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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. Where do Maud, Roland, Euan, Val, and Toby decide the letters should go?

2. What has happened to Roland's landlady's cats?

3. What is Cropper's lecture about?

4. Whose number does Val give to Fergus?

5. How does the apprentice feel about lying?

Short Essay Questions

1. What does Roland start to do at the end of Chapter 26?

2. What happens at Sabine's house when Christabel disappears?

3. What are all the things Ellen puts in the box?

4. How does the subject of Christabel and Ash's letters come up at the race track?

5. How does the medium in the poem introduce her practices to the apprentice?

6. What does the knight tell Melusine when he first sees her?

7. How do Maud and Roland react to Euan's phone call?

8. What offer does Blackadder make to Roland?

9. What do Roland and Maud decide to do at the end of Chapter 18?

10. What are Cropper's relationships with the Ash family like?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

In the novel, scholars are in competition with each other, but they also must cooperate to find truths. Discuss competition versus cooperation in the novel.

1) Why do the characters keep information to themselves, as a possession? Why does Roland keep the letters, and why does Cropper "steal" photos of other letters of Ash? How does secrecy affect knowledge, both of the individual and society?

2) Why is Roland and Maud's picture of Ash and LaMotte incomplete without information from others? If they did not go to other scholars for cooperation, how would their final knowledge be different?

3) How does Cropper's attitude toward cooperation and competition differ from the other scholars in the novel?

Essay Topic 2

In the novel, reading is an active experience, which is greatly influenced by not only the writer's perspective but the reader's perspective. Discuss the role of the reader's bias in the novel.

1) How does Roland's life influence how he interprets Ash? How does this dynamic cause Blackadder, Roland, and Cropper to all have distinctive experiences of Ash?

2) How do the characters' readings of Ash and LaMotte change over the course of the novel, not because of what they learn about the poets, but because of changes in themselves? How do the characters' personal experiences and biases prevent objective understandings of the authors' intentions?

3) How do formal perspectives, like feminism, create a group bias in the reading of LaMotte? What other examples of this dynamic are there in the novel?

Essay Topic 3

The characters pursue knowledge, but they find only an interpretation, not an objective truth. Discuss objective reality in the novel.

1) How do the characters judge the relationship of their knowledge to objective truth? Can the characters ever know that they've accessed objective truth, and how might they?

2) Does objective truth have meaning to the characters? Which is more powerful in affecting the characters' lives, objective truth or the accepted understanding of reality that the characters' share?

3) How does the characters' literary investigation compare to a scientific investigation?

(see the answer keys)

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