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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. What literary agency do Rushdie and Roth share?

2. In what year did Heller publish Catch-22?

3. In what translation does Rushdie note having first read One Hundred Years of Solitude?

4. In what year does Rushdie note having first read Slaughterhouse-Five?

5. How many days pass for Shahryar and Shah Zaman between their revenge for cuckoldry and their marriages to Scheherazade and Dunyazad?

Short Essay Questions

1. To what does the “Lakshman rekha” refer?

2. Why does Rushdie note that the Philip Roth Lecture he gives takes Roth as its topic?

3. What answer to the question of difficult reading does Rushdie propose?

4. What was Rushdie’s last assignment as a student journalist?

5. What, from context, does Rushdie mean by saying “English, I understood, could be chutnified” (91)?

6. How does Rushdie report Slaughterhouse-Five presents war?

7. What reason for enjoying Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” does Rushdie note?

8. What does Rushdie note was his first attraction to Thousand Nights and One Night?

9. For what reason does Rushdie report Scheherazade pled for her life to be spared by her husband?

10. In what way does Rushdie contrast the animal fables of “the Eastern canon” with those represented by Aesop?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Readerly attention focuses on the following passage: “I believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are, or, not to claim too much, that the act of falling in love with a book or story changes us in some way, and the beloved tale becomes a part of our picture of the world, a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgements and choices in our daily lives” (3). Does the passage bear out? What in the anthology and in your experience suggests as much? How does it do so?

Essay Topic 2

It might be argued that the essays, taken together, comment about what, for Rushdie, is and is not good writing. What vision of good writing can be taken from the text, what in the text supports that vision, and how does it do so?

Essay Topic 3

Section divisions, their titles, and chapter numbering / division schema are all components of paratext. That is, they are not part of the text but are associated with it closely and affect its meaning. What significance, if any, accrues to the chapter-numbering scheme at work in Languages of Truth? If there is significance, how does that significance manifest? If there is not, what in the anthology supports the paratextual divisions that are in place?

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