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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 Melville presents in Moby Dick?
(a) The cruel heart of American industry.
(b) The isolation of American individuals.
(c) The mystery of the self.
(d) The stoicism of the American self.

2. What does Boorstin say Leonardo da Vinci protected?
(a) Artistic independence.
(b) The value of history.
(c) Traditional Christian figures.
(d) The idea of the future.

3. For what does Boorstin say skyscrapers were first used?
(a) Advertising.
(b) Industry.
(c) Defense.
(d) Commerce.

4. What motif did Bruneleschi and Alberti introduce to Western art?
(a) The view out of a window.
(b) The division of a canvas into allegorical and realist halves.
(c) Mimetic realism.
(d) Decorative cherubs.

5. What does Boorstin say was the second step in the use of skyscrapers?
(a) National pride.
(b) Architectural form.
(c) Industry.
(d) Surveillance.

Short Answer Questions

1. In what does Zola say man stopped believing in the epigraph to Book 3?

2. How does Boorstin characterize the autobiography as a form?

3. To what condition does art aspire according to Pater's epigraph for Part 9?

4. Where does Goethe say the shadows are deepest in the epigraph to Part 10?

5. How did Benjamin Franklin innovate in the autobiographical form?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does Proust change the way we understand imagination in modern times?

2. How does Boorstin characterize Johann Sebastian Bach's contribution to human imaginative work?

3. In what way did T. S. Eliot change the course of literature's evolution?

4. How did painting begin to reflect the changes that were taking place in literature?

5. Where does Melville's Moby Dick fit in Boorstin's narrative?

6. How did photography change the nature of art and representation in Boorstin's account?

7. How did visual arts change as artists came to appreciate the power of light?

8. What, in Boorstin's opinion, is calligraphy's place in the history of human culture?

9. What is Coleridge's importance in imaginative literature according to Boorstin?

10. When does Boorstin say authors became the subject of their own writing?

(see the answer keys)

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