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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 is the first stage of life that Marx describes through Shakespeare's 'The Tempest'?

2. What would people live on, in Gonzalo's ideal world?

3. What kind of lifestyle does Marx say Americans want?

4. When did Thomas Jefferson publish his Notes on Virginia?

5. What does Marx say is the 'sentimental' pastoral ideal?

Short Essay Questions

1. In what way does the railroad symbolize the industrial intrusion into a pastoral idyll?

2. Where has the pastoral ideal been apparent in American culture?

3. How had Shakespeare learned about conditions in America?

4. What view did the colonists take of the New World in the early years of colonization?

5. How does Shakespeare demonstrate the impossibility of the pastoral ideal?

6. What are the three spatial stages a person goes through in pastoral ideal?

7. How long does Marx say the pastoral ideal has endured?

8. What ideal does the conclusion to Shakespeare's 'The Tempest' suggest, in Marx's interpretation?

9. What feature of American culture allowed Jefferson's ideal to survive for 100 years?

10. How does Marx describe the ambiguity of existence Beverly hit on?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What is the value of farming today? What ideological value does the small farm have? What is the reality of farming--is it agribusiness, or are small farms making a comeback? What forces are affecting the shape of farms in America? Is this a result of shifts in American pastoral ideology, or is it driving a new kind of pastoral ideology?

Essay Topic 2

Some writers describe pastoralism as a contradiction or paradox, between the good life and civilization on one hand and savagery on the other. How do authors strike this paradox, without falling off into a fixed idea, or stable definition, on one hand, or all-encompassing overreach on the other? How do authors keep the paradox alive?

Essay Topic 3

Is the purpose of pastoral ideology really to return to society with the knowledge that living in civilization requires killing off and destroying nature? Is the time in nature and return to society really designed to initiate people into the knowledge that civilization is destructive? Or is pastoralism the conscience's revenge against industrialism, a nostalgia that makes it impossible to accept everything industrialism provides?

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