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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. Where does Boorstin say Monet's achievement was made?
(a) In the elusive moment.
(b) In the relationship between audience and nature.
(c) In the relationship between the artist and history.
(d) In the eternal moment of art.

2. What does Boorstin say is unique about Richard Wagner?
(a) His work was performed with modern orchestras for the first time.
(b) His music created new philosophies.
(c) His work embodied religious ideals in new ways.
(d) He was influential in both musical and literary history.

3. How does Boorstin characterize Stravinsky's role in music?
(a) The philosopher of sound.
(b) The voice of the past.
(c) The prophet of harmony.
(d) The apostle of modernism.

4. 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 rebellion against the act of being misread.
(d) A scientific glimpse into the workings of the self.

5. Boorstin says that Dickens' work was a love affair with what?
(a) Future technologies.
(b) The English people.
(c) The New World.
(d) English history.

Short Answer Questions

1. How does Boorstin characterize Of Education?

2. To what does Melville say the sea and land are analogous in the epigraph to Part 12?

3. What does Boorstin say Eliot tried to express in "The Waste Land"?

4. What is the relationship between teacher and learner according to the Koestler quote in the epigraph to Book 3?

5. What was startling about Leaves of Grass in Boorstin's account?

Short Essay Questions

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

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

3. How does Boorstin characterize Milton's contribution to imaginative culture?

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

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

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

7. How does Boorstin characterize Monet's accomplishment?

8. Why does Boorstin say Goethe's Faust is an important work?

9. How did dance change during the transition into modernity?

10. Where does Boorstin put Kafka in his portrait of imaginative thinkers?

(see the answer keys)

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