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  3. "I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense." Virginia Woolfs provocative statement abou

"I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense." Virginia Woolfs provocative statement abou

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问题     "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 dream 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’ casual dismissal of Woolf s social vision will not withstand thorough examination.
    In her novels, Woolf is deeply engaged by the questions of how individuals are shaped (or deformed) by their social environments, how historical forces impinge on people’s lives, how class, wealth, and gender help to determine people’s fates. Most of her novels are rooted in a realistically represented 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. (Her Writer’s Diary notes: "the only honest people are the artists" whereas "these social reformers and philanthropists" harbor discreditable desires under the disguise of loving their kind...) Woolf had an abhorrence of what she called "preaching" in fiction, too, and criticized novelist D. H. Lawrence (among others) 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 reader’s 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 satirist’s art.
    Woolf s 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 no 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.
Woolf chose Chaucer as a literary model because she believed that______.
选项 A、Chaucer was the first English author to focus on society as a whole
B、Chaucer was an honest and forthright author, whereas novelists like D.H. Lawrence did not
C、Chaucer was more concerned with understanding his society
D、Chaucer’s writing was effective in influencing the moral attitudes of his readers
答案D
解析 细节题。原文第四段指出：正如她在《普通读者》一书中所说的： “可以这样说，并不因为乔叟说了写了什么而制定一条法律或者树起一块纪念碑；但是当读他的书时，我们在字里行间到处汲取着道德的教诲”(We are absorbing morality at every pore)。由此可以推论；伍尔夫选择乔叟作为文学典范(chose Chaucer as a literary model)，因为她认为乔叟的作品对读者道德观的影响是非常有效的，虽然这种影响是潜移默化的(Chaucer’s writing was greatly，if subtly，effective in influencing the moral attitudes of his readers)。这是选择项D的内容，因此D是正确答案。
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