24秋季-大学英语3-美国社会与文化
学校: 无
问题 1: 1. Read the passage and choose the best answer to the questions.
War of words
Looking through a newspaper's list of top-selling fiction is an interesting experience. Almost always, the books with the most sales are examples of genre fiction (often known as popular fiction), novels that can be neatly classified as romance, crime, mystery, fantasy, etc. From time to time, but only from time to time, literary fiction, in other words, novels in which the emphasis is on good style and psychological depth, appears on the lists, mostly when a writer has won a major literary award such as the UK Man Booker Prize.
For those who value good writing, it's a depressing state of affairs. Genre fiction is aimed at pulling in readers with a plot that gallops along with lots of exciting twists, and characters, who, though made of cardboard, the reader can nonetheless identify with. The writer's style is unimportant, the main criteria being that the sentences are readable and perform their function of moving you on to the next exciting development. In a word, plot is all.
This is in great contrast to literary fiction, where plot can be a dirty word and language is sacred. Readers? Who cares about readers? The literary novelist would write their novel even if they were marooned on a desert island. For them, it's the construction of sentences and the originality of their thought that matter, together with the exploration of characters. Sentences are there to be savoured, like a fine meal.
Friction inevitably arises between these two opposing camps. The literary army, attempting to conceal their envy of genre writers' sales, fire their big, literary guns, writing scathing reviews in the quality newspapers. One Booker Prize-winning writer memorably described the best-selling Harry Potter books as written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons. Literary writers see genre writers as having sold their soul for sales. But how they would love that money!
Genre writers, on the other hand, while enjoying financial security, long for the esteem that literary writers receive. That's the middle-ranking ones, of course. World best-selling authors J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter) and Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code) simply laugh all the way to the bank.
However, one cannot end without pointing out that the very best novels defy such easy categorization, a good example being the epic romance and war novel Gone with the Wind (1936) by the American novelist Margaret Mitchell. Among the world's best-selling novels, its style is nothing special, but the main characters are so complex and memorable, and the historical reconstruction so vivid and detailed that in 2005, the influential American Time magazine deservedly included it in its list of the all-time 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.
1. What is the main difference between genre fiction and literary fiction?
A. Genre fiction's characters don't interest the reader at all.
B. Literary fiction never sells well.
C. Genre fiction is never well written.
D. Genre fiction is much more concerned with the story than style, unlike literary fiction.
2. What does the writer say is depressing?
A. The fact that literary novels are not very popular.
B. The fact that newspapers don't do enough to sell literary novels.
C. The fact that genre novels are not well written.
D. The fact that not enough good writers win literary awards.
3. What is the attitude of literary writers to genre fiction and genre writers?
A. They think that no one who reads genre fiction has any imagination.
B. Some literary writers are interested in genre fiction.
C. They try to hide the fact that they would like to make as much money as genre writers.
D. Many of them write critical articles about those who read genre fiction.
4. How do genre writers feel about their work?
A. They would prefer to write literary fiction.
B. They dislike literary fiction.
C. They would like it to be recognized that their work has literary quality.
D. They are all delighted that they make money and don't care about the quality of their work at all.
5. Why is Gone with the Wind special according to the writer?
A. It's a best-selling novel.
B. It's about both romance and war.
C. It's very long.
D. It's a genre fiction novel considered to have great literary merit.
选项:
答案: D |
发表于 2025-3-22 10:28:45
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