I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense. Virginia Woolfs provocative statement about her intentions in writing Mrs. Dalloway has regularly been ignored by the critics, since it highlights an aspect of her literary interests very different from the traditional picture of the poetic novelist concerned with examining states of reverie and vision and with following the intricate pathways of individual consciousness. But Virginia Woolf was a realistic as well as a poetic novelist, a satirist and social critic as well as a visionary: literary critics cavalier dismissal of Woolfs social vision will not withstand scrutiny.
In her novels, Woolf is deeply engaged by the questions of how individuals are shaped by their social environments, how historical forces impinge on peoples lives, how class, wealth, and gender help to determine peoples fates. Most of her novels are rooted in a realistically rendered social setting and in a precise historical time.
Woolfs focus on society has not been generally recognized because of her intense antipathy to propaganda in art. The pictures of reformers in her novels are usually satiric or sharply critical. Even when Woolf is fundamentally sympathetic to their causes, she portrays people anxious to reform their society and possessed of a message or program as arrogant or dishonest, unaware of how their political ideas serve their own psychological needs. Woolf detested what she called preaching in fiction, too, and criticized novelist D. H. Lawrence for working by this method.
Woolfs own social criticism is expressed in the language of observation rather than in direct commentary, since for her, fiction is a contemplative, not an active art. She describes phenomena and provides materials for a judgment about society and social issues; it is the readers work to put the observations together and understand the coherent point of view behind them. As a moralist, Woolf works by indirection, subtly undermining officially accepted mores, mocking, suggesting, calling into question, rather than asserting, advocating, bearing witness: hers is the satirists art.
Woolfs literary models were acute social observers like Chekhov and Chaucer. As she put it in The Common Reader, It is safe to say that not a single law has been framed or one stone set upon another because of anything Chaucer said or wrote; and yet, as we read him, we are absorbing morality at every pore. Like Chaucer, Woolf chose to understand as well as to judge, to know her society root and branch ― a decision crucial in order to produce art rather than polemic.
1.Which of the following would be the most appropriate title for the text?
[A] Poetry and Satire as Influences on the Novels of Virginia Woolf.
[B] Virginia Woolf: Critic and Commentator on the Twentieth-Century Novel.
[C] Trends in Contemporary Reform Movements as a Key to Understanding Virginia Woolfs Novels.
[D] Virginia Woolfs Novels: Critical Reflections on the Individual and on Society.
2.In the first paragraph of the text, the authors attitude toward the literary critics mentioned can best be described as
[A] disparaging.
[B] ironic.
[C] facetious.
[D] skeptical but resigned.
3.It can be inferred from the text that Woolf chose Chaucer as a literary example because she believed that
[A] Chaucer was the first English author to focus on society as a whole as well as on individual characters.
[B] Chaucer was an honest and forthright author, whereas novelists like D. H. Lawrence did not sincerely wish to change society.
[C] Chaucer was more concerned with understanding his society than with calling its accepted mores into question.
[D] Chaucers writing was greatly, if subtly, effective in influencing the moral attitudes of his readers.
4.It can be inferred from the text that the most probable reason Woolf realistically described the social setting in the majority of her novels was that she
[A] was aware that contemporary literary critics considered the novel to be the most realistic of literary genres.
[B] was interested in the effect of a persons social milieu on his or her character and actions.
[C] needed to be as attentive to detail as possible in her novels in order to support the arguments she advanced in them.
[D] wanted to show that a painstaking fidelity in the representation of reality did not in any way hamper the artist.
5.Which of the following phrases best expresses the sense of the word contemplative as it is used in line 2, paragraph 4 of the text?
[A] Gradually elucidating the rational structures underlying accepted mores.
[B] Reflecting on issues in society without prejudice or emotional commitment.
[C] Avoiding the aggressive assertion of the authors perspective to the exclusion of the readers judgment.
[D] Conveying a broad view of society as a whole rather than focusing on an isolated individual consciousness.
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