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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. Who is the author of Piers Plowman?
(a) Miller.
(b) Langland.
(c) Joyce.
(d) Salinger.

2. What author does Gardner remark has a persistent mean streak in his writing?
(a) Hemingway.
(b) Joyce.
(c) Salinger.
(d) Kerouac.

3. Who is the author of The Turn of the Screw?
(a) Henry Melville.
(b) Dylan Thomas.
(c) James Joyce.
(d) Henry James.

4. Which philosopher maintained that nothing a writer writes means anything, "all the words are a lunatic blithering," since all language is by nature false and misleading?
(a) Plato.
(b) Kant.
(c) Heidegger.
(d) Nietzsche.

5. What is the honest answer to the question most young writer's ask of "Do I have what it takes to be a writer?" according to Gardner?
(a) "Definitely no."
(b) "Definitely yet."
(c) "You'll know in time."
(d) "God only knows."

6. Of which writer does Gardner say, "the brilliant language with which he describes a minor character cannot help but suggest that the words he chooses are more important to him than the token secretary behind the desk"?
(a) William Faulkner.
(b) F. Scott Fitzgerald.
(c) Dylan Thomas.
(d) John Updike.

7. What psychologist suggests that Jack and the Beanstalk is about penis envy?
(a) Sigmund Freud.
(b) Bruno Bettelheim.
(c) Madison Thomas.
(d) Carl Jung.

8. What does Gardner compare to the floors and structural supports in a fine old mansion in Chapter 1?
(a) Plot.
(b) Character.
(c) Theme.
(d) Action.

9. What author of Over the Edge does Gardner cite in Chapter 1?
(a) Franz Kafka.
(b) Harlan Ellison.
(c) Kurt Vonnegut.
(d) James Joyce.

10. What does Gardner state in Chapter 1 that we call a writer who cares more for language than the other elements of fiction?
(a) Tedious.
(b) Stylized.
(c) Bad.
(d) Mannered.

11. What does Gardner claim is helpful, if it can be kept in partial control, to keep the novelist driven?
(a) A need for love.
(b) A tendency to drink.
(c) A tendency to prove himself.
(d) A psychological wound.

12. Gardner writes in Chapter 1 that when the central character is a victim there is no what?
(a) Suspense.
(b) Action.
(c) Empathy.
(d) Terror.

13. Gardner compares Melville's Moby Dick with what in Chapter 1?
(a) Omoo.
(b) Emma.
(c) To Have and Have Not.
(d) Anna Karanina.

14. Gardner writes in Chapter 1 that if one studies with whom, does he learn that Shakespeare is better than Mickey Spillane?
(a) Dr. Andrew Dryd.
(b) Dr. Michael Mortenson.
(c) Dr. Martin Meyer.
(d) Dr. Stanley Fish.

15. Who wrote Finnegan's Wake?
(a) Robbe-Grillet.
(b) Flaubert.
(c) Joyce.
(d) Nabokov.

Short Answer Questions

1. Who wrote Divine Comedy?

2. Gardner notes in Chapter 1 that Mercutio's madness is fantastic and what?

3. Which sci-fi author wrote A Canticle for Liebowitz?

4. To whose poetry and prose had Gardner made allusions to in the novel Grendel?

5. What is, according to Gardner, the one quality in fiction that cannot be faked?

(see the answer keys)

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