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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does Boorstin say upturned stones signify?
(a) Man's determination to find origins.
(b) Man's attempt to measure and regulate his environment.
(c) Man's determination to find food sources.
(d) Man's desire to live forever.

2. What fear did St. Ambrose's creation allay?
(a) Of drabness in church literature.
(b) Of unseemly literature entering the church canon.
(c) Of buildings that rendered prayer impossible.
(d) Of unsuitable music entering the church.

3. What does Byron say a sculptor should do in the epigraph to Part 4?
(a) Exceed his model.
(b) Capture his model.
(c) Leave some flaw by which the work could be distinguished from the model.
(d) Perfect his model.

4. What is a dithyramb?
(a) A song sung in honor of the god.
(b) A poem that commemorates a battle.
(c) A dance done to honor ancestors.
(d) A monument that commemorates a sacrifice.

5. What does Abbé Suger say about how spirits can raise themselves to eternal things in the epigraph to Part 6?
(a) That it requires renunciation of the world.
(b) That it happens on its own.
(c) That it requires symbolic death, again and again.
(d) That it requires symbols of beauty.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does Boorstin say the Renaissance offered to Shakespeare?

2. What does Virginia Woolf say, in the second epigraph to Part 7, about writing?

3. What does Boorstin say man discovered in Section 24: The Birth of the Spectator?

4. How does Boorstin characterize the Decameron?

5. How long was it before Gothic art changed the style of European art and architecture in Boorstin's account?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does Boorstin characterize Chaucer's Canterbury Tales?

2. What improvement did the Greeks make in architecture?

3. How do Greek depictions compare with Egyptian symbols?

4. How does Boorstin characterize Shakespeare's role in the development of imaginative works?

5. How does Boorstin describe the Hindu contribution to imaginative culture?

6. How does Boorstin say the Japanese differ from Westerners in their architectural approach?

7. What is a dithyramb and what is its place in imaginative culture?

8. What does Boorstin say is the Koran's position on imaginative culture?

9. How does Boorstin describe the birth of prose?

10. What was St. Augustine's contribution to imaginative culture according to Boorstin?

(see the answer keys)

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