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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. As cancer is imagined to be caused by repression, how was TB explained?

2. When did the Swiss writer Henri Amiel write about sadness and tuberculosis?

3. When did Schlegel write his essay On the Study of Greek Poetry?

4. What was fever a sign of in TB, as described in Chapter 3?

5. When did the Concourt brothers write about TB in their novel Madame Gervaisais?

Short Essay Questions

1. What did Marie Bashkirtsev write about having tuberculosis?

2. How did the metaphor of TB provide for two contradictory applications?

3. Why does Sontag believe that cancer patients were not told about their illness, but patients with cardiac disease were told about their condition?

4. Who invented the cult of TB?

5. What does Sontag want to debunk about illness as a metaphor in her book?

6. What does Sontag reveal about metaphor and tuberculosis (TB) and cancer?

7. What stages does cancer have and how does it progress?

8. When was it possible to separate the conception of TB and cancer?

9. How was TB seen as a disease of passion?

10. How did Sontag see people treated who had cancer, and why?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Genre is a means of classifying literature. What is the genre of the novel? Why is it not a treatise?

Essay Topic 2

Susan Sontag is the author of Illness as Metaphor. Why did Sontag write Illness as Metaphor?

Essay Topic 3

How did the idea that man created his disease lead to the concept that the sick person caused his illness? What dangers were there in this concept?

(see the answer keys)

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