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. For what is Faust a metaphor according to Boorstin?

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

3. How does Boorstin say Proust created life?

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

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

Short Essay Questions

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

2. What was Gibbon's innovation?

3. How does Boorstin characterize Monet's accomplishment?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Where is the climax of this book? Are there different climaxes? What questions does each climax resolve? What questions does each climax leave unanswered?

Essay Topic 2

Modern times are often described as either the summit of individual expression or the fragmentation of culture--but these are opposing concepts, and the opposition is always a tricky territory to navigate. How does Boorstin render these two trends, how does he reconcile them, and how does he account for the sense some people have that modern culture is a catastrophe from the perspective of the family or community?

Essay Topic 3

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?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 715 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample