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

Multiple Choice Questions

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

2. 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) John Updike.
(b) William Faulkner.
(c) Dylan Thomas.
(d) F. Scott Fitzgerald.

3. Gardner refers to boring, worn out language as being what kind of mask?
(a) Dramatic.
(b) Hamlet.
(c) Need-for-approval.
(d) Pollyanna.

4. What anthology of fiction did Gardner publish with a colleague at Chico College?
(a) The Life and Times of Chaucer.
(b) Dragon, Dragon, and Other Tales.
(c) The Forms of Fiction.
(d) The Complete Works of the Gawain Poet.

5. Which author does Gardner say has a style at parties to take to the floor at any cost, telling funny stories?
(a) Bernard Malamud.
(b) Joyce Carol Oates.
(c) Stanley Elkin.
(d) Truman Capote.

6. With what older colleague did Gardner publish an anthology of fiction at Chico College?
(a) David Wellesley.
(b) James Fenway.
(c) Lennis Dunlap.
(d) Michael Ewing.

7. The two things that keep the common reader turning the pages, according to Gardner are story or what?
(a) Theme.
(b) Mood.
(c) Argument.
(d) Character.

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

9. Which title does Raymond Carver say is the only one he recalls of John Gardner's manuscripts in the Forward?
(a) Grendel.
(b) Nickel Mountain.
(c) The Life and Times of Chaucer.
(d) The King's Indian.

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

11. What is one of the philosophers who has maintained that words inevitably distance us from the brute existence, according to Gardner in Chapter 1?
(a) Socrates.
(b) Nietzsche.
(c) Plato.
(d) Kierkegaard.

12. Gardner suggests that the dazzling poetry of Mercutio's Queen Mab speech is not the same poetry that who speaks?
(a) Juliet.
(b) Macbeth.
(c) Petrucio.
(d) Hamlet.

13. Who developed the style of the "epiphany story" in The Dubliners?
(a) Beckett.
(b) McKinley.
(c) Joyce.
(d) Conrad.

14. 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) "You'll know in time."
(b) "Definitely yet."
(c) "Definitely no."
(d) "God only knows."

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

Short Answer Questions

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

2. What does Gardner compare to the floors and structural supports in a fine old mansion in Chapter 1?

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

4. Of whose writing does Gardner say that no reader can doubt the impulse to capture real life, "the special quality of country-Welsh craziness"?

5. What name does Gardner assign to the teenage daughter whose unknown father moves next door in Chapter 1?

(see the answer keys)

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