2 . Fait Diver: More Than Brief Stories
Every day, there are items in the news believed too minor to report at length. For these _________ stories, French newspapers of old had a solution: a section called fait divers: stories of a paragraph or a few lines. These brief stories were typically of some_________ or odd occurrence: train accidents, lovers' quarrels, drownings, suicides. The fait divers remained a practical form, intended to convey a story without _________ too much space, but it also developed into an art. In French literature, it crossed the line from low to high culture and influenced the writing of _________ as varied as Stendha(司汤达), Flauber(福楼拜), and Camus(加缪), sometimes as the_________ inspiration for what later became a novel. _________ a version of it was present in American newspapers, it never quite caught on in the English press as a literary form.
Perhaps the finest flowering of fait divers was in the reports filed by the art critic Felix Feneon 1906. He gave the form more wit, more emotional _________ and formal perfection, than it had had before. In his hands, it became ironic, dark, and very funny. His collected fait divers, published in English as Novels in Three Lines, was a(n) _________ to me. It inspired me to undertake _________ projects. One was a sequence of fait divers set in contemporary Nigeria and__________ from the newspapers there. The other was based on stories from New York City's newspapers in 1912: the New-York Tribune, the New York Herald, the New York Times. I called my projects small fates." an acknowledgment that so many of these stories are __________ about the strange workings of chance.
One can go days in New York without really thinking about how __________ these streets once were by crowds of people, all of whom are now dead. I found in writing the small fates that these long-gone New Yorkers suddenly came back to the__________ tense when you are not even ready for it. The fine details made their lives vivid and __________. They were no longer__________, and at times seemed even more real to me than the latter-day outside my window.
1. A.curious | B.tiny | C.ridiculous | D.detailed |
2. A.tragedy | B.coincidence | C.imagination | D.thriller |
3. A.turning up | B.putting up | C.showing up | D.taking up |
4. A.images | B.imagination | C.figures | D.portraits |
5. A.motivative | B.sudden | C.original | D.weak |
6. A.Though | B.When | C.Since | D.Before |
7. A.expression | B.peace | C.health | D.discomfort |
8. A.identification | B.secret | C.appeal | D.approach |
9. A.a series of | B.a pair of | C.a collection of | D.a set of |
10. A.received | B.inspired | C.eliminated | D.drawn |
11. A.finally | B.accidentally | C.previously | D.unexpectedly |
12. A.fascinating | B.populated | C.brilliant | D.sophisticated |
13. A.previous | B.future | C.present | D.past |
14. A.believable | B.considerable | C.understandable | D.approachable |
15. A.deadly | B.lonely | C.lively | D.ghostly |