Q26

[tommywallach]

26. (A)
Question Type: Inference (26-34, 40-41)

For this inference question, the subject of the answer choices should clue you in to where to look in the passage for an answer. Every answer choice mentions "well-written" or "political." These issues are discussed in the third paragraph. There, we see that the radical critics insisted that "the formal aspects of a work were of secondary importance so long as its goal was good and its purpose clear." Dostoyevsky disagreed, believing that only "fully realized artistic works could fulfill their goals." We later learn that an "artistic" work need only be well written. Thus, only a work that was well-written could actually serve a particular political view, as (A) says.

(B) flips everything around. Dostoyevsky believed that aesthetic conerns should have primacy over intentional concerns. So a work had to be well written before it could serve any other purpose.
(C) also confuses the language of the passage. While Dostoyevsky would almost certainly have agreed that some works of literature that were primarily concerned with serving a particular political view were not well written (because they took a political stand at the expense of formal artistry), he never said that all badly written works were political in nature.
(D) goes too far. Dostoyevsky said that a book could not be successful at delivering a political message unless it succeeded first as a work of art. But that would not mean that artistry and politics had to be exclusive.
(E) makes the same mistake as (D). Dostoyevsky argued that if a book did not succeed formally, it was by definition a failure (even as a piece of political commentary). But if a book succeeded on the formal level, it could also succeed as political commentary.

[shirando21]

Nice!

[samantha.b233]

When reading the passage, I actually thought the "goal" in line 32 and the "goal" in line 34 refer to different concepts, the former the literature's political influence, the latter the literature's being artistic...

My reasoning for that is the term "contradiction" in line 33, which led me to think that the reason why Dostoyevsky believed that was contradictory must be, a literature's "goal" cannot be "good" unless it is "fully realized artistic" work. There I linked the two together...

Apparently I was wrong...

[jones.mchandler]

Sorry for the spam guys but wow this passage was not good to me. I'm just so confused as to how D thinks that works of literature could ever serve a political point of view.

The first line of paragraph three says that D believed that it's shameful to insist that art must serve a particular point of view.

It just seems that the first sentence precludes the possibility of D believing that only works of literature that are well written can serve a particular political view.

Isn't that the opposite of what he thought?

[rachellewrx]

Sorry for the spam guys but wow this passage was not good to me. I'm just so confused as to how D thinks that works of literature could ever serve a political point of view.

The first line of paragraph three says that D believed that it's shameful to insist that art must serve a particular point of view.

It just seems that the first sentence precludes the possibility of D believing that only works of literature that are well written can serve a particular political view.

Isn't that the opposite of what he thought?

Yeah, I agree with you. That's why I chose E after eliminating A, B,C, and D.

I'm having trouble seeing how Dostoyevsky could agree that only well written work can fulfil the " shameful destiny".

[ohthatpatrick]

Dostoyevsky (henceforth known as "D") doesn't think that it's a shameful destiny if a writer serves a particular political view.

D thinks it's a shameful destiny if we say that "a writer MUST serve a particular political view".

He's cool with writers pursuing their own artistic purposes, whether those be political, humorous, experimental, etc.

He thinks it's dumb to insist that every work of art HAS to be political. But that doesn't mean that he thinks that political art is dumb.

Since all the answer choices have conditional words ("only" / "cannot"), we really have to find some supporting text in which D says something THAT strong, that harsh.

The strongest, harshest, most conditional claim is line 33-34: "ONLY fully realized artistic works could fulfill their goals."

Fulfill goals --> fully realized

(A) says
"serve political view --> well written"

This is the same as
"fulfill goals --> fully realized"

We have to do some code-language swapping to get there though.

In line 30-33, the radical critics are basically saying "we don't care if the writing is mediocre, as long as the GOAL was good and purpose clear". Line 26 informed us that radical critics see the GOAL of writing as "serving a political view".

And how do we get to "well written"? Well, what did D mean by a 'fully realized artistic work'? The closest answer we have is the definition provided in 36-41, which ends with 'artistry = ability to write well'.

So, getting out of this symbolic code-switching conditional B.S. and back into a normal human brain, you had this conversation in the 3rd paragraph.

Radical critics:
Don't judge works of art initially by their formal aspects (i.e. the quality of the execution of the artist's vision). After all, art is REQUIRED to serve a particular political view. So we really need to measure works of art by how good their political goal / purpose is.

Dostoyevsky:
Say whaaa? DEFINITELY judge works of art primarily by their formal aspects. After all, it doesn't matter what an author's GOAL is if the author can't write well. If the author can't write well, she can't communicate her thoughts to the reader. So if an author had some noble political GOAL but wrote something poorly, the goal would not be conveyed to the reader. Only well written stuff can accomplish the goal of serving a particular political view.