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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. To which of the following does Rushdie report his parents moved?

2. Which of the following poems by Housman does Rushdie reference?

3. From which of the following does Rushdie note borrowing?

4. As which of the following does Rushdie gloss"khalaas"?

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

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Heraclitus’s fragment 121 say?

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

3. What lessons does Rushdie find in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice?

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

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

6. What does Rushdie note was his first attraction to Thousand Nights and One Night?

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

8. What does Rushdie identify as the primary value of the protean in literature?

9. What does Rushdie assert that falling in love with stories awakens in children?

10. What idea about Shakespeare does Rushdie ascribe to Howard Brenton?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Readerly attention focuses on the following passage: “I believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are, or, not to claim too much, that the act of falling in love with a book or story changes us in some way, and the beloved tale becomes a part of our picture of the world, a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgements and choices in our daily lives” (3). Does the passage bear out? What in the anthology and in your experience suggests as much? How does it do so?

Essay Topic 2

If the anthology were a work of fiction and nothing else about the work were changed, how reliable would the narrator be? Why?

Essay Topic 3

To what other writer’s work in your experience does Rushdie’s seem most similar? What makes the writers similar? What differentiates them? Overall, which do you regard as doing better at the craft of writing, and why?

(see the answer keys)

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