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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 does Boorstin say was the second step in the use of skyscrapers?

2. What did Bondone create according to Boorstin?

3. In what way does Boorstin say Milton was a strong individual?

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

5. What does Boorstin say Bruneleschi and Alberti rediscovered?

Short Essay Questions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 3

Which of the many epigraphs Boorstin uses in the headings for each Part is most applicable to the book as a whole? Using your analysis of the text, make a case for one epigraph in particular as an emblem of the whole project.

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