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  3. "I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense." Virginia Woolf’s provocative statement abo

"I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense." Virginia Woolf’s provocative statement abo

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问题     "I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense." Virginia Woolf’s 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 Woolf’s social vision will not withstand scrutiny.
    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 rendered social setting and in a precise historical time.
    Woolf’s 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 detested what she called" preaching" in fiction, too, and criticized novelist D. H. Lawrence(among others)for working by this method.
    Woolf’s 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 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.
Which of the following would be the most appropriate title for the passage?
选项 A、Poetry and Satire as Influence on the Novels of Virginia Woolf
B、Virginia Woolf: Critic and Commentator on the Twentieth-century Novel
C、Society as Allegory for Individuals in the Novels of Virginia Woolf
D、Virginia Woolf’s Novels: Critical Reflections on Individuals and on Society
答案D
解析 主旨题。首段首句指出，“我想批判当前的社会制度，并且表明它是怎样以其最强烈的方式运转的。”这是弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫在谈到她写作《黛洛维夫人》的创作意图时发表的挑战性声明。第二段指出，伍尔夫在小说中深入考虑的问题是：个人是怎样被社会环境塑造或扭曲的；历史的力量是怎样冲击人们的生活的；阶级、财富、性别是怎样决定人们的命运的。她的小说多数扎根于从现实迁移来的社会背景以及特定的历史时代中。由此可知，本文探讨伍尔夫的小说的重点在于她对个人和社会所做的批判性的思考，故[D]为答案。文中没有提及[A]、[B]两项内容，故排除；作者从伍尔夫小说的个人和社会两个方面进行论述，并没有通过社会反映个人问题，故排除[C]。
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