View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. How does Boorstin characterize "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"?

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

3. What did modern dance claim to be according to Boorstin?

4. Whom does Boorstin say was the first biographer?

5. What did Cristofori invent?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. What does Boorstin say is Ben Franklin's contribution to the art of imaginative life?

3. What was Gibbon's innovation?

4. What does Boorstin say Pickering and Prescott have in common, and what is their role in the development of the Western imaginative consciousness?

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

6. What is the place of the essay in the history Boorstin is describing?

7. What is the skyscraper's role in the development of the human imagination?

8. What innovation does Boorstin say Leonardo da Vinci made in imaginative art?

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

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Why do you think Boorstin excluded technological inventions and imaginative work? What is it about combustion engines, or industrial processes, or scientific discoveries, that excludes them from this work?

Essay Topic 2

From what perspective could the narrative described here--of an art that came to approximate the condition of lived individual experience--be described as a falling away into false life and pseudo-awareness? How else could this narrative be described? What would a person have to believe in order to make a different characterization than Boorstin makes?

Essay Topic 3

Defend or refute the proposition that in its evolution, modern art has given the individual the ability to become immortal through his self-expression. Use examples from the text.

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 725 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample