Mid-term test on the subject “TO’MA” Faculty of Philology and Language Teaching (English), 2022

Mid-term test on the subject “TO’MA” Faculty of Philology and Language Teaching (English), 2022
Date	23.12.2022
Group	1929
Name	Soxibnazarova Kumush
The result

Instructions:
Write your name and group number above.

Please, do not compare your answers with your classmates. Work individually and do not share your answers. You have two hours to submit your paper.

Late submissions will decrease your score!

There are 3 questions in this Midterm test. Read each question carefully and answer all questions. Answers should be accurate, precise with the sufficient amount of explanation, examples are welcomed. Answers should be written in your own words; plagiarism instances will nullify your results.

Begin the test now. Be sure to answer all 3 questions. Good luck!
Variant 2

1. 
   What are the main features of Harlem Renaissance? (150-200 words)
   
2. 
   Kurt Vonnegut and his main works. (150-200 words)
   
3. 
   What does Sinclair Lewis criticize in Main Street? (150-200 words)
   

Answers.
1*
The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literure, theater, politics and scholarship centerd in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the “ New Nergo Movement”, named after The New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke. The movement also included the new African American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeasst and Midwest united States affected by a renewed militancy in the general struggle for caviling rights, combined with the Great Migration of African American workers fleeing the racist conditions of the Jim Crow Deep South, as Harlem was the final destination of the largest number of those who migrated north. Thought it was centered in the Harlem neighborhood, many francophone black writers froms African and Caribbean colonies who lived in Paris were also influenced by the movement, which spanned from about 1918 until the mid-1930s. Many of its ideas lived on much longer. The zenith of this “flowering of Negro literature”, as James Weldon Johnsonpreferrod to call the Harlem Renaissance, took place between 1924- when A Journal of negro Life hosted a party for black writers where many white publishers were in attendance- and 1929, the years of the stock- market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression. The Harlem Renaissance is considered th have been a rebirth of the African-American arts.

2*
Kurt Vonnegut, in full Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,was born November 11,1922, Indiapolis, Indiana. American writer noted for his wryly satirical novels who frequently used postmodern techniques as well as elements of fantasy and science fiction to highlight the horrors and ironies of 20^th- century civilization. Much of Vonnegut’s work is maeked by an essentially fatalistic worldview that nonetheless embraces modern humanist beliefs. Vonnegut grew up in Indianapolis in a well-to-do family, although his father, an architect, was unemployed during much of the Great Depression. As a teenager, Vonnegut wrote for his high-school newspaper, and he continued the activity at Cornell University in New York, where he majored in beochemistry before leaving in 1943 to enlist in the U.S Army. Captured by the Germans during World WarII, he was one of the survivors of the firebombing of Dresden, Germany in February 1945. In the early 1950s Vonnegut began publishing short stories. Many of them were concerned with technology and the future, which led some critics to classify Vonnegut as a science fiction writer, though he resisted the label. His firs novel, p Player Piano (1952) elaborates on those themes, visualizing a complety mechanized and automated society whose dehumanizing effects are unsuccessfully resisted by the scients and workers in a New York factory town. For his second novel, The Sirens of Titan (1959), Vonnegut imagined a scenario in which the entire history of the human race is considered an accient attendant on an aline planet’s search for a spare part for a spaceship.

3*
Harry Sinclair Lewis became a reporter and freelance writer and married his wife, Grece. His first novel, our MR. Wren was published in 1914 . Five more novels followed in the next five years, but each field to attract critical or public attention. The publication of Main Street in 1920, however, secured Lewis,s literary reputation. The book was a runway bestseller, with millions of copies flying off the shelves in one of the biggest publishing events in American history up to that point. Virtually overnight, Lewis became a wealthy, internationally recognized celebrity. While many of Lewis’s other novels are written in an optimistics tone, main Street I a bit darker, satirizing small-town life of early 20^th centry America , Lewis criticized the complacency, restrictive conformity, and narrow- mindedness of small- town life. While such accusations about small towns limiting individually may seem natural to us today, criticsm of small- town America was not common before Lewi,s nowel appeared. Rather, the Americn reading public frequentyly mythologized and felt nastolgia for the goodness small town life- romantic myths and traditional values that Lewis sough to mock. Main Street is written in the same vein as Shewood Andersons novel Winesburg.