Modern Cultural Studies
Question Bank
Course Introduction
Modern Cultural Studies explores the complex interactions between culture, society, and identity in contemporary contexts. Through interdisciplinary perspectives, the course examines topics such as global media, consumer culture, social movements, race, gender, and digital technologies. Students will analyze how power relations, historical processes, and everyday practices shape and are shaped by cultural phenomena. The course encourages critical thinking about current issues, representation, and the dynamic nature of culture in a rapidly changing world.
Recommended Textbook
Humanities The Culture Continuity and Change Volume II 1600 to the Present 2nd Edition by Henry
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Page 2
Chapter 20: The Baroque in Italy: The Church and Its Appeal
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Sample Questions
Q1) Why was Artemesia Gentileschi so obsessed with the biblical story of Judith beheading Holofernes that she painted five versions of it?
A)Gentileschi was of Jewish descent
B)Judith was the female equivalent of David
C)Judith was a female artist
D)Gentileschi had been raped
Q2) What is the meaning of the Portuguese term barroco,from which "Baroque" likely derived?
A)Flamboyant
B)Misshapen pearl
C)Ecstasy
D)Sailor
Q3) What is a defining characteristic of Baroque art?
A)Attention to viewers' emotional experience of a work
B)Return to the forms and proportions of classical art
C)Focus on the symbolic meaning of a work
D)Absence of excessive decoration and sensuousness
Q4) Define tenebrism,and explain Caravaggio's use of it to provide drama to two of his works.
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Chapter 21: The Secular Baroque in the North: The Art of Observation
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Q1) In Descent from the Cross,discussed in the chapter's "Continuity and Change" section,why does Rembrandt push his scene deeper into the canvas than does Rubens in his earlier painting of the same title?
A)To make his small painting more intimate
B)To remove the viewers from the action
C)To make the subjects look more helpless
D)To accommodate more subjects around the cross
Q2) Why were the Catholic and the Protestant Churches opposed to Kepler's and Galileo's heliocentric theory?
A)For contradicting certain biblical passages
B)For resembling the pagan myths about Apollo
C)For challenging belief in God as creator
D)For implying the existence of other solar systems
Q3) What requirement did the Dutch state place on people in public service?
A)Be a graduate of a Dutch university
B)Not be involved in tulip investing
C)Not be of Spanish descent
D)Be a member of the Dutch Reformed Church
Q4) Describe the development,beliefs,and appearance of the Dutch Reformed Church.
Q5) List and describe three of the most popular subjects of Dutch artists.
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Chapter 22: The Baroque Court: Absolute Power and Royal Patronage
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Q1) What is meant by a Rubenesque figure?
A)Fleshy and voluptuous
B)Small breasted and wide hipped
C)Slender and modestly posed
D)Enveloped by rich textures and colors
Q2) On whose work did Nicholas Poussin model his classical approach to painting?
A)Michelangelo
B)Leonardo
C)Titian
D)Raphael
Q3) Describe the differences in politics and appearance of the English Cavaliers and Roundheads.
Q4) Why was dance so popular at Louis XIV's court?
A)Its formality matched Louis's rule
B)Louis was a very talented dancer
C)The Church had not spoken against dance
D)Louis enjoyed watching sensuous dances
Q5) Compare Peter Paul Rubens' idea of a beautiful human body,which came to be known as Rubenesque,to today's standards of the body beautiful.
Q6) Identify and describe three of the six dances that can make up a suite. Page 5
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Chapter 23: The Rise of the Enlightenment in England: The
Claims of Reason
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Q1) Why did the Hawaiians kill Captain Cook in 1779?
A)For overreacting to a Hawaiian's theft of a small boat
B)For allowing his men to have sex with Hawaiian prostitutes
C)For firing his ship's cannon at the beach
D)For not paying homage to the Hawaiian gods
Q2) What new literary form did Addison and Steele invent for their newspapers?
A)Journalistic essay
B)Yellow journalism
C)Parody
D)New journalism
Q3) Explain the connection between Captain Cook's explorations in the Pacific and the ideas that were arising in England during the Enlightenment.
Q4) Why did London's East End become home to the very poor in the eighteenth century?
A)The government converted houses into tenements
B)Parliament raised taxes on the East End's residents
C)The rich and middle class moved outside the city
D)The people spent all their money in East End's gin houses
Q5) Explain how Milton's God and Satan reflect the ideas of Locke and Hobbes.
Q6) List and describe two developments of the Industrial Revolution.
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Chapter 24: The Rococo and the Enlightenment on the
Continent: Privilege and Reason
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Q1) What Joseph Haydn development was the first of the new Classical genres?
A)The symphony
B)The German opera
C)The sonata form
D)The string quartet
Q2) In Jean-Antoine Watteau's The Signboard of Gersaint,why is a portrait of Louis XIV being placed in a storage box?
A)Louis was not popular with the common people
B)Louis had criticized Watteau's work
C)Louis did not support the Enlightenment
D)Louis had recently had died
Q3) What work of art does the young man's position in Jean-Honoré Fragonard's The Swing reflect?
A)Polyclitus's Doryphorus
B)Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam
C)Leonardo's The Last Supper
D)Raphael's The School of Athens
Q4) Cite and explain two examples of Europe and China influencing one another.
Page 8
Q5) Describe the features of the English garden,and explain the intended effects on the viewer of its design.
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Chapter 25: The Rights of Man: Revolution and the
Neoclassical Style
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Q1) Identify,describe,and cite specific examples of two ways Jean Louis-David's paintings define French Neoclassicism.
Q2) Why did Houdon position a plowshare beaten by a sword behind George Washington in his 1788 sculpture?
A)To signify his role as a warrior who brought peace to his people
B)To show the two aspects-farming and military-of the United States
C)To show that Washington was a farmer before becoming a general
D)To reference the Roman farmer-poet Virgil and Augustus Caesar
Q3) In France,what triggered the events leading to revolution?
A)Loss of the Seven Years' War
B)Grain and flour shortage
C)Murder of Jean Paul-Marat
D)The national debt
Q4) Why did the French Tribunal order execution of Maximilien Robespierre,one of the leaders of the revolution and new government?
A)For being a member of the nobility
B)For ordering execution of an innocent girl
C)For declaring himself emperor of France
D)For ordering so many executions himself
Page 9
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Chapter 26: The Romantic World View: the Self in Nature
and the Nature of Self
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Q1) Why did Henry David Thoreau begin his experiment of living at Walden Pond?
A)To escape imprisonment
B)To live simply
C)To write a book
D)To preserve nature
Q2) As discussed in the chapter's "Continuity and Change" section,what might Théodore Géricault have aimed to capture in his series of portraits of the insane?
A)The creative spark of madness
B)The downtrodden and forgotten
C)The shape of an insane person's head
D)The Romantic anti-hero
Q3) Compare Goethe's Faust's reasons for forming a pact with the devil to Shelley's Dr.Frankenstein's reasons for creating the creature.Then discuss the two character's outcomes.
Q4) What were the Romantic artists reacting against?
A)Neoclassicism's order,control,and balance
B)Guidance from the educated elite
C)The brutality of revolution
D)The movement away from God
Page 10
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Q1) Construct an argument for or against Paul Delaroche's claim that after the development of photography,"Painting is dead!"
Q2) Why did Dickens write Hard Times?
A)To show the greed of London lawyers
B)To satirize the Utilitarian industrialists
C)To expose the London poorhouse conditions
D)To show the brutality of London's orphanages
Q3) Why did the French public and critics object to Gustave Courbet's paintings?
A)His use of contemporary people in historical scenes
B)His political symbolism in landscape scenes
C)His wild,energetic brushstrokes and blurry details
D)His depiction of commoners in grand size
Q4) What type of government did France have after Napoleon fell in 1815?
A)Republic
B)Monarchy
C)Anarchy
D)Democracy
Q5) Describe the living and working conditions of nineteenth-century London.
Q6) Define literary realism,and list two examples by different authors.
Q7) Explain Charles Darwin's argument of natural selection.
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Chapter 28: Global Confrontation and Civil War: Challenges to Cultural Identity
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Q1) Describe the American minstrel show,and show how it fostered stereotypes of the southern African American.
Q2) Which nineteenth-century artist was most enthusiastic about the Japanese prints?
A)Édouard Manet
B)Paul Gauguin
C)Paul Cézanne
D)Vincent van Gogh
Q3) List three ways Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann redesigned Paris,describing the rationale for these changes.
Q4) Why in 1877 did Southern African Americans lose many of the freedoms they had gained from the Civil War?
A)Jim Crow organized the Ku Klux Klan
B)Newly-elected President Hayes was a Southerner
C)The Supreme Court struck down the Emancipation Act
D)Union troops withdrew from the South
Q5) Explain the differences between liberalism and nationalism,and show how these two ideologies figured into two of the conflicts that defined the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Page 12
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Chapter 29: In Pursuit of Modernity: Paris in the 1850s and 1860s
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Q1) Why can Manet's Olympia be viewed as a statement about human slavery?
A)Olympia's hands are dirty
B)Olympia is a prostitute
C)Olympia is holding money
D)Olympia's maid is black
Q2) As described in the chapter's "Continuity and Change" section,why does the older woman in Manet's The Gare Saint-Lazare seem resigned to her status as a nineteenth-century French female?
A)She sits with her back to the train
B)She gazes directly at the viewer
C)She wears her long hair down
D)She wears dark-colored clothes
Q3) In Germinal why was Zola able to portray the plight of the French coal miner so realistically?
A)He came from a coal mining family
B)He went into a mine to research it
C)He had worked in a mine in his teens
D)He had read Charles Dickens's novels
Q4) Compare the two views of nineteenth-century women that George Sand presents in her novel Lélia.
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Chapter 30: The Promise of Renewal: Hope and Possibility in
Late Nineteenth-Century Europe
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Q1) Identify and define two ways Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace revolutionized architecture and construction.
Q2) What question functions as the theme of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment?
A)Can immoral means justify worthy ends?
B)Who has the right to pass judgment on others?
C)Are we our brothers' keepers?
D)Who is in control of a person's fate?
Q3) Compare the main themes of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and Tolstoy's War and Peace.
Q4) Why did Claude Monet,Auguste Renoir,Edgar Degas,and other artists found a Société anonyme?
A)To help rebuild French culture
B)To unionize the French artists
C)To challenge the Salon's exhibits
D)To show their art anonymously
Q5) How did William Morris and Company discriminate against women?
A)Presented them erotically in art
B)Hired them to do embroidery only
C)Paid them a lower wage than male workers
D)Refused to let them design tapestries
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Chapter 31: The Course of Empire: Expansion and Conflict in America
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Q1) As discussed in the chapter's "Continuity and Change" section,what had the frontier produced for Americans?
A)Unprecedented wealth
B)Dominant individualism
C)Capitalistic economy
D)Cultural exchange
Q2) How were women almost always portrayed in late nineteenth-century American visual art?
A)As maternal
B)As erotic objects
C)As professionals
D)As passive
Q3) Not exactly well received during his time,Walt Whitman and his works continue to influence writers today.Identify and describe at least two ways Whitman changed American literature.
Q4) Why did the Lakota and the Kiowa tribes keep a "winter count"?
A)To determine optimal planting times
B)To mark the buffalo herds' migrations
C)To keep track of the tribes' populations
D)To record family or tribe history
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Chapter 32: The Fin De Siècle: Toward the Modern
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Q1) Why was Auguste Rodin's The Kiss considered too scandalous for U.S.public display?
A)American sensibility shunned nudity
B)It celebrates an adulterous relationship
C)The woman is an active participant
D)The figures' sexual organs are exaggerated
Q2) Citing at least two artists as examples,explain the effect on their art of the Symbolists' need to retire from society in order to create works.
Q3) Why did Paul Gauguin leave France for Tahiti in 1891?
A)To avoid being arrested for murdering his wife's lover
B)To get far away from the European capitalism
C)To earn money by working on a merchant ship
D)To escape his obligations to his five children
Q4) Using specific details to support your response,describe and explain the meaning of Edvard Munch's The Scream.
Q5) Define Pointillism,and explain Georges Seurat's use of points of color to reflect and to create mood.
Q6) Define social Darwinism,and then summarize Darwin's response to it as presented in his The Descent of Man.
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Chapter 33: The Era of Invention: Paris and the Modern World
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Q1) Why did Igor Stravinsky earn boos and hisses from the opening-night Parisian audience for Le Sacre de printemps (The Rite of Spring)?
A)Stravinsky was Russian
B)The dancers were nude
C)The play was violent and paganistic
D)The radical music was jarring
Q2) Describe Pablo Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon,and analyze the tremendous influence this work exerted on the other art movements discussed in the chapter.
Q3) Why did viewers find Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon disturbing?
A)The subjects are prostitutes
B)The shapes are unnatural
C)The women look androgynous
D)The blue and orange colors clash
Q4) Why were Thomas Edison's early films for the Kinetoscope rather limited?
A)Only one person at a time could view them
B)Price to view them was beyond the working class
C)Lapse between slides made the films quite long
D)Only black and white images showed up on film
Q5) Identify and explain the three characteristics of Imagist poetry.
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Chapter 34: The Great War and Its Impact: a Lost
Generation and a New Imagination
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Q1) According to Freud,which of the following is not one of the competing drives of human personality?
A)Ego
B)Superego
C)Id
D)Superid
Q2) Why did some early twentieth-century writers embrace stream of consciousness?
A)To pare down their writing styles to the most basic reflections
B)To expand their novels beyond a mere narrative of events
C)To focus more sharply on condensed episodes of time
D)To emphasize the subjectivity of their characters' points of view
Q3) Why did Gertrude Stein declare of the World War I survivors,"You are all a lost generation"?
A)They were expatriated
B)They were damned
C)They were optimistic
D)They were aimless
Q4) Compare Alfred,Lord Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" to Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" within the context of World War I.
Page 18
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Chapter
Making It New
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Q1) Identify and explain two ways the films made in 1920s Hollywood differ from those made in Europe during the same era.
Q2) How did George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess bridge the gap between popular and high culture?
A)It blends jazz and blues with orchestras and arias
B)It has been performed by jazz bands and opera companies
C)It sets the plot of Romeo and Juliet in Harlem
D)It was the first Broadway musical to use a jazz band
Q3) According to W.E.B.Du Bois,what major problem did African Americans face at the turn of the century?
A)Oppression from whites
B)Double-consciousness of self
C)Lack of education
D)Substandard living conditions
Q4) What types of subjects did William Carlos Williams use for his poems?
A)Commonplace,everyday
B)Horrors of disease
C)Religion and faith
D)Wonders of technology
Page 19
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Chapter 36: The Age of Anxiety: Fascism and Depression
holocaust and Bomb
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Q1) During America's Great Depression,approximately how much of the national workforce was unemployed?
A)One-tenth
B)One-fourth
C)One-third
D)One-half
Q2) How did Mohandas Gandhi convince the British to decolonize India in 1947?
A)Leading guerrilla resistance
B)Using passive resistance
C)Ceding Pakistan to Britain
D)Starting a civil war in India
Q3) What three major divisions of German society does Georg Grosz parody in his painting The Pillars of Society?
A)Upper,middle,and lower classes
B)Artists,entertainers,and merchants
C)Military,clergy,and middle class
D)Intellectuals,workers,and politicians
Q4) Define Bertolt Brecht's concept of epic theater,and list the four ways his plays aimed to achieve his desired effect.
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Q1) What is the central thematic concern of the Theater of the Absurd?
A)Futility of organized religion
B)Ridiculousness of the masses
C)Meaninglessness of existence
D)Fragmentation of the human psyche
Q2) Minimalist art seems to ask an intriguing question-what,minimally,makes a work of art? Using as your examples the works discussed in this chapter,list three qualities necessary for a work to be considered art.
Q3) What in American society were the Beat artists reacting against?
A)Capitalism
B)Gender roles
C)False values
D)Conservative politics
Q4) According to Søren Kierkegaard,why must Christians live in a state of anguish caused by their own freedom of choice?
A)They must endure the guilt of their sins
B)Belief in God requires suspension of reason
C)They hold responsibility for Jesus's sacrifice
D)Temptation awaits them at every turn
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Chapter 38: Multiplicity and Diversity: Cultures of Liberation and
Identity in the 1960s and 1970s
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Q1) How did Birmingham Police Chief Bull Conner respond to the April 1963 mass demonstration by children?
A)Ordered his men to open fire,killing 4 girls
B)Called in the National Guard to control them
C)Attacked them with dogs and fire hoses
D)Ignored them,hoping they would tire
Q2) What did the electronic synthesizer allow composers to create for the first time?
A)Stereo and surround sound
B)Music without performers
C)The sound of pure vibration
D)A natural echo chamber
Q3) In The Feminist Mystique,why does Betty Friedan reject Freud's idea that women envy men?
A)Assumption that women are inferior to men
B)Too much emphasis to female sexuality
C)Denial of the chance for inequality to be eliminated
D)Acceptance that culture determines gender roles
Q4) List and analyze two reasons for the title of Ralph Ellison's novel-Invisible Man.
Page 22
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Chapter 39: Without Boundaries: Multiple Meanings in a
Postmodern World
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Q1) What is a hallmark of postmodern architecture?
A)Utilization of all available space
B)Incorporation of elements of technology
C)Harmony with its site's natural elements
D)Use of many different elements of design
Q2) Identify and explain how two video presentations discussed in the chapter fit with the characteristics of postmodernism.
Q3) Referencing one poem and one novel discussed in the chapter,explain the "open interpretation" that characterizes postmodern literature.
Q4) Why did Benoit Mandelbrot reject traditional Euclid geometry for his work with fractals?
A)Didn't account for variations in starting points
B)Couldn't describe irregularly shaped forms
C)Didn't use color as a component of order
D)Focused too much on finite patterns
Q5) Define "green architecture," and explain how it fits with the concept of postmodern architecture.Then describe two examples-one from the book and one from your community.
23
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