Deck 22: The Age of Anxiety and Late Modernism

Question 1

The hero in Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

A) is killed during a rebellion against the prison system.
B) endures the hardships of the labor camp.
C) decides that life is not worth living and commits suicide.
D) renounces Marxism and is executed for his thought crime.

Answer 1

B

Question 2

The capital of the postwar art world shifted after 1945 from Paris to

A) Tokyo.
B) London.
C) New York.
D) Rome.

Answer 2

C

Question 3

The most significant poet produced by the beat generation of the 1950s was

A) Allen Ginsberg.
B) Richard Wright.
C) James Baldwin.
D) Robert Frost.

Answer 3

A

Question 4

Abstract expressionism can be described as a style of painting that

A) liberates the human spirit.
B) borrows themes from popular culture.
C) is based on classical values.
D) is based on a photographic clarity of detail.

Question 5

The greatest threat to the West in the immediate postwar years was the possibility of

A) the Germans and the Japanese rearming.
B) nuclear war.
C) uprisings in the third world.
D) an international economic depression.

Question 6

Which of the following was/were among the chief influences on Jean-Paul Sartre's literary works?

A) his Roman Catholic heritage
B) existentialism and Marxism
C) structuralism and logical positivism
D) realism and naturalism

Question 7

Which of the following countries was NOT part of the American bloc during the cold war?

A) Japan
B) West Germany
C) Italy
D) China

Question 8

Martin Luther King Jr. was influenced by all of the following EXCEPT

A) the New Testament and the teachings of Jesus.
B) the philosophy of Nietzsche.
C) the writings of Thoreau.
D) the example of Gandhi.

Question 9

What early theorist of black identity had by the 1950s begun to justify black revolution against white society on the basis of existential choice and Marxism?

A) Martin Luther King Jr.
B) Frantz Fanon
C) Malcolm X
D) Whitney Young

Question 10

The revival of the feminist movement after 1945 was first sparked by

A) Simone de Beauvoir.
B) Betty Friedan.
C) Alice Walker.
D) Germaine Greer.

Question 11

Structuralists maintain that

A) human freedom is unlimited.
B) humans act and operate in random ways, absent of patterns.
C) civilizations arise from deep-seated modes of thought.
D) the basic nature of the human mind is unfathomable.

Question 12

In his novel, The Fall, Camus dealt with the

A) problem of the tragedy of death at an early age.
B) sense of guilt brought on by moral fraud.
C) consequences of sin to a devout believer.
D) never-ending quest for happiness.

Question 13

Which New York museum was a major force in elevating the artists of the Western avant-garde to dominance in postwar Western art?

A) Metropolitan Museum of Art
B) Whitney Museum
C) Museum of Modern Art
D) Guggenheim Museum

Question 14

How did the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. affect James Baldwin?

A) It revived his faith in the American way of life.
B) It persuaded him that an integrated society was the only solution to America's racism.
C) It convinced him that violence was the only path to changing America's racial attitudes.
D) It led him to dedicate his life to working among the urban poor.

Question 15

The theater of the absurd

A) shared existentialism's bleak vision.
B) obeyed the rules of the classical tradition.
C) concentrated on the psychology of the characters.
D) romanticized the lives of ordinary people.

Question 16

The writer Doris Lessing is noted for

A) the bleak vision of her "absurdist" plays.
B) the obscurity of her enigmatic poetry.
C) showing contradictions between opposing social groups in her realist novels.
D) humour of her romantic short stories.

Question 17

Martin Luther King Jr. was a key leader of

A) the civil rights movement in the U.S.
B) Johnson.
B) decolonization.
C) the Protestant churches in the U.S.
D) the U.S. Senate during the presidency of Lyndon

Question 18

Which of the following was a characteristic of late modernism?

A) an undaunted optimism
B) a commitment to a fixed set of standards in art
C) investing works with spiritual or metaphysical meaning
D) appropriation of images of mass culture

Question 19

Which abstract expressionist is famous for "drip paintings"?

A) Jackson Pollock
B) Robert Rauschenberg
C) Jasper Johns
D) Mark Rothko

Question 20

Which of the following was a consequence of decolonization and the emergence of the third world?

A) the cold war
B) the North-South divide
C) the Vietnam War
D) the rise of American mass culture

Question 21

The most famous pop artist was

A) Picasso.
B) David Smith.
C) Andy Warhol.
D) Jasper Johns.

Question 22

Who of the following was born on a Mississippi plantation and created literary works filled with too much rage at racism to be accepted by white literary critics in the 1940s?

A) Martin Luther King Jr.
B) James Baldwin
C) Richard Wright
D) Doris Lessing

Question 23

Who of the following described a universe that depends on the "I-Thou" relationship?

A) Teilhard de Chardin
B) Paul Tillich
C) Martin Buber
D) Karl Barth

Question 24

Which of the following nations was NOT among the chief Allied forces that planned for the post-World War II era?

A) Great Britain
B) Japan
C) the United States
D) the Soviet Union

Question 25

The sculptor Louise Nevelson worked in a(n)

A) pop art style.
B) abstract expressionist style.
C) neorealist style.
D) style inspired by Rodin.

Question 26

New York-centered pop art focused on

A) commercial images.
B) religious themes.
C) color, texture, and line.
D) third world culture.

Question 27

Which of the following artists was guided by the "truth to materials" argument and enhanced his reputation in the United Kingdom by sketching a series of "shelter" drawings that depicted Londoners huddled in the underground subway stations during the blitz?

A) Joseph Beuys
B) David Smith
C) Henry Moore
D) George Segal

Question 28

An "assemblage" is best described as

A) an eclectic style that joins several styles of art into a single work.
B) a put-together structure that mixes junk, found objects, and some paint.
C) a performance piece that blends art, music, dance, speech, and theater.
D) a collection of artists who work together simultaneously to create a work of art.

Question 29

Who of the following insisted on the existence of the authentic God, known as the "God behind God"?

A) Teilhard de Chardin
B) Paul Tillich
C) Martin Buber
D) Karl Barth

Question 30

Which of the following nations enjoyed an average of 10 percent annual growth in its gross domestic product between 1950 and 1973?

A) Great Britain
B) Japan
C) the United States
D) the Soviet Union

Question 31

In which of the following nations did Mao Zedong play a key role as the nation sought to establish a socialist system?

A) North Korea
B) South Korea
C) China
D) Vietnam

Question 32

Teilhard's 1955 work, The Phenomenon of Man, dealt with

A) Judaism.
B) evolution.
C) the social construction of human societies.
D) human redemption.

Question 33

Which of the following was a military alliance formed by the Eastern bloc in 1955?

A) North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
B) Iron Curtain
C) Warsaw Pact
D) League of Nations

Question 34

The European Economic Community was initiated in 1957 by what two pioneering countries?

A) France and Britain
B) Germany and Britain
C) France and Belgium
D) France and Germany

Question 35

Which two abstract expressionists showed the way to pop art?

A) Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning
B) Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg
C) Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler
D) Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis

Question 36

Which of the following playwrights created a work using the witch trials of Salem, Massachusetts, to symbolize the communist investigation undertaken by the Un-American Activities Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives?

A) Tennessee Williams
B) John Osborne
C) Harold Pinter
D) Arthur Miller

Question 37

Who is considered the founder of neoorthodoxy, which claimed that God was beyond human reason?

A) Teilhard de Chardin
B) Paul Tillich
C) Martin Buber
D) Karl Barth

Question 38

What event in 1948 further intensified the volatile changes occurring in the Middle East?

A) the growth in oil demand by the industrialized states
B) the founding of Israel as a Jewish state in 1948
C) the ouster of British-backed King Farouk in Egypt
D) an explosion of Islamic fundamentalism

Question 39

Who of the following conducted linguistic research that led him to conclude that below the surface form of sentences lays a deeper linguistic structure that is intuitively grasped by the mind and is common to all languages?

A) Claude Levi-Strauss
B) Martin Buber
C) Frantz Fanon
D) Noam Chomsky

Question 40

Which of the following nations was NOT among the original members of the European Economic Community (or the Common Market) when it was established in 1957?

A) Great Britain
B) Belgium
C) Luxembourg
D) Italy

Question 41

How was abstract expressionism manifested in painting? Use examples by two of its most important painters.

Question 42

Identify the major developments of film in the late modernist period. How were these developments similar to and distinct from contemporary trends in other artistic media?

Question 43

Which artist gave birth to a technique called hard-edge?

A) Helen Frankenthaler
B) Frank Stella
C) Robert Rauschenberg
D) Jasper Johns

Question 44

The term auteur was developed to describe

A) the directors of the French New Wave.
B) pop culture artists who injected social commentary into their works.
C) screenwriters who elevated the film to an art form.
D) film directors who "wrote" with their cameras.
Essay Questions

Question 45

Which artistic movement was sometimes scoffed at by critics, who connected it to Dada?

A) minimalism
B) op art
C) pop art
D) happenings

Question 46

What is meant by pop art? Which artists were associated with this movement?

Question 47

What were the reasons for the end of European colonialism after 1945? What international issues and problems emerged in the wake of decolonization?

Question 48

Discuss late modernist innovations in music, considering trends in both avant-garde and popular music. Which of these trends was most representative of its era?

Question 49

Who of the following wrote a play that spawned a movement called the angry young men?

A) Eugene Ionesco
B) Tennessee Williams
C) Arthur Miller
D) John Osborne

Question 50

What role did Simone de Beauvoir play in the feminist movement?

Question 51

What is meant by the term cold war? Which nations were involved in this conflict, and what were the causes of this "war"?

Question 52

How was existentialism expressed in the works of Sartre and Camus?

Question 53

Define the term late modernism. What are its chief characteristics?

Question 54

Discuss black consciousness, its definition, and the reasons for its birth, using the writings and actions of its chief supporters to support your discussion.

Question 55

Which director founded the neorealism movement in film?

A) Federico Fellini
B) Ingmar Bergman
C) Roberto Rossellini
D) Jean-Luc Godard