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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What does Camus suggest happens in bad novels?
(a) There is substantial over-writing, especially with descriptive passages.
(b) There is too much emphasis on structure.
(c) Thought becomes more important than style.
(d) Dialogue is poorly written and often inappropriate to character.

2. What common quality can be found in Kafka, Proust and Plotinus?
(a) Pity for suffering.
(b) Rejection of paradise.
(c) Nostalgia for a lost paradise.
(d) Nostalgia for childhood.

3. What attitude can overcome all fate?
(a) Indolence.
(b) Indifference.
(c) Diigence.
(d) Scorn.

4. What is astonishing about eternal values?
(a) That they exist at all.
(b) They survive wars and other conflicts.
(c) The very fact that they exist without reference to God.
(d) They transcend cultural factors.

5. What has Camus to say about 'great revolutions'?
(a) They never last.
(b) They take us into a sure future.
(c) They are always metaphysical.
(d) They are always metatextual.

6. Why is it necessary to read a Kafka work twice?
(a) There is a double possibility of interpretation.
(b) His prose is very dense.
(c) There are complex relationships and a host of characters.
(d) In order to savor the beauty of his writing.

7. Who was Adrienne Lecouvreur?
(a) Voltaire's mistress.
(b) A French actress.
(c) A French philosopher.
(d) A French composer of operetta.

8. What sacrifice does Loyola say God rejoices in?
(a) The sacrifice of the intellect.
(b) The sacrifice of celibacy.
(c) The sacrifice of hope.
(d) The sacrifice of humility?

9. How are myths given life?
(a) Through representations on Grecian urns.
(b) Through cinema and stage representation.
(c) Through human imagination.
(d) Through their coming true.

10. How does Camus classify regret?
(a) As sin.
(b) As mere sentimentality.
(c) As another form of hope.
(d) As being akin to grief, therefore dangerous.

11. What technique is employed by philosophical novelists?
(a) They often construct their novels as conversations.
(b) They write with heavy didacticism.
(c) They use characters as mouthpieces for their philosophy.
(d) They use imagery rather than argument to convey their ideas.

12. What quality does Camus call 'the fatal evasion'?
(a) Mendacity.
(b) Despair.
(c) Hope.
(d) Faith.

13. Why are European cemeteries hideous?
(a) People beautify what they love, not what they hate--and they hate death.
(b) They are badly planned.
(c) They are not maintained properly.
(d) Only poor art-work and sculpture is used.

14. What is ridiculous about the writer who emulated Peregrinos?
(a) He tried to commit suicide by drowning in the Seine, but could not sink.
(b) The writer suicided so his book would be noticed, but the book was no good.
(c) The writer suicided in despair and his relatives benefited hugely from the royalties.
(d) He thought the name would make him a great travel writer, but he failed.

15. Of what figurative device is: 'These are our nights of Gethsemane'?
(a) It is an example of idiomatic phrasing.
(b) It is a metaphor.
(c) It is an example of decorative prose.
(d) It is an illusion.

Short Answer Questions

1. Who is the author of Discourses of Edification?

2. Who believed that 'to kill God is to become god oneself'?

3. What has been the focus of don Juan's existence?

4. Once, how were the condemned spared the sight of the scaffold?

5. In what way are people's minds related?

(see the answer keys)

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