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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 is the poem Swammerdam set?

2. How does Roland feel about Fergus Wolff?

3. Where is the book that Roland looks at usually kept?

4. What attraction of Roland's apartment is forbidden to him?

5. Where does Cropper live?

Short Essay Questions

1. How does Roland react to Maud's idea of how to go about reading the letters?

2. How do Christabel and Ash feel about meeting secretly?

3. What is Roland's initial reaction to the letters?

4. What does Maud tell Beatrice about the importance of what she finds in Ellen's journal and papers?

5. Where did Maud get the pin that she is wearing in her turban?

6. Describe the relationship between Blackadder and Cropper.

7. How do Beatrice Nest's students view her?

8. What, in her own life, does Val compare Roland's work to?

9. How does Fergus Wolff know about Christabel LaMotte?

10. How does Roland compare Maud to Christabel?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Knowledge and reality are constructed in different ways throughout the novel, and one way is by the consensus of a society. Discuss knowledge and reality as a group agreement in the novel.

1) Discuss the story of the giant that Ash writes about from Yorkshire. How do the local people create knowledge through myth? Identify other examples of this in the novel.

2) How do scholarly groups create reality through consensus in the novel? How does this affect the relationship between what is known and the objective truth?

3) What happens when the individual's perspective is different from the group consensus, as with Swammerdam?

Essay Topic 2

Discuss the structure of the novel.

1) Why and how does the novel use letters, excerpts of poems, and journal entries in its telling of the story?

2) How does the novel gradually reveal the story of Ash and Maud?

3) How do the characters of Roland and Maud change over the course of the novel?

Essay Topic 3

Discus the role of objects in the story, and how they are and are not invested with meaning.

1) What gives an object meaning? How do the letters that Roland finds have meaning, and why is the meaning only identified when Roland reads the letters?

2) How does context relate to meaning? Why can Maud only interpret Christabel's doll poem correctly in the context of Christabel's room? What other examples are there in the novel of context giving meaning to objects or words?

3) What meanings do the physical objects in Ash's box have? How are these meanings different for different people, in different contexts?

(see the answer keys)

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