2. 考研
  3. [A] From the beginning of the 20th century, people abroad have been uncomfortable with the global impact of American culture. M

[A] From the beginning of the 20th century, people abroad have been uncomfortable with the global impact of American culture. M

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问题 [A] From the beginning of the 20th century, people abroad have been uncomfortable with the global impact of American culture.  More recently, globalization has been the main enemy for academics, journalists, and political activists who loathe what they see as the trend toward cultural uniformity. Still, they usually regard global culture and American culture as synonymous. And they continue to insist that Hollywood, McDonald’s and Disneyland are eradicating regional and local eccentricities.
[B] Despite those allegations, the cultural relationship between the United States, and the rest of the world over the past 100 years has never been one-sided. On the contrary, the United States was, and continues to be, as much a consumer of foreign intellectual and artistic influences as it has been a shaper of the world’s entertainment and tastes.
Section A
[C]In fact, as a nation of immigrants from the 19th to 21st century, the United States has been a recipient as much as an exporter of global culture. Indeed, the influence of immigrants on the United States explains why its culture has been so popular for so long in so many places. American culture has spread throughout the world because it has incorporated foreign styles and ideas. What Americans have done more brilliantly than their competitors overseas is repackage the cultural products we receive from abroad and then retransmit them to the rest of the planet. That is why a global mass culture has come to be identified, however simplistically, with the United States.
[D] Americans, after all, did not invent fast food, amusement parks, or the movies. Before the Big Mac, there were fish and chips. Before Disneyland, there was Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens (which Walt Disney used as a prototype for his first theme park in Anaheim, California a model later re-exported to Tokyo and Paris). And in the first two decades of the 20th century the two largest exporters of movies around the world were France and Italy.
Section B
[E]So, the origins of today’s international entertainment cannot be traced only to P. T. Barnum’s circuses or Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. The roots of the new global culture lie as well in the European modernist assault, in the early 20th century, on 19th-century literature, music, painting, and architecture—particularly in the modernist refusal to honor the traditional boundaries between high and low culture. Modernism in the arts was improvisational, eclectic, and irreverent. Those traits have also been characteristic of American popular culture.
[F]The artists of the early 20th century also challenged the notion that culture was a means of intellectual or moral improvement. They did so by emphasizing style and craftsmanship at the expense of philosophy, religion, or ideology. They deliberately called attention to language in their novels, to optics in their paintings, to the materials in and function of their architecture, to the structure of music instead of its melodies.
[G] Although modernism was mainly a European affair, it inadvertently accelerated the growth of mass culture in the U. S. Surrealism, with its dreamlike associations, easily lent itself to the wordplay and psychological symbolism of advertising, cartoons, and theme parks.  Dadaism ridiculed the snobbery of elite cultural institutions and reinforced an already-existing appetite (especially among the immigrant audiences in the United States) for " low-class," disreputable nickelodeons and vaudeville shows. Stravinsky’s experiments with unorthodox, atonal music validated the rhythmic innovations of American jazz. Modernism provided the foundations for a genuinely new culture. But the new culture turned out to be neither modernist nor European. Instead, American artists transformed an avant-garde Project into a global phenomenon.
Section C
[H] It is in popular culture that the reciprocal relationship between America and the rest of the world can best be seen. There are many reasons for the ascendancy of American mass culture. Certainly , the ability of American-based media conglomerates to control the production and distribution of their products has been a major stimulus for the worldwide spread of American entertainment. But the power of American capitalism is not the only, or even the most important, explanation for the global popularity of America’s movies and television shows.
[I] The effectiveness of English as a language of mass communications has been essential to the acceptance of American culture: Unlike German, Russian, or Chinese, the simpler structure and grammar of English, along with its tendency to use shorter, less abstract words and more concise sentences, are all advantageous for the composers of song lyrics, ad slogans, cartoon captions, newspaper headlines, and movie and TV dialogue. English is thus a language exceptionally well suited to the demands and spreed of American mass culture.
[J]Another factor is the international complexion of the American audience. The heterogeneity of America’s population—its regional, ethnic, religious, and racial diversity—forced the media, from the early years of the 20th century, to experiment with messages, images, and story lines that had a broad multicultural appeal. The Hollywood studios, mass-circulation magazines, and the television networks have had to learn how to speak to a variety of groups and classes at home. This has given them the techniques to appeal to an equally diverse audience abroad.
[K] One important way that the American media have succeeded in transcending internal social divisions, national borders, and language barriers is by mixing up cultural styles. American musicians and composers have followed the example of modernist artists like Picasso and Braque in drawing on elements from high and low culture. Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, and Leonard Bernstein incorporated folk melodies, religious hymns, blues and gospel songs, and jazz into their symphonies, concertos, operas, and ballets. Indeed, an art form as quintessentially American as jazz evolved during the 20th century into an amalgam of African, Caribbean, Latin American, and modernist European music. This blending of forms in America’s mass culture has enhanced its appeal to multiethnic domestic and international audiences by capturing their different experiences and tastes.
Section D
[L] Finally, American culture has imitated not only the modernists’ visual flamboyance, but also their tendency to be apolitical and anti-ideological. The refusal to browbeat an audience with a social message has accounted, more than any other factor, for the worldwide popularity of American entertainment. American movies,  in particular,  have customarily focused on human relationships and Private feelings, not on the problems of a particular time and place. They tell tales about romance , intrigue, success, failure, moral conflicts, and survival.  The most memorable movies of the 1930s ( with the exception of The Grapes of Wrath) were comedies and musicals about mismatched people falling in love, not socially conscious films dealing with issues of poverty and unemployment. Similarly, the finest movies about World War II (like Casablanca) or the Vietnam War (like The Deer Hunter) linger in the mind long after those conflicts have ended because they explore their character’s most intimate emotions rather than dwelling on headline events.
[M]Such intensely personal dilemmas are what people everywhere wrestle with. So Europeans, Asians, and Latin Americans flocked to Titanic, as they once did to Gone With the Wind, not because those films celebrated American values, but because people all over the world could see some part of their own lives reflected in the stories of love and loss.
[N] America’s mass culture has often been crude and intrusive, as its critics have always complained. But, American culture has never felt all that foreign to foreigners. And, at its best, it has transformed what it received from others into a culture everyone, everywhere, could embrace a culture that is both emotionally and , on occasion, artistically compelling for millions of people throughout the world.
[O] So, despite the current resurgence of anti-Americanism—not only in the Middle East but in Europe and Latin America—it is important to recognize that America’s movie television shows, and theme parks have been less "imperialistic" than cosmopolitan. In the end, American mass culture has not transformed the world into a replica of the United States. Instead, America’s dependence on foreign cultures has made the United States a replica of the world.
Choose the correct headings for the four sections A - D from the list of headings below.
Write the correct number, i - xi, in the parentheses on your Answer
Sheet.
[ i ] Major Stimuli for the Growth of American Culture
[ ii ] American Entertainment Industry
[ iii ] Globalization of American Culture
[ iv ] Pop Culture Potpourri in the United States
[ v ] Global Impact of American Culture
[ vi ] The Influence of Modernism on American Culture
[ vii ] America’s Dependence on Foreign Cultures
[ viii ] Human Relationships in American Mass Culture
[ ix ] The Main Features of American Culture
[ x ] American Culture and Global Culture: A Reciprocal Relationship
[ xi ] The History of American Mass Culture
Section D(          )
选项
答案viii
解析 Section D主要介绍了人际关系在美国大众文化的体现。从第F段第一句话可知美国文化是不关心政治的，与意识形态无关的。美国的电影特别注重人际关系和个人的感受，而不是特殊时期的问题。
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