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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What artistic movement does Boorstin say Monet initiated?

2. How many paintings does Boorstin say da Vinci left?

3. In Boorstin's account, Michelangelo changed man from an imitation of nature to what?

4. Of what is the Florence Foundling Hospital the first according to Boorstin?

5. What did Gibbon say was the essence of history?

Short Essay Questions

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

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

3. Where does Melville's Moby Dick fit in Boorstin's narrative?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Why do women play so small a part in The Creators? Analyze the text to describe Boorstin's ideas about women and women's contribution to Western culture and the development of the imagination. Are they principally muses instead of creators? Are they principally biological creators instead of artistic creators? How does Boorstin describe women's roles in culture?

Essay Topic 2

Other critics have told this story--of the progress of art and literature--as an evolution of a state of crisis, as individuals reacted to changes in culture with innovations in art, which changed the nature of the question. To what extent does Boorstin account for the cultural causes of the evolution of art, and to what extent does he account for the sense of ongoing crisis many artists have described?

Essay Topic 3

Make an annotated timeline and map to show Boorstin's progress through the history of imagination in World culture. Describe how you arrived at the graphic representation at which you arrived. Account, too, for Boorstin's departures from straight chronology.

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