"MAKING money is a dirty game," says the Institute ofEconomicAffairs, summing up the attitude ofBritish novelists towards business. The IEA, a free market think-tank, has just published a collection of essays ("The Representation ofBusiness inEnglish Literature") by five academics chronicling the hostility of the country's men and women of letters to the sordid business of making money. The implication is thatBritain's economic performance is retarded by an anti-industrial culture.
Rather than blaming recalcitrant workers and incompetent managers forBritain's economic worries, then, we can put George Orwell and MartinAmis in the dock insteaD、FromDickens's Scrooge toAmis’s John Self in his 1980s novel "Money", novelists have conjured up a rogue's gallery of mean, greedy, amoral money-men that has alienated their impressionable readers from the noble pursuit of capitalism.
The argument has been well made before, most famously in 1981 by Martin Wiener, anAmerican academic, in his "EnglishCulture and theDecline of the Industrial Spirit". Lady Thatcher was a devotee of Mr. Wiener's, and she led a crusade to revive the "entrepreneurial culture" which the liberal elite had allegedly trampled underfoot. The presentChancellor of theExchequer, GordonBrown, sounds as though he agrees with her.At a recent speech to theConfederation ofBritish Industry, he declared that it should be the duty of every teacher in the country to "communicate the virtues of business and enterprise".
Certainly, most novelists are hostile to capitalism, but this refrain risks scapegoating writers for failings for which they are not to blame.Britain's culture is no more anti-business than that of other countries. The Romantic Movement, which started as a reaction against the industrial revolution of the century, was born and flourished in Germany, but has not stopped the Germans from beingEurope's most successful entrepreneurs and industrialists.
Even theAmericans are guilty of blackening business's name. SMERSH and SPECTRE、went out with the cold war. JamesBond now takes on international media magnates rather than Rosa Kle
B、His films such as "ErinBrockovich" have pitched downtrodden, moral heroes against the evil of faceless corporatism. Yet none of this seems to have dentedAmerica's lust for free enterprise.
The irony is that the novel flourished as an art form only after, and as a result of, the creation of the new commercial classes of VictorianEngland, just as the modern Hollywood film can exist only in an era of mass consumerism. Perhaps the moral is that capitalist societies consume literature and film to let off steam rather than to change the worlD、
21. In the first paragraph, the author introduces his topic by
A、posing a contract
B、justifying an assumption
C、making a comparison
D、explaining a phenomenon
22. The word “sordid”(line 6, para 1)implies
A、holy
B、dirty
C、sainty
D、pure
23. George Orwell and MartinAmis are defendants because
A、no accusation of the inefficient management
B、the decline of the country’s economy
C、the novelists are in favor of them
D、novelists depict them as merciful people
24.American academic Martin Wiener’s argument
A、sides with the liberal elite
B、is neutral about the virtue of business and enterprise
C、inclines towards the revival of the entrepreneurial culture
D、is hostile to the industrial spirit
25. What can we infer from the last paragraph?
A、the novel existed after the creation of the new commercial classes
B、capital doesn’t pollute social morality
C、capitalist societies change the world
D、the modern holy world has nothing to do with consumers