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GRE Exam
The relevance of the literary personality—a writer's distinctive attitudes, concerns, and artistic choices—to the analysis of a literary work is being scrutinized by various schools of contemporary criticism. Deconstmctionists view the literary personality, like the writer's biographical personality, as irrelevant. The proper focus of literary analysis, they argue, is a work's intertextuality (interrelationship with other texts), subtexts (unspoken, concealed. or repressed discourses), and metatexts (self-referential aspects), not a perception of a writer's verbal and aesthetic "fingerprints." New historicists also devalue the literary personality, since, in their emphasis on a work's historical context, they credit a writer with only those insights and ideas that were generally available when the writer lived. However, to readers interested in literary detective work—say scholars of classical (Greek and Roman! literature who wish to reconstruct damaged texts or deduce a work's authorship— the literary personality sometimes provides vital clues.
It can be inferred from the passage that on the issue of how to analyze a literary work, the new historic its would most likely agree with the deconstructionists that
Even the most complex models used in fishery management are cartoons of reality. They reduce hundreds of links in food webs to a handful and inadequately represent processes operating over space. Many of their assumptions are as flawed today as those of the simplest models of the past. Fish stocks, for one. are still assumed to be populations of a species that are isolated from one another. Yet many populations mix at their edges and some even migrate through areas occupied by other populations. Furthermore, the more complex models suffer from a "crisis of complexity"—more is really less. Adding layers of detail, each carrying its own set of assumptions, produces instability. The model's behavior becomes erratic, and conclusions drawn from it can be downright misleading.
In the context of the passage, the highlighted portion serves to
The term "ragtime opera" was used frequently m the first years of the twentieth century, but more often than not its use was (i)_________. The very idea of "ragtime opera" was viewed as lii)_________: opera was regarded as the highest form of musical art; ragtime was at the opposite pole.