User:KF/Literature quiz

You can test your knowledge of literatures in English by doing this quiz. Question 1 is fairly easy, Question 30 is probably the most difficult one. Of course Wikipedia is at your disposal. However, from Question 21 or so onward, you will have to rely mainly on other resources as you will hardly find a corresponding Wikipedia article (or maybe just a stub). It is hoped that participants will see the final part of the quiz as an incentive to write new articles.

PS You may find that you know the answers to some of the questions from watching the movie rather than reading the book. In that case, you might, in the future, consider reading the book first and watching the film afterwards—comparing the two versions can be great fun. Now enjoy the quiz!

1

In 1991 Michael Crichton published a novel—a cautionary tale on unconsidered biological tinkering which explores the consequences of an attempt to re-create certain species of dinosaur to serve as amusement park attractions— which in 1993 was turned into a successful movie by Steven Spielberg. What is the title of both book and film?

2

One night in Covent Garden, London, a Professor Higgins, a linguist, makes the acquaintance of a Cockney flower girl and decides to teach her proper English and also proper manners. What is her name, and who wrote the 1913 play which starts with the above scene? Image:8_ustinov.jpg

3

Which Agatha Christie novel, filmed in 1978, is set in Egypt, what is the name of the character in this screenshot (played by Peter Ustinov), and what country does he come from?

4

In the days before the American Revolutionary War a villager of Dutch descent living in what today is New York State escapes his nagging wife by wandering up into the mountains. After various adventures he settles down under a shady tree and falls asleep. He wakes up 20 years later and returns to his village. He immediately gets into trouble when he hails George III, not knowing that in the meantime the American Revolution has taken place and he is not supposed to be a loyal subject of the Hanoverian king any longer.

What is the sleeper's name? Who wrote the short story?

5

Theatrical superstitions are superstitions particular to actors or the theatre. For example, Shakespeare's play Macbeth is said to be cursed, so actors avoid saying its name. What euphemism do they use instead?

6

What famous short poem ends with the line "And don't have any kids yourself"? Who wrote it?

7

In a novel by Warren Adler, Oliver, a lawyer, and his wife Barbara, a caterer, embark on a bitter fight for material possessions when their marriage begins to fall apart. What is Oliver and Barbara's family name?

8

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

These are the last six lines of a 14-line poem. What is the literary term for such a poem, and who wrote this one?

9

Who wrote a short novel about a gardener who knows the world only from television, and who lives and acts accordingly? What is the title of the book?

10

In the early 1930s a British author wrote a novel in which he described a mystical, harmonious valley somewhere in the Himalayas, gently guided from a monastery, a place which has become synonymous with any earthly paradise—a permanently happy land, isolated from the outside world.

What is the name of that fictional place? Who is the author? What is the title of the novel?

11

It is a term used to denote a genre of popular fiction written for, and marketed to, young women, especially single, working women in their twenties. The genre came to prominence in the mid-1990s and continues to sell well in the 2000s, with titles topping bestseller lists and the creation of imprints devoted entirely to it.

It features hip, stylish female protagonists, usually in their twenties or early thirties, in urban settings, and follows their love lives and struggles in business (often the publishing or advertising industries). The books usually feature an irreverent tone and frank sexual themes.

What term is defined here?

12

He travels to Belmont seeking to marry a beautiful and wealthy heiress, whose father has left a will specifying that her suitors must choose between three caskets of gold, silver, and lead. The suitor who correctly looks past the outer show to choose the lead casket will win her hand. The others will discover only a "blinking idiot", and must thereafter live eternally as bachelors. After two comical suitors have chosen incorrectly, the third one makes the correct choice, perhaps aided by a subtle hint from the heiress herself.

What is the title of the play whose subplot is given above?

13

What is the name of the gay author whose most noted work to date is a novel sequence about the residents of 28 Barbary Lane, San Francisco, the first portions of which were initially serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle? What is the title of the first volume?

File:Slr.jpg

14

This is a screenshot from a film based on a novel written by a U.S. author. Another novel by the same writer, published 15 years earlier, is about the cloning of a 20th century politician. What is the name of the politician?

15

Horner's impotence trick—to pretend impotence in order to be allowed where no complete man may go—is distantly based on the classic Roman comedy Eunuchus by Terence. The upper-class town rake Harry Horner mounts a campaign for seducing as many respectable ladies as possible and thus cuckolding, or "putting horns on", their husbands: Horner's very name serves to alert the audience to what is going on. He spreads a false rumour of his own impotence, in order to convince married men that he can safely be allowed to socialize with their wives. The rumour is also meant to assist his mass seduction campaign by helping him identify women who are secretly eager for extramarital sex, because those women will react to a supposedly impotent man with tell-tale horror and disgust. This diagnostic trick, which invariably works perfectly, is one of the play's many running jokes at the expense of hypocritical upper-class women who are rakes at heart.

What is the title of this Restoration comedy, and who is its author? What exactly was restored during the Restoration?

16

According to Emily Dickinson, there is no frigate like ...

17

Miriam Hopkins, Lynn Fontanne and Rachel Weisz played the same role—Hopkins on the big screen, and the other two on the stage. What is the title of the play, and who wrote it?

18

The rules for writing mystery novels were codified in 1929 by an Englishman. According to him, a detective story "must have as its main interest the unravelling of a mystery; a mystery whose elements are clearly presented to the reader at an early stage in the proceedings, and whose nature is such as to arouse curiosity, a curiosity which is gratified at the end."

His "Ten Commandments" (or "Decalogue") are as follows:

1. The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.
2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
7. The detective himself must not commit the crime.
8. The detective is bound to declare any clues upon which he may happen to light.
9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

Who wrote this set of rules? What was his profession?

19

It is a play about the power struggle between John, a university professor, and Carol, one of his female students. Carol accuses him of sexual harassment and, by doing so, spoils his chances of being accorded tenure. The play has often been characterized as an attack on political correctness and affirmative action, yet it should also be viewed as a close scrutiny of power relations, especially in the elusive world of academia.

What is the title of the play?

20

Which novel ends with the following words:

So [said the doctor]. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?

File:Sternwood.jpg

21

This is James Stewart as General Sternwood in the 1978 remake of a 1946 movie. What is the name of the character sitting opposite him? Who played him in 1946? Who in 1978?

22

I've always been a quitter. I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of hornrims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams. I got married, separated, divorced. Quit smoking, quit jogging, quit eating red meat. I quit jobs: digging graves, pumping gas, selling insurance, showing pornographic films in an art theater in Boston. When I was nineteen I made frantic love to a pinch-faced, sack-bosomed girl I'd known from high school. She got pregnant. I quit town. About the only thing I didn't give up on was the summer camp.

Let me tell you about it.

What is the name of this first person narrator?

23

My name is ■■■■ ■■■■■■■■■, and I am a failure. All my life, almost forty years of it, I have been a loser. My ability to miss out, to fall short, to come to grief, amounts almost to a talent. So singular is this gift of mine that I have tried on occasion to exploit it, to make of it a virtue, to set its scene with humorous production. But I have failed in that too. Even my failure is a failure. My life has lurched from one catastrophe to another.

It all began on the day of my birth. I was born a loser, since my parents had wished for a girl. And from that day, it was downhill all the way. My schooling was disastrous. Every September saw me at another establishment of education. Not that my parents were itinerant. On the contrary, they were stolid working-class, immovable from both dwelling and opinion. [...]

Again: What is the narrator's name?

24

[...]

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show

To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the centre sit,

Yet when the other far doth roam,

It leans, and hearkens after it,

And grows erect, as that comes home.

[...]

Who wrote this poem?

25

It is a form of drama that sprang up in Great Britain in the 1990s. Created by young playwrights, it intends to involve and affect the audience by presenting vulgar, shocking, and confrontational material on the stage. The term was coined by theatre critic and teacher at Boston University's London program, Aleks Sierz, and popularized in his 2001 book.

What term is defined here?

26

Which of the following works of literature (just one) was not filmed by Alfred Hitchcock?

• Eric Ambler: Journey into Fear
• Paul Anthelme: Nos Deux Consciences
• Robert Bloch: Psycho
• Patricia Highsmith: Strangers on a Train
• Frances Iles: Before the Fact
• Frederick Knott: Dial M for Murder
• Josephine Tey: A Shilling for Candles
• Ethel Lina White: The Wheel Spins
• Cornell Woolrich: "It Had to Be Murder"

27

The image shows actress Vivien Merchant as Ruth in the film version of a play written by her then-husband. What is his name, what is the title of the film, and who directed it?

28

A Thanksgiving dinner triggers all kinds of unexpected changes in the lives of a group of Americans living in a small university town in California. Ernest Wright, the pater familias, an authority on Freud, is having a secret affair with his secretary, an ungainly woman who nevertheless has had many lovers. His 17 year-old daughter Daphne secretly leaves the family home when everyone else is asleep to spend the night with one of her father's work colleagues. His 15 year-old son Ben keeps pestering everybody to listen to his mediocre poems, including a novelist and his wife who have come to stay for the weekend. The novelist has almost completed his latest book. Then something quite out of the ordinary happens.

What is the title of this novel? Who is its author? When was it first published?

29

The notion of one art for the "cultural", i.e., the favored few in any given society and of another subart for the "uncultured", i.e., an excluded majority as deficient in Gutenberg skills as they are untutored in "taste", in fact represents the last survival in mass industrial societies (capitalist, socialist, communist—it makes no difference in this regard) of an invidious distinction proper only to a class-structured community. Precisely because it carries on, as it has carried on ever since the middle of the eighteenth century, a war against that anachronistic survival, Pop Art is, whatever its overt politics, subversive: a threat to all hierarchies insofar as it is hostile to order and ordering in its own realm. What the final intrusion of Pop into the citadels of High Art provides, therefore, for the critic is the exhilarating new possibility of making judgments about the "goodness" and "badness" of art quite separated from distinctions between "high" and "low" with their concealed class bias.

What is the name of the literary critic who wrote this?

30

What do the novels Boy in the Water, Concluding, Miss Pym Disposes, A Private Place, and The Wishing Game have in common?

<KF> 04:11, August 20, 2005 (UTC)