In 1990, William Deresiewicz was on his way to gaining a Ph.D. in English literature at Columbia University. Describing that time in the opening pages of his sharp, endearingly selfeffacing new book, A Jane Austen Education, Deresiewicz explains that he faced one crucial obstacle. He loathed not just Jane Austen but the entire gang of 19th-century British novelists ~ Hardy, Dickens, Eliot ... the lot. At 26, Deresiewicz wasn’t experiencing the hatred born of surfeit that Mark Twain described when he told a friend, "Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shinbone. " What Deresiewicz was going through was the rebel phase in which Dostoyevsky rules Planet Gloom, that stage during which the best available image of marriage is a prison gate. Sardonic students do not, as Deresiewicz points out, make suitable shrine-tenders for a female novelist whose books, while short on wedding scenes, never skimp on proposals. Emma Bovary fulfilled all the young scholar’s expectations of literary culture at its finest; Emma Woodhouse left him cold. "Her life," he lamented, "was impossibly narrow. " Her story, such as it was, "seemed to consist of nothing more than a lot of chitchat among a bunch of commonplace characters in a country village. " Hypochondriacal Mr. Woodhouse, garrulous Miss Bates -weren’t these just the sort of bores Deresiewicz had spent his college years struggling to avoid Maybe, he describes himself conceding, the sole redeeming feature of smug Miss Woodhouse was that she seemed to share his distaste for the dull society of Highbury. The state of outraged hostility is, of course, a setup. Many of Deresiewicz’s readers will already know him as the author of the widely admired Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets. One of the novelist’s most appreciative critics isn’t about to knock Austen off her plinth. Nevertheless, a profound truth lies embedded in Deresiewicz’s witty account of his early animosity. He applies that comic narrative device to her six completed novels. Considered so, each work reveals itself as a teaching tool in the painful journey toward becoming not only adult but useful. The truth is that young readers don’t easily attach themselves to Austen. Mr. Darcy, "haughty as a Siamese cat," isn’t half as appealing on the page as Colin Firth stalking across the screen in Andrew Davies’s liberty-taking film. Seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland seems coltish and naive to readers of her own age today, while Emma Woodhouse, all of 20, appears loud, vain and bossy. And who, at 27 or thereabouts, now feels sympathy for the meekness of Anne Elliot, a young woman who has allowed a monstrous father and a persuasive family friend to ruin her chances of happiness with the engaging Captain Wentworth Deresiewicz’s emphasis on Austen’s lack of appeal to young readers struck a chord. The memory still lingers of being taken to lunch by my father to meet a cultured man who might, it must have been hoped, exert a civilizing influence on a willful 20-year-old. We’d barely started on the appetizers before Jane Austen’s name came up. "I hate her," I announced, brandishing my scorn as a badge of pride. Invited to offer reasons, I prattled on, much like Deresiewicz’s younger self, about her dreary characters: all so banal, so unimportant. Glancing up for admiration, I caught an odd expression on our guest’s face, something between amusement and disgust. I carried fight on. It was another five years before I comprehended the shameless depths of my arrogance. I had matched Emma -at her worst. It happens that Emma at her worst is the turning point in Deresiewicz’s account of his own conversion. The fictional scene that taught him to understand the subtlety of Austen’s manipulation of the reader was the picnic at which Emma, cocksure as ever, orders gentle Miss Bates to restrict her utterance of platitudes during the meal. Miss Bates blushes painfully, and yet accepts the truth of Emma’s critique. The reader has no option but to admire, however grudgingly, such quiet humility. Although he’s a shrewd critic of Austen’s work, Deresiewicz is less at ease when entering the genre of memoir. Girlfriends come and go; a controlling father is described without ever being quite brought to life; personal experiences of community in a Jewish youth movement are awkwardly yoked to the kindly naval group evoked by Austen in the Harville-Benwick household of Persuasion. Very occasionally, as in a startling passage that offers a real-life analogy to the socially ambitious Crawfords of Mansfield Park, a sentence leaps free of Deresiewicz’s selective recollections. "You guys are lunch meat now," a friend’s rich wife advises both him and her husband. "Wait a few years -you’ll be sirloin steak. " Here, slicing up through the text like a knife blade, surfaces a statement to match Austen’s own scalpel-wielding. Teaching became Deresiewicz’s chosen vocation. And Austen, he claims, taught him the difficult art of lecturing without beingdidactic, in just the way that Henry Tilney instructs a wide-eyed Catherine Morland -and that Austen herself lays down the law to her readers. Rachel M. Brownstein’s Why Jane Austen offers a different approach. Excellent in her overview of Austen’s ascent of the Olympian literary slope, Brownstein speaks down to her readers from an equally dizzy height. Pity the "smart, eloquent and clubbable" former pupil Brownstein names and thanks for having, at the end of the term, "helpfully clarified things by telling me what I had been saying. " Ouch. Students, Brownstein loftily declares, are best introduced to Austen’s novels by being informed, for example, that the title "Mr. Knightley of Donwell Abbey" conceals the code words "knightly" and "donewell. " No indication is given that this formidable tutor would embrace the collaborative observations from her pupils that Deresiewicz has learned to welcome and enjoy. Brownstein remains, however, a superb critic, seen at her best when illuminating Austen’s mastery of significant detail -a quality, she reminds us, Walter Scott was quick to discern and praise. Exasperated though I was when Brownstein remarked that partaking of the daily feasts at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center presented her with a "moral" obligation, I’d gladly forgive worse for the pleasure of learning how artfully Austen sows our mistrust of her nastier characters. I have, however, one suggestion. Brownstein, almost as socially obsessed as her elegant scapegoat of choice, Lionel Trilling, dithers over exactly where to place Austen. Snobs, she declares, without much evidence, are among the novelist’s firmest fans. But Austen belonged neither to the aristocracy nor to the rising middle class. There’s no need for her to be pigeonholed, but if a place must be granted, how about "vicarage class" -for the position from which a parson’s clever daughter could observe the mannered comedy of all walks of life According to the passage, Deresiewicz is______
A. a teacher
B. a critic
C. a dramatist
D. a novelist
In America retail banking is still a local business. Around 95% of the country’s deposittakers are "community" banks, and more than 90% have assets of less than $1 billion. Even Bank of America, which comes closest to having a national network, has branches in only 29 of the 50 states. Nevertheless, banking is much less local than it used to be. Advances in technology have made it far easier to offer banking services regionally or nationally. And deregulation has swept away restrictions that once prevented banks from extending their branch networks across state boundaries (even, in some states, within them). Thanks mainly to a wave of mergers, but also to a spate of bank failures in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the number of banks in America has fallen by half in the past 20 years. Big banks have some obvious advantages over small ones. They can raise money more cheaply than smaller banks, notably in the financial markets, and can therefore offer keener lending rates. Their assets are more diversified and therefore less risky when taken as a group. They may be able to supply a broader range of services for which fees can be charged. That said, the small fry are not helpless when bigger fish swim into their pool. Precisely because of big banks’ easier access to financial markets, they rely less on deposits for their funding. There is evidence that they offer customers meaner deposit rates -and hence make local banks’ life easier in this respect. They also tend to offer all savers the same rate, at least within one state, whereas local banks react more nimbly to local economic conditions. Research also suggests that multi-market banks charge higher fees than local banks do. And diseconomies as well as economies of scale can come into play. Frequently, merging banks lose some deposits, as customers disgruntled by a big, impersonal institution take their money elsewhere -sometimes to one of the 100-odd new banks set up in America each year. In a forthcoming paper,Allen Berger, of the Federal Reserve, Astrid Dick, of the New York Fed, the late Lawrence Goldberg, of the University of Miami, and Lawrence White, of New York University’s Stern School of Business, weigh two hypotheses about banking mergers. On the one hand, consolidation may have been born of efficiency, as technological progress improved the profitability of large institutions serving several markets faster than that of small, local banks. On the other, mergers may have been the children of hubris, as chief executives sought scale for its own sake. Efficiency-based mergers should have made life harder for small, single-market banks; hubris should have helped them. The authors compare the profitability of small banks operating in only one local market in two periods, 1982 1990 and 1991 2000. They find that in the first period, competition from out of town did them more good than harm; their returns on equity were higher if they were up against banks that were big, served many markets or both. In the second period, though, the effect was reversed. In other words, between the 1980s and 1990s bank consolidation became less hubristic and more efficient, to the detriment of small, local banks -thanks, say the authors, largely to developments in technology. It appears that local banks suffered both lost revenues, as the interlopers stole their fees and interest on loans, and also higher costs, as they offered higher deposit rates or spent more on advertising or service to keep hold of their customers. Looking at an alternative measure of local banks’ profitability, the authors suggest that their competitors became sharper at serving several markets, rather than exploiting sheer scale. About American retail banking, which of the following statements is NOT true
A number of American banks ended in failures in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Bank consolidation contributed to the deregulation of banking operations.
C. With the deregulation and merger, American retail banking has extended to a national business.
D. Bank of America sees a good prospect of having a national network.
定额是质和量的统一体,在讨论定额的概念时,不能把定额看成是单纯的数量关系。( )
A. 对
B. 错
In 1990, William Deresiewicz was on his way to gaining a Ph.D. in English literature at Columbia University. Describing that time in the opening pages of his sharp, endearingly selfeffacing new book, A Jane Austen Education, Deresiewicz explains that he faced one crucial obstacle. He loathed not just Jane Austen but the entire gang of 19th-century British novelists ~ Hardy, Dickens, Eliot ... the lot. At 26, Deresiewicz wasn’t experiencing the hatred born of surfeit that Mark Twain described when he told a friend, "Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shinbone. " What Deresiewicz was going through was the rebel phase in which Dostoyevsky rules Planet Gloom, that stage during which the best available image of marriage is a prison gate. Sardonic students do not, as Deresiewicz points out, make suitable shrine-tenders for a female novelist whose books, while short on wedding scenes, never skimp on proposals. Emma Bovary fulfilled all the young scholar’s expectations of literary culture at its finest; Emma Woodhouse left him cold. "Her life," he lamented, "was impossibly narrow. " Her story, such as it was, "seemed to consist of nothing more than a lot of chitchat among a bunch of commonplace characters in a country village. " Hypochondriacal Mr. Woodhouse, garrulous Miss Bates -weren’t these just the sort of bores Deresiewicz had spent his college years struggling to avoid Maybe, he describes himself conceding, the sole redeeming feature of smug Miss Woodhouse was that she seemed to share his distaste for the dull society of Highbury. The state of outraged hostility is, of course, a setup. Many of Deresiewicz’s readers will already know him as the author of the widely admired Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets. One of the novelist’s most appreciative critics isn’t about to knock Austen off her plinth. Nevertheless, a profound truth lies embedded in Deresiewicz’s witty account of his early animosity. He applies that comic narrative device to her six completed novels. Considered so, each work reveals itself as a teaching tool in the painful journey toward becoming not only adult but useful. The truth is that young readers don’t easily attach themselves to Austen. Mr. Darcy, "haughty as a Siamese cat," isn’t half as appealing on the page as Colin Firth stalking across the screen in Andrew Davies’s liberty-taking film. Seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland seems coltish and naive to readers of her own age today, while Emma Woodhouse, all of 20, appears loud, vain and bossy. And who, at 27 or thereabouts, now feels sympathy for the meekness of Anne Elliot, a young woman who has allowed a monstrous father and a persuasive family friend to ruin her chances of happiness with the engaging Captain Wentworth Deresiewicz’s emphasis on Austen’s lack of appeal to young readers struck a chord. The memory still lingers of being taken to lunch by my father to meet a cultured man who might, it must have been hoped, exert a civilizing influence on a willful 20-year-old. We’d barely started on the appetizers before Jane Austen’s name came up. "I hate her," I announced, brandishing my scorn as a badge of pride. Invited to offer reasons, I prattled on, much like Deresiewicz’s younger self, about her dreary characters: all so banal, so unimportant. Glancing up for admiration, I caught an odd expression on our guest’s face, something between amusement and disgust. I carried fight on. It was another five years before I comprehended the shameless depths of my arrogance. I had matched Emma -at her worst. It happens that Emma at her worst is the turning point in Deresiewicz’s account of his own conversion. The fictional scene that taught him to understand the subtlety of Austen’s manipulation of the reader was the picnic at which Emma, cocksure as ever, orders gentle Miss Bates to restrict her utterance of platitudes during the meal. Miss Bates blushes painfully, and yet accepts the truth of Emma’s critique. The reader has no option but to admire, however grudgingly, such quiet humility. Although he’s a shrewd critic of Austen’s work, Deresiewicz is less at ease when entering the genre of memoir. Girlfriends come and go; a controlling father is described without ever being quite brought to life; personal experiences of community in a Jewish youth movement are awkwardly yoked to the kindly naval group evoked by Austen in the Harville-Benwick household of Persuasion. Very occasionally, as in a startling passage that offers a real-life analogy to the socially ambitious Crawfords of Mansfield Park, a sentence leaps free of Deresiewicz’s selective recollections. "You guys are lunch meat now," a friend’s rich wife advises both him and her husband. "Wait a few years -you’ll be sirloin steak. " Here, slicing up through the text like a knife blade, surfaces a statement to match Austen’s own scalpel-wielding. Teaching became Deresiewicz’s chosen vocation. And Austen, he claims, taught him the difficult art of lecturing without beingdidactic, in just the way that Henry Tilney instructs a wide-eyed Catherine Morland -and that Austen herself lays down the law to her readers. Rachel M. Brownstein’s Why Jane Austen offers a different approach. Excellent in her overview of Austen’s ascent of the Olympian literary slope, Brownstein speaks down to her readers from an equally dizzy height. Pity the "smart, eloquent and clubbable" former pupil Brownstein names and thanks for having, at the end of the term, "helpfully clarified things by telling me what I had been saying. " Ouch. Students, Brownstein loftily declares, are best introduced to Austen’s novels by being informed, for example, that the title "Mr. Knightley of Donwell Abbey" conceals the code words "knightly" and "donewell. " No indication is given that this formidable tutor would embrace the collaborative observations from her pupils that Deresiewicz has learned to welcome and enjoy. Brownstein remains, however, a superb critic, seen at her best when illuminating Austen’s mastery of significant detail -a quality, she reminds us, Walter Scott was quick to discern and praise. Exasperated though I was when Brownstein remarked that partaking of the daily feasts at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center presented her with a "moral" obligation, I’d gladly forgive worse for the pleasure of learning how artfully Austen sows our mistrust of her nastier characters. I have, however, one suggestion. Brownstein, almost as socially obsessed as her elegant scapegoat of choice, Lionel Trilling, dithers over exactly where to place Austen. Snobs, she declares, without much evidence, are among the novelist’s firmest fans. But Austen belonged neither to the aristocracy nor to the rising middle class. There’s no need for her to be pigeonholed, but if a place must be granted, how about "vicarage class" -for the position from which a parson’s clever daughter could observe the mannered comedy of all walks of life Deresiewicz’s attitude to Jane Austen is______
A. hostile
B. appreciative
C. outraged
D. neutral