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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What is, according to Gardner, the one quality in fiction that cannot be faked?
(a) Honor.
(b) Beauty.
(c) Strangeness.
(d) Love.

2. Who wrote Bartelby the Scrivener?
(a) Thomas Mann.
(b) Ernest Hemingway.
(c) Herman Melville.
(d) James Joyce.

3. What was Gardner's first wife's name?
(a) Nora.
(b) Sarah.
(c) Emily.
(d) Joan.

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

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

6. Of what author does Gardner say his heroes are clown-heroes knocked around by the universe?
(a) James.
(b) Hemingway.
(c) Kafka.
(d) Odets.

7. In Chapter 1, Gardner states that "In a literary culture where the very notion of a 'masterpiece' is commonly thought" what?
(a) Immature.
(b) Impossible.
(c) Barbaric.
(d) Dangerous.

8. Who is the author of Crime and Punishment?
(a) Joyce.
(b) Dostoevsky.
(c) Nabokov.
(d) Flannagan.

9. What is the name of the man who moves next door to his teenage daughter in Gardner's hypothetical story in Chapter 1?
(a) Bob.
(b) Bill.
(c) James.
(d) Frank.

10. What does Gardner say we call a writer who has less feeling for his characters than we feel they deserve?
(a) Tedious.
(b) Mannered.
(c) Stylized.
(d) Frigid.

11. Where had John Gardner taught before Chico State College?
(a) Oberlin College.
(b) DePaul University.
(c) New York University.
(d) University of Ohio.

12. What kind of intelligence does Gardner say is important to the writer in Chapter 1?
(a) Philosophical.
(b) Storyteller's.
(c) Psychological.
(d) Mathematics.

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

14. Who is the author of All the King's Men?
(a) Robert Penn Warren.
(b) William Faulkner.
(c) Ernest Hemingway.
(d) Franz Kafka.

15. Who wrote Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy?
(a) Raymond Carver.
(b) William Faulkner.
(c) Ernest Hemingway.
(d) Theodore Dreiser.

Short Answer Questions

1. What year did Raymond Carver move to Chico, California?

2. Gardner notes in Chapter 1 that all writing requires some measure of a ____ state.

3. What is one of the philosophers who has maintained that words inevitably distance us from the brute existence, according to Gardner in Chapter 1?

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

5. What author of Over the Edge does Gardner cite in Chapter 1?

(see the answer keys)

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