is plural because

1. love rides the speaker while the speaker rides his horse.
   
2. the speaker has committed more than one wrong.
   
3. love exercises many forms of control over the speaker.
   
4. love controls him better than he controls love.
   
5. love appears in many forms.
   

“I didn't want to kill!” Bigger shouted. “But what I killed for, I am! It must've been pretty deep in me to make me kill! I must have felt it awful hard to murder....What I killed for must've been good! Bigger's voice was full of frenzied anguish. ”It must have been good. When a man kills, it's for something... I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ‘em... .It's the truth, Mr. Max. I can say it now,‘cause I'm going to die. I know what I'm saying real good and I know how it sounds. But I'm all right. I feel all right when I look at it that way....”

The preceding passage best supports which of the following statements?

1. Bigger is an embodiment of the chief tenets of existentialist philosophy.
   
2. Bigger has achieved self-identity through violence.
   
3. Like Iago, Bigger is driven by motive, but there is also an inexplicable reality behind his rational exterior.
   
4. Ultimately, Bigger ends where he began, understanding little of the world around him and even less of himself.
   
5. Bigger now realizes that his acts have been impulsive and, therefore, meaningless.
   

The passage is from

1. James Baldwin's
   Another Country
   .
   
2. Ralph Ellison's
   Invisible Man
   .
   
3. Norman Mailer's
   The Armies of the Night
   .
   
4. Richard Wright's
   Native Son
   .
   
5. James Dickey's
   Deliverance.
   

1. “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”
   
2. “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”
   
3. “Endymion”
   
4. “Porphyria's Lover”
   
5. “Ozymandias”
   

Which is a dramatic monologue?

Which is a villanelle?

[His] mother had charged him to return with his shield or upon it. Or perchance he was some Achilles, who had nourished his wrath apart, and had now come to avenge or rescue his Patroclus. He saw this unequal combat from afar,—for the blacks were nearly twice the size of the red,—he drew near with rapid pace till he stood on his guard within half an inch of the combatants; then, watching his opportunity, he sprang upon the black warrior, and commenced his operations near the root of his right fore leg, leaving the foe to select among his own members; and so there were three united for life, as if a new kind of attraction had been invented which put all other locks and cements to shame. I should not have wondered by this time to find that they had their respective musical bands stationed on some eminent chip, and playing their national airs the while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying combatants. I was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference.

The combatants are

1. Greeks.
   
2. Americans.
   
3. French.
   
4. dogs.
   
5. ants.
   

Patroclus was

1. the husband of Helen of Troy.
   
2. the king of Troy.
   
3. once Achilles' friend, but killed Achilles after the two quarreled.
   
4. Achilles' friend, killed in the Trojan War.
   
5. Achilles' son.
   

The author of this passage is

1. Benjamin Franklin.
   
2. Washington Irving.
   
3. Nathaniel Hawthorne.
   
4. Henry David Thoreau.
   
5. Oliver Wendell Holmes.
   

[He] had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in the administration. When I think over this rumour, hardly can I express the emotions which seize me. Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? ... Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring—the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave, a bank-note sent in swiftest charity—he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death.

Dead letters serve as a metaphor for

1. government inefficiency.
   
2. the protagonist's existence.
   
3. governmental indifference to the suffering of its citizens.
   
4. man's inhumanity to man.
   
5. the protagonist's family.
   

The author of the previous passage is also the author of

1. Benito Cereno.
   
2. The Red Badge of Courage
   .
   
3. Ethan Frome
   .
   
4. The Fall of the House of Usher
   .
   
5. The House of the Seven Gables
   .
   

O our Scots nobles were richt laith
To weet their cork-heeled shoon
But lang owre a' the play were played
Their hats they swam aboon.

 

O lang, lang may their ladies sit,
Wi' their fans into their hand,
Or e'er they see Sir Patrick Spens
Come sailing the land.

Which of the following best expresses the meaning of lines 3 and 4? The Scots nobles

1. drowned.
   
2. refused to go.
   
3. changed their minds in the middle of the voyage.
   
4. mutinied.
   
5. jumped overboard and swam to shore.
   

This excerpt is from

1. a sixteenth-century broadside ballad.
   
2. a mock epic.
   
3. a Middle English lyric.
   
4. a medieval popular ballad.
   
5. a seventeenth-century elegy.
   

The ___ was a medieval form: a short comic or satiric tale in verse that deals realistically with middle-class or lower-class characters and that revels in the obscene and ribald.

 

Which one of the following correctly completes the definition above?

1. parable
   
2. beast fable
   
3. fabliau
   
4. allegory
   
5. exemplum
   

The British had possessed the country so completely. Their withdrawal was so irrevocable. And to me even after many months something of fantasy remained attached to all the reminders of their presence. I had grown up in a British colony and it might have been expected that much would have been familiar to me. But England was at least as many-faceted as India. England, as it expressed itself in Trinidad, was not the England I had lived in; and neither of these countries could be related to the England that was the source of so much that I now saw about me.

 

The author of this passage is

1. E. M. Forster.
   
2. Rudyard Kipling.
   
3. V. S. Naipaul.
   
4. Nadine Gordimer.
   
5. Doris Lessing.
   

That was when people had begun to feel really sorry for her. People in our town, remembering how old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last, believed that the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were. None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such. We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door. So when she got to be thirty and was still single, we were not pleased exactly, but vindicated; even with insanity in the family she wouldn't have turned down all of her chances if they had really materialized.

The attitude of the townspeople toward Miss Emily is best described as one of

1. disdain tempered by understanding.
   
2. compassion mixed with self-congratulation.
   
3. condescension and moral superiority.
   
4. obsequiousness combined with self-righteousness.
   
5. pity tinged with envy.