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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

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

2. When did Montaigne publish his Essays?
(a) 1580.
(b) 1620.
(c) 1607.
(d) 1825.

3. How does Boorstin characterize the autobiography as a form?
(a) An objective account of a person's feelings and language.
(b) A shifting subject viewed from a shifting perspective.
(c) A scientific glimpse into the workings of the self.
(d) A rebellion against the act of being misread.

4. What does Boorstin say man is finally learning to celebrate in Book 3?
(a) Each individual.
(b) Industry.
(c) The Other.
(d) The human masses.

5. How does Boorstin characterize the Heroic American Literary Myth?
(a) A tale of morality and sacrifice.
(b) A tale of shining visions fulfilled.
(c) A tale of revenge and madness.
(d) A tale of brutality and crude mysticism.

6. For what is Faust a metaphor according to Boorstin?
(a) The conscience.
(b) The questing soul.
(c) The unconscious.
(d) The dissatisfied modern self.

7. What did William Henry Fox Talbot discover?
(a) A process for capturing sharp contrasts between black and white on photographic film.
(b) A process for using silver nitrate to make copies.
(c) A process for capturing images on glass.
(d) A process for retouching negatives.

8. What artistic movement does Boorstin say Monet initiated?
(a) Impressionism.
(b) Surrealism.
(c) Dadaism.
(d) Realism.

9. What does Boorstin say Rousseau's Confessions are a self-defense against?
(a) An imaginary conspiracy.
(b) Political intrigue.
(c) Inherited accusations.
(d) His own human nature.

10. When did Goethe start Faust?
(a) 1770.
(b) 1812.
(c) 1776.
(d) 1832.

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

12. In what does Zola say man stopped believing in the epigraph to Book 3?
(a) Himself.
(b) His own mortality.
(c) His own immortality.
(d) God.

13. What does Chaucer say in the epigraph to Part 8?
(a) That life is short and craft is hard to learn.
(b) That a liar is the most honest of men.
(c) That history is made on the backs of common men.
(d) That the lives of the common people are themselves art.

14. What did the Slavonic Dostoevskian character represent for the Western imagination according to Boorstin?
(a) The primitive memories out of which Western consciousness arose.
(b) Experiences at the heart of Western consciousness.
(c) Experiences beyond the Western consciousness.
(d) The duality present in Western consciousness.

15. What does Boorstin say Michelangelo inspired people to idealize?
(a) God.
(b) Man.
(c) Aristocrats.
(d) Genius.

Short Answer Questions

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

2. What does Boorstin say Giotto di Bondone was the first Western artist to do?

3. What made Lyrical Ballads revolutionary according to Boorstin?

4. How did Dostoevsky view Western science according to Boorstin?

5. What does Boorstin say does the artist's job in photography?

(see the answer keys)

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