View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What type of cancer did the character Watanabe have in Kurosawa's film Ikiru?

2. Who abducted Chryses' daughter in the Iliad?

3. In Chapter 6, how did Groddeck describe illness?

4. Where did Keats die?

5. Who did Kafka write and say that his illness was speaking for him because he wanted it to speak for him?

Short Essay Questions

1. Why was cancer thought to be an inapprorpriate disease for a romantic person in contrast to TB?

2. Why was syphilis and its origin not mysterious?

3. How did the fantasies about TB in the nineteenth century relate to ideals of capitalist accumulation?

4. What did Joseph Severn write was done to Keats' room a couple weeks after his death?

5. What was Menninger's view of illness, and how does Sontag criticize that view?

6. In the nineteenth century, what did disease have to do with the will?

7. In The Magic Mountain how did tuberculosis affect Hans Castorp?

8. How was TB different from the great epidemic diseases of the past?

9. How did Kafka describe TB?

10. What observations did Galen make regarding women who got breast cancer?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Genre is a means of classifying literature. What is the genre of the novel? Why is it not a treatise?

Essay Topic 2

Some scientific studies seemed to link emotion and cancer. How did some scientific studies seem to link emotion and cancer? Why does Sontag believe that any apparent link between cancer and emotion is due to incomplete knowledge about cancer, its causes, and a cure?

Essay Topic 3

TB and cancer are very different diseases. How are TB and cancer very different diseases? How are the diseases generalized? How does that generalization create a mythological construct that is used when writing about the diseases?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 823 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample