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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. In what period was the symphony created?

2. When did Bruneleschi make the Foundling Hospital in Florence?

3. What does Boorstin say was Milton's contribution to poetry?

4. Where did Dostoevsky gain the experience from which he wrote Crime and Punishment?

5. What history did Prescott and Parkman write?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Boorstin say is Dostoevsky's contribution to imaginative literature?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. What does Boorstin say is Rousseau's contribution to the art of autobiography?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

How do the differences between men and women figure in Boorstin's book? What kind of creativity, and what forms are appropriate to each? What are the essential differences according to Boorstin? What underlying symmetries or similarities are there?

Essay Topic 2

Evaluate the proposition that Boorstin's portrait of culture is outdated. Describe how it is no longer appropriate to our times, and, if possible, what has replaced it.

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 720 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample