2018年解放军文职招聘考试——英语58

 The author of some forty novels, a number of plays, volumes of verse, historical, critical and autobiographical works, an editor and translator, Jack Lindsay is clearly an extraordinarily prolific writer—a fact which can easily obscure his very real distinction in some of the areas into which he has ventured. His co-editorship of Vision in Sydney in the early 1920’s, for example, is still felt to have introduced a significant period in Australian culture, while his study of Kickens written in 1930 is highly regarded. But of all his work it is probably the novel to which he has made his most significant contribution.

Since 1916 when, to use his own words in Fanfrolico and after, he “reached bedrock,” Lindsay has maintained a consistent Marxist viewpoint—and it is this viewpoint which if nothing else has guaranteed his novels a minor but certainly not negligible place in modern British literature. Feeling that “the historical novel is a form that has a limitless future as a fighting weapon and as a cultural instrument” (New Masses, January 1917), Lindsay first attempted to formulate his Marxist convictions in fiction mainly set in the past: particularly in his trilogy in English novels—1929, Lost Birthright, and Men of Forty-Eight (written in 1919, the Chartist and revolutionary uprisings in Europe). Basically these works set out, with most success in the first volume, to vivify the historical traditions behind English Socialism and attempted to demonstrate that it stood, in Lindsay’s words, for the “true completion of the national destiny.”

Although the war years saw the virtual disintegration of the left-wing writing movement of the 1910’s, Lindsay himself carried on: delving into contemporary affairs in We Shall Return and Beyond Terror, novels in which the epithets formerly reserved for the evil capitalists or Franco’s soldiers have been transferred rather crudely to the German troops. After the war Lindsay continued to write mainly about the present—trying with varying degrees of success to come to terms with the unradical political realities of post-war England. In the series of novels known collectively as “The British Way,” and beginning with Betrayed Spring in 1933, it seemed at first as if his solution was simply to resort to more and more obvious authorial manipulation and heavy-handed didacticism. Fortunately, however, from Revolt of the Sons, this process was reversed, as Lindsay began to show an increasing tendency to ignore party solutions, to fail indeed to give anything but the most elementary political consciousness to his characters, so that in his latest (and what appears to be his last) contemporary novel, Choice of Times, his hero, Colin, ends on a note of desperation: “Everything must be different, I can’t live this way any longer. But how can I change it, how?” To his credit as an artist, Lindsay doesn’t give him any explicit answer.

1. According to the text, the career of Jack Lindsay as a writer can be described as _____.

［A］inventive ［B］productive ［C］reflective ［D］inductive

2. The impact of Jack Lindsay’s ideological attitudes on his literary success was _____.

［A］utterly negative

［B］limited but indivisible

［C］obviously positive

［D］obscure in net effect

3. According to the second paragraph, Jack Lindsay firmly believes in______.

［A］the gloomy destiny of his own country

［B］the function of literature as a weapon

［C］his responsibility as an English man

［D］his extraordinary position in literature

4. It can be inferred from the last paragraph that__________.

［A］the war led to the ultimate union of all English authors

［B］Jack Lindsay was less and less popular in England

［C］Jack Lindsay focused exclusively on domestic affairs

［D］the radical writers were greatly influenced by the war

5. According to the text, the speech at the end of the tex__________t.

［A］demonstrates the author’s own view of life

［B］shows the popular view of Jack Lindsay

［C］offers the author’s opinion of Jack Lindsay

［D］indicates Jack Lindsay’s change of attitude