View a FREE sample

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

Short Answer Questions

1. How large an advance did Rushdie receive for his first published novel?

2. Which of the following authors does Rushdie note having read?

3. Which of the following does Rushdie note Kundera ignores?

4. How many days pass for Shahryar and Shah Zaman between their revenge for cuckoldry and their marriages to Scheherazade and Dunyazad?

5. Which of the following does Rushdie report is considered Roth’s best novel?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Rushdie remark the phase “so it goes” is used to euphemize?

2. How does Rushdie report Slaughterhouse-Five presents war?

3. What was Rushdie’s last assignment as a student journalist?

4. Why does Rushdie note that the Philip Roth Lecture he gives takes Roth as its topic?

5. What, from context, does Rushdie mean by saying “English, I understood, could be chutnified” (91)?

6. What reason for enjoying Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” does Rushdie note?

7. What is the central conceit of Now It Can Be Told?

8. To what does the “Lakshman rekha” refer?

9. What effect does Rushdie note of Romanian orphans having no access to stories?

10. What does Heraclitus’s fragment 121 say?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

In “Heraclitus,” Rushdie asserts “These are the four roots of the self: language, place, community, custom” (58). Does your experience bear out the assertion? How or how not?

Essay Topic 2

What does Rushdie gain from commending the works of other writers? That is, what effect is created by his doing so, and how does it work to the advantage of the anthology?

Essay Topic 3

In the anthology, some individuals are given but one name, while others are given first- and surnames, and still others are accorded names and titles. What significance, if any, accrues to patterns of naming in the book? If no significance accrues, what purpose might be served by the patterns of naming in the book? How does Languages of Truth bear as much out?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 581 words (approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample