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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. Whom does Boorstin say was the first biographer?
(a) Shakespeare.
(b) Benjamin Franklin.
(c) Dr. Samuel Johnson.
(d) James Boswell.

2. How does Boorstin say Proust created life?
(a) In ritual.
(b) In space.
(c) In time.
(d) In action.

3. 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.

4. What does Boorstin say Eliot tried to express in "The Waste Land"?
(a) Redemption.
(b) Compensation.
(c) Incoherence.
(d) Sadness.

5. How did Dostoevsky view Western science according to Boorstin?
(a) As a denial of freedom.
(b) As materialistic determinism.
(c) As social Darwinism.
(d) As primitive superstition.

Short Answer Questions

1. In what way is Moby Dick NOT a novel according to Boorstin?

2. In what does Zola say man DID NOT stop believing in the epigraph to Book 3?

3. What does Boorstin say artists began to see in modern art?

4. Mozart composed eight symphonies, four divertimentos and some sacred works in a few months at what age?

5. What happened to Milton before he wrote Paradise Lost?

Short Essay Questions

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

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

3. What does Boorstin say is William Wordsworth's contribution to imaginative culture?

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

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

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

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

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

9. How does Boorstin characterize Dickens' contribution to imaginative culture?

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

(see the answer keys)

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