2016
GRE
Think & Learn GRE
READING PRINCIPLES
CONCEPT PASSAGES
PASSAGE 1
Art historians’ approach to French Impressionism has changed significantly in recent years. While a decade
ago Rewald’s History of Impressionism, which emphasizes Impressionist painters’ stylistic innovations, was
unchallenged, the literature on impressionism has now become a kind of ideological battlefield, in which
more attention is paid to the subject matter of the paintings, and to the social and moral issues raised by it,
than to their style. Recently, politically charged discussions that address the impressionists’ unequal
treatment of men and women and the exclusion of modern industry and labor from their pictures have
tended to crowd out the stylistic analysis favored by Rewald and his followers. In a new work illustrating this
trend, Robert L. Herbert dissociates himself from formalists whose preoccupation with the stylistic features
of impressionist painting has, in Herbert’s view, left the history out of art history; his aim is to restore
impressionist paintings “to their socio-cultural context.” However, his arguments are not finally persuasive.
In attempting to place impressionist painting in its proper historical context, Herbert has redrawn the
traditional boundaries of impressionism. Limiting himself to the two decades between 1860 and 1880, he
assembles under the impressionist banner what can only be described as a somewhat eccentric grouping of
painters. Cezanne, Pisarro, and Sisley are almost entirely ignored, largely because their paintings do not suit
Herbert’s emphasis on themes of urban life and suburban leisure, while Manet, Degas, and Caillebotte—who
paint scenes of urban life but whom many would hardly characterize as impressionists dominate the first half
of the book. Although this new description of Impressionist painting provides a more unified conception of
nineteenth-century French painting by grouping quite disparate modernist painters together and
emphasizing their common concerns rather than their stylistic difference, it also forces Herbert to overlook
some of the most important genres of impressionist painting—portraiture, pure landscape, and still-life
painting.
Moreover, the rationale for Herbert’s emphasis on the social and political realities that Impressionist
paintings can be said to communicate rather than on their style is finally undermined by what even Herbert
concedes was the failure of Impressionist painters to serve as particularly conscientious illustrators of their
social milieu. They left much ordinary experience—work and poverty, for example—out of their paintings
and what they did put in was transformed by a style that had only an indirect relationship to the social
realities of the world they depicted. Not only were their pictures inventions rather than photographs, they
were inventions in which style to some degree disrupted description. Their paintings in effect have two levels
of subject: what is represented and how it is represented, and no art historian can afford to emphasize one
at the expense of the other.
PASSAGE 2
While complex in the extreme, Derrida’s work has proven to be a particularly influential approach to the
analysis of the ways in which language structures our understanding of ourselves and the world we inhabit,
an approach he termed deconstruction. In its simplest formulation, deconstruction can be taken to refer to a
methodological strategy which seeks to uncover layers of hidden meaning in a text that have been denied or
suppressed. The term ‘text’, in this respect, does not refer simply to a written form of communication,
however. Rather, texts are something we all produce and reproduce constantly in our every day social
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relations, be they spoken, written or embedded in the construction of material artifacts. At the heart of
Derrida’s deconstructive approach is his critique of what he perceives to be the totalitarian impulse of the
Enlightenment pursuit to bring all that exists in the world under the domain of representative language, a
pursuit he refers to as logocentrism. Logocentrism is the search for a rational language that is able to know
and represent the world and all its aspects perfectly and accurately. Its totalitarian dimension, for Derrida at
least, lies primarily in its tendency to marginalize or dismiss all that does not neatly comply with its particular
linguistic representations, a tendency that, throughout history, has all too frequently been manifested in the
form of authoritarian institutions. Thus logocentrism has, in its search for the truth of absolute
representation, subsumed difference and oppressed that which it designates as its alien ‘other’. For Derrida,
western civilization has been built upon such a systematic assault on alien cultures and ways of life, typically
in the name of reason and progress.
In response to logocentrism, deconstruction posits the idea that the mechanism by which this process of
marginalization and the ordering of truth occurs is through establishing systems of binary opposition.
Oppositional linguistic dualisms, such as rational/irrational, culture/nature and good/bad are not, however,
construed as equal partners as they are in, say, the semiological structuralism of Saussure. Rather, they exist,
for Derrida, in a series of hierarchical relationships with the first term normally occupying a superior position.
Derrida defines the relationship between such oppositional terms using the neologism différance. This refers
to the realization that in any statement, oppositional terms differ from each other (for instance, the
difference between rationality and irrationality is constructed through oppositional usage), and at the same
time, a hierarchical relationship is maintained by the deference of one term to the other (in the positing of
rationality over irrationality, for instance). It is this latter point which is perhaps the key to understanding
Derrida’s approach to deconstruction.
For the fact at any given time one term must defer to its oppositional ‘other’, means that the two terms are
constantly in a state of interdependence. The presence of one is dependent upon the absence or ‘absent
presence’ of the ‘other’, such as in the case of good and evil, whereby to understand the nature of one, we
must constantly relate it to the absent term in order to grasp its meaning. That is, to do good, we must
understand that our act is not evil, for without that comparison the term becomes meaningless. Put simply,
deconstruction represents an attempt to demonstrate the absent-presence of this oppositional ‘other’, to
show that what we say or write is in itself not expressive simply of what is present, but also of what is absent.
Thus, deconstruction seeks to reveal the interdependence of apparently dichotomous terms and their
meanings relative to their textual context; that is, within the linguistic power relations which structure
dichotomous terms hierarchically. In Derrida’s own words, a deconstructive reading “must always aim at a
certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not
command of the patterns of a language that he uses. …[It] attempts to make the not-seen accessible to
sight.”
Meaning, then, is never fixed or stable, whatever the intention of the author of a text. For Derrida, language
is a system of relations that are dynamic, in that all meanings we ascribe to the world are dependent not only
on what we believe to be present but also on what is absent. Thus, any act of interpretation must refer not
only to what the author of a text intends, but also to what is absent from his or her intention. This insight
leads, once again, to Derrida’s further rejection of the idea of the definitive authority of the intentional agent
or subject. The subject is decentred; it is conceived as the outcome of relations of difference. As author of its
own biography, the subject thus becomes the ideological fiction of modernity and its logocentric philosophy,
one that depends upon the formation of hierarchical dualisms, which repress and deny the presence of the
absent ‘other’. No meaning can, therefore, even be definitive, but is merely an outcome of a particular
interpretation
1. According to the passage, Derrida believes that the system of binary opposition
A. represents a prioritization or hierarchy
B. reconciles contradictions and dualities
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C. weakens the process of marginalization and ordering of truth
D. deconstructs reality
2. Derrida rejects the idea of ‘definitive authority of the subject’ because
A. interpretation of the text may not make the unseen visible
B. the meaning of the text is based on binary opposites
C. the implicit power relationship is often ignored
D. any act of interpretation must refer to what the author intends
PRACTICE PASSAGES
PASSAGE 1
That Louise Nevelson is believed by many critics to be the greatest twentieth-century sculptor is all the more
remarkable because the greatest resistance to women artists has been, until recently, in the field of
sculpture. Since Neolithic times, sculpture has been considered the prerogative of men, partly, perhaps, for
purely physical reasons: it was erroneously assumed that women were not suited for the hard manual labor
required in sculpting stone, carving wood, or working in metal. It has been only during the twentieth century
that women sculptors have been recognized as major artists, and it has been in the United States, especially
since the decades of the fifties and sixties, that women sculptors have shown the greatest originality and
creative power. Their rise to prominence parallels the development of sculpture itself in the United States:
while there had been a few talented sculptors in the United States before the 1940’s, it was only after
1945—when New York was rapidly becoming the art capital of the world—that major sculpture was
produced in the United States. Some of the best was the work of women.
By far the most outstanding of these women is Louise Nevelson, who in the eyes many critics is the most
original female artist alive today. One famous and influential critic, Hilton Kramer, said of her work, “For
myself, I think Ms. Nevelson succeeds where the painters often fail.”
Her works have been compared to the Cubist constructions of Picasso, the Surrealistic objects of Miro, and
the Merzbau of Schwitters. Nevelson would be the first to admit that she has been influenced by all of these,
as well as by African sculpture, and by Native American and pre-Columbian art, but she has absorbed all
these influences and still created a distinctive art that expresses the urban landscape and the aesthetic
sensibility of the twentieth century. Nevelson says, “I have always wanted to show the world that art is
everywhere, except that it has to pass through a creative mind.”
Using mostly discarded wooden objects like packing crates, broken pieces of furniture, and abandoned
architectural ornaments, all of which she has hoarded for years, she assembles architectural constructions of
great beauty and power. Creating very freely with no sketches, she glues and nails objects together, paints
them black, or more rarely white or gold, and places them in boxes. These assemblages, walls, even entire
environments create a mysterious, almost awe-inspiring atmosphere. Although she has denied any symbolic
or religious intent in her works, their three-dimensional grandeur and even their titles, such as Sky Cathedral
and Night Cathedral, suggest such connotations. In some ways, her most ambitious works are closer to
architecture than to traditional sculpture, but then neither Louise Nevelson nor her art fits into any neat
category.
1. The author quotes Hilton Kramer in lines 25-27 most probably in order to illustrate which of the
following?
A. The realism of Nevelson’s work
B. The unique qualities of Nevelson’s style
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C. The extent of critical approval of Nevelson’s work
D. A distinction between sculpture and painting
E. A reason for the prominence of women sculptors since the 1950’s
PASSAGE 2
Computer programmers often remark that computing machines, with a perfect lack of discrimination, will do
any foolish thing they are told to do. The reason for this lies, of course, in the narrow fixation of the
computing machine’s “intelligence “on the details of its own perceptions-its inability to be guided by any
large context. In a psychological description of the computer intelligence, three related adjectives come to
mind: single-minded, literal-minded, and simpleminded. Recognizing this, we should at the same time
recognize that this single-mindedness, literal-mindedness, and simple-mindedness also characterizes
theoretical mathematics, though to a lesser extent.
Since science tries to deal with reality, even the most precise sciences normally work with more or less
imperfectly understood approximations toward which scientists must maintain an appropriate scepticism.
Thus, for instance, it may come as a shock to mathematicians to learn that the Schrodinger equation for the
hydrogen atom is not a literally correct description of this atom, but only an approximation to a somewhat
more correct equation taking account of spin, magnetic dipole and relativistic effects; and that this corrected
equation is itself only an imperfect approximation to an infinite set of quantum field-theoretical equations.
Physicists, looking at the original Schrodinger equation, learn to sense in it the presence of many invisible
terms in addition to the differential terms visible, and this sense inspires an entirely appropriate disregard for
the purely technical features of the equation. This very healthy scepticism is foreign to the mathematical
approach.
Mathematics must deal with well-defined situations. Thus, mathematicians depend on an intellectual effort
outside of mathematics for the crucial specification of the approximation that mathematics is to take
literally. Give mathematicians a situation that is the least bit ill-defined, and they will make it well-defined,
perhaps appropriately, but perhaps inappropriately. In some cases, the mathematician’s literal-mindedness
may have unfortunate consequences. The mathematicians turn the scientist’s theoretical assumptions, that
is, their convenient points of analytical emphasis, into axioms, and then take these axioms literally. This
brings the danger that they may also persuade the scientists to take these axioms literally. The question,
central to the scientific investigation but intensely disturbing in the mathematical context “what happens if
the axioms are relaxed” is thereby ignored.
The physicist rightly dreads precise argument, since an argument that is convincing only if it is precise loses
all its force if the assumptions on which it is based are slightly changed, whereas an argument that is
convincing though imprecise may well be stable under small perturbations of its underlying assumptions.
2. According to the passage, mathematicians present a danger to scientists for which of the following
reasons?
A. Mathematicians may provide theories that are incompatible with those already developed by
scientists.
B. Mathematicians may define situation in a way that is incomprehensible to scientists.
C. Mathematicians may convince scientists that theoretical assumptions are facts.
D. Scientists may come to believe that axiomatic statements are untrue.
E. Scientists may begin to provide arguments that are convincing but imprecise.
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