Chapter 14 Practice Test 4 With Answers - Mcgraw-Hill'S Psat/nmsqt Page 7
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45CHAPTER 14 / PRACTICE PSAT 4
479
he sees in the unique experience of his own life
The passage below is followed by questions
and that of others characteristics of general
based on its content. Answer the questions
significance. The artist in man explores the
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on the basis of what is stated or implied in
motivations in man and the artist gives to his
the passage or the introductory material pre-
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discoveries shape
and meaning. Eliseo Vivas
ceding it.
has stated the dual nature of the man-artist’s
relationship to experience and literature:
“To discover in its specificity the nature and
structure of experience as lived, and to present
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it in terms that
man can grasp, is the creative
task of the artist. And it is an essential task. He
Questions 10– 15 are based on the
is engaged in giving us a refurbished picture of
following passage.
our world in concrete terms. He teaches us to
discern what we in our purblindness cannot see
The following passage discusses the experience of
literature in different forms.
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for ourselves; he
tells us what is the dramatic
pattern of human life and thus defines for us its
sense . . . without his aid our comprehension
Line
The common reader
is “safe” with a story in a
book, or with a poem, because when the story
and our culture coarsens, we get confused, our
sensibilities harden; and because, as a result,
or the poem threatens to become too vivid, it
can be regarded as “cold print,” and kept
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our imaginative grasp
falters, our daily living
insensibly relapses to the level of instinct,
5
comfortably
suppressed and remote. Such
automatism and animal brutality.”
a reader is proof against the full effect of
It is true that the living world of reality is full
literature because something is always
of things that have weight, shape, texture, color
reassuring him that after all it is only a story.
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But when literature is presented to this same
to which literature
can only point with words.
But this is no weak or second-best thing, for
10
reader, not on
the page between the covers of a
book, but on the stage before his very ears and
words have the shape and force of our attitudes
and actions. Sticks and stones may break our
eyes in the form of a play, he falls easy victim to
the illusion of reality. The characters are living
bones, but words have equal power to wound;
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the imagined
slight will destroy the lover’s
and breathing; the settings are real. A moment’s
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reflection will
dispel the illusion as effectively as
appetite as effectively as the odor of strong
the reflection that the novel is only a story or
meat. It is not so much the objects of the real
world that have meaning for us; it is our
that the poem is just something made up by the
poet; nevertheless, literature and life seem not
attitudes toward them that make them
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significant. It is the special
talent of a writer
so widely separated when the form of literature
20
is
dramatic.
that he sees in himself and in others the
psychological shape of experience; it is the
But even nondramatic literature implies
someone speaking and something spoken. In
function of literature through his genius to
clarify, intensify, and extend the primary data
this sense, all literature is dramatic: there is
always a conflict expressed or implied, and
of human experience so that our duller
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a prevailing emotional
state. Such are the
perceptions may be sharpened and our self-
knowledge extended.
conditions of drama, and such are the
conditions which give all literature the
semblance of life.
B
It is possible, of course, to press the
As it is used in line 5, “remote” most nearly
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means
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similarities
between life and literature too far.
The experience of one will not always serve
(A) hard to interpret
satisfactorily as a substitute for the experience
(B) emotionally distant
of the other! However, it is more often the case
(C) unintelligent
that the separation of literature and life is
(D) exotic
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insisted
upon until each is regarded as
(E) threatening
autonomous.
Consider the writer. He is man and artist. As
a man his experience is both general and
specific. The general and the specific may be
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related only
accidentally. As an artist, however,
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