View a FREE sample

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 does the artist's job in photography?
(a) The machine.
(b) The developer.
(c) Light.
(d) The image itself.

2. What happened to Milton before he wrote Paradise Lost?
(a) He nearly died.
(b) He lost his children.
(c) He lost his wife.
(d) He went blind.

3. What did Kafka believe about the inner and outer selves according to Boorstin?
(a) They were bent on destroying each other.
(b) They were capable of mystical harmonies.
(c) They ran in separate ways.
(d) They were mutually exclusive.

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

5. What did Gibbon add to the genre of human comedy according to Boorstin?
(a) The biography of kings.
(b) The historical novel.
(c) The fairy tale of history.
(d) The saga of empire.

Short Answer Questions

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

2. What motif did Bruneleschi and Alberti introduce to Western art?

3. What does Boorstin say Mozart said about dying?

4. What does Boorstin say was combined in the skyscraper?

5. For what is Faust a metaphor according to Boorstin?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. What was Gibbon's innovation?

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

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

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

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

7. How does Boorstin describe the evolution of the orchestra over time?

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

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

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

(see the answer keys)

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