2014年考研英语阅读的经典试题及答案(7)_大学英语阅读

2014年考研英语阅读的经典试题及答案(7)

　　Woolfs focus on society has not been generally recognized because of herintense antipathy to propaganda in art. The pictures of reformers in her novelsare usually satiric or sharply critical. Even when Woolf is fundamentallysympathetic to their causes, she portrays people anxious to reform theirsociety and possessed of a message or program as arrogant or dishonest, unawareof how their political ideas serve their own psychological needs. Woolfdetested what she called preaching in fiction, too, and criticized novelist D. H. Lawrence for working by this method.

　　Woolfs own social criticism is expressed in the language of observationrather than in direct commentary, since for her, fiction is a contemplative,not an active art. She describes phenomena and provides materials for ajudgment about society and social issues; it is the readers work toput the observations together and understand the coherent point of view behindthem. As a moralist, Woolf works by indirection, subtly undermining officiallyaccepted mores, mocking, suggesting, calling into question, rather thanasserting, advocating, bearing witness: hers is the satirists art.

　　Woolfs literary models were acute social observers like Chekhov andChaucer. As she put it in The Common Reader, It is safe to saythat not a single law has been framed or one stone set upon another because ofanything Chaucer said or wrote; and yet, as we read him, we are absorbingmorality at every pore. Like Chaucer, Woolf chose to understand as well as to judge, toknow her society root and branch a decision crucial in order to produce art rather thanpolemic.