Literary Quiz Contest

Organized by the
Literary & Cultural Forum
Deptt. Of English & Foreign Languages
Tezpur University
Quiz round # 1
 1. With which enormously influential perspective or practice
is the early-twentieth-century thinker Sigmund Freud
associated?

 a) eugenics
 b) psychoanalysis
 c) phrenology
 d) anarchism

The correct answer is : b) psychoanalysis

 2. Assamese writer Rebati Mohan Dutta Chaudhury is
popularly known as…

a) Bihagi Kabi
b) Ekhud Kakaidew
c) Silabhadra
d) Bakul Banar Kabi

Ans: c)
 3. Which best describes the imagist movement, exemplified in
the work of T. E. Hulme and Ezra Pound?

 a) a poetic aesthetic vainly concerned with the way words appear on the
page
 b) an effort to rid poetry of romantic fuzziness and facile emotionalism,
replacing it with a precision and clarity of imagery
 c) an attention to alternate states of consciousness and uncanny imagery
 d) a neoplatonic poetics that stresses the importance of poetry aiming to
achieve its ideal "form"

The correct answer is : b) an effort to rid poetry of romantic

fuzziness and facile emotionalism, replacing it with a precision
and clarity of imagery.
 4. Which phrase indicates the interior flow of thought
employed in high-modern literature?

 a) automatic writing
 b) confused daze
 c) total recall
 d) stream of consciousness
 e) free association

The correct answer is: d) stream of consciousness

 5. Which of the following became the most popular Romantic
poetic form, following on Wordsworth's claim that poetic
inspiration is contained within the inner feelings of the
individual poet as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings"?

 a) the lyric poem written in the first person

 b) the sonnet
 c) doggerel rhyme
 d) the political tract
 e) the ode

The correct answer is: a) the lyric poem written in the first person
 6. Which royal dynasty was established in the resolution of the so-called
War of the Roses and continued through the reign of Elizabeth I?

a)Tudor
b)Windsor
c)York
d)Lancaster
e)Valois

The correct answer is : a) Tudor

 7. Who introduced the art of printing into England?

a) Elizabeth Eisenstein
b) Johannes Gutenberg
c) Henry VIII
d) William Tyndale
e) William Caxton

The correct answer : e)William Caxton

 8. Which novel did T. S. Eliot praise for utilizing a new "mythical method"
in place of the old "narrative method" and demonstrates the use of ancient
mythology in modernist fiction to think about "making the modern world
possible for art"?

a) Virginia Woolf's The Waves

b) Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness
c) James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake
d) E. M. Forster's A Passage to India
e) James Joyce's Ulysses

Ans: e)
 9. When was the ban finally lifted on D. H. Lawrence's novel
Lady Chatterley's Lover, written in 1928.

a) 1930
b) 1945
c) 1960
d) 2000

Ans: c)
 10. This prominent literary figure of Assam came into the
limelight with his poem “Xaap” in his college days. Who is
he?

a) Homen Borgohain
b) Syed Abdul Malik
c) Nabakanta Baruah
d) Hiren Bhattacharya
Ans: a)
 11. Which of the following terms is defined as the application of a
scientific attitude of mind toward studying the Bible, seen as a mere text of
history and not an infallibly sacred document?

a) New Criticism
b) Critical Inquiry
c) Scientific Bibliology
d) Higher Criticism
e) New Historicism

Ans: d)
 12. Which South-African novelist won the Nobel Prize for
literature in 2007?

a) Orhan Pamuk
b) Harold Pinter
c) J. M. Coetzee
d) Doris Lessing
Ans: d)
 13. Who is the present president of Asom Sahitya Sabha?

a) Nilamani Phukan
b) Nagen saikia
c) Arupa Patangia Kalita
d) Kanaksen Deka
Ans: d)
 14. Who began to ignite the embers of dissent against the
Catholic church in November 1517 in a movement that came
to be known as the Reformation?

a) Anne Boleyn
b) Martin Luther
c) Pope Leo X
d) Ulrich Zwingli
e) John Calvin

Ans: b) Martin Luther

 15. “Halodhia Soraye Baodhan Khay” is written by...

a) Hiren Gohain
b) Nabakanta Baruah
c) Jatin Goswami
d) Homen Borgohain
Ans: d)
 16. Which of the following phrases best characterizes the late-
nineteenth century aesthetic movement which widened the
breach between artists and the reading public, sowing the
seeds of modernism?

a) art for intellect's sake

b) art for God's sake
c) art for the masses
d) art for art's sake
e) art for sale

The correct answer is : d) art for art's sake

 17. Which historical figure initiated a series of religious
persecutions condemning Protestants as heretics and burning
them at the stake in the 1550s?

a) Archbishop Cranmer
b) Catherine of Aragon
c) Elizabeth I
d) Mary, Queen of Scots
e) Mary Tudor
Ans: e)
 18. What is the title of the 1st volume of Dr. Hiren Gohain’s
autobiography?

a) Jibonor Batot
b) Botahot Kor Godhuli Gopal
c) Adha Likha Dastawez
d) Jibon Jatra
Ans: b)
 19. To what subgenre did the Senecan influence give rise, as
evidenced in the first English tragedy Gorboduc, or Ferrex
and Porrex?

a) villain tragedy
b) poetic tragedy
c) heroic tragedy
d) revenge tragedy
e) pastoral tragedy
Ans: d)
 20. Who succeeded Elizabeth I on the throne of England?

a) Elizabeth II
b) Henry IX
c) James I
d) Charles I
e) Mary, Queen of Scots

 Ans: c)
 21. Which hero made his earliest appearance in Celtic
literature before becoming a staple subject in French, English,
and German literatures?

a)Beowulf
b)Arthur
c)Caedmon
d)Augustine of Canterbury
e)Alfred
Ans: b)
 22. Who would be called the English Homer and father of
English poetry?

a) Bede
b) Sir Thomas Malory
c) Geoffrey Chaucer
d) Caedmon
e) John Gower

Ans: c)
 23. What is the first Assamese novel to win Sahitya Academy
Award?

a) Mrityunjai
b) Yaruingam
c) Aximot Zar Heral Xima
d) Nahoror Niribili Saa
Ans: b)
 24. Which influential medieval text purported to reveal the
secrets of the afterlife?

a) Dante's Divine Comedy

b) Boccaccio's Decameron
c) The Dream of the Rood
d) Chaucer's Legend of Good Women
e) Gower's Confessio Amantis
Ans: a)
 25. Famous Assamese novel “Maharathi” written by
Chandraprasad Saikia is based on the life of which character?

a) Arjun
b) Bhim
c) Karna
d) Duryodhan
Ans: c)
 26. Which two Indian writers are among the six shortlisted
novelists for the 2008 Man Booker prize?

a) Amitav Ghosh & Aravind Adiga

b) Shashi Tharoor & Vikram Chandra
c) Shashi Deshpande & Agha Shahid Ali
d) Raja Rao & Girish Karnad

Ans: a) Amitav Ghosh for his novel Sea of Poppies & Aravind Adiga for his
debutant novel The White Tiger
 27. Who is the current chief editor of “Gariaxi” magazine?

a) Harekrishna Deka
b) Hemanta Barman
c) Kanaksen Deka
d) Tilak Hazarika

Ans: a)
 28. Which Italian novelist gained enormous response from
international readers through his novels “The Name of the
Rose”, “Foucault’s Pendulum” and “The Island of the Day
Before”?

a) José Saramago
b) Gabriel García Márquez
c) Aldo Manutius
d) Umberto Eco
Ans: d)
 29. What was the name of Don Quixote's horse?

a) Bucephalus
b) Rosinante
c) Cathederis
d) La Mancha
Ans: b)
 30. What was the setting for Boris Pasternak's "Doctor
Zhivago"?

a) The Greek War of Independence

b) Russia's October Revolution
c) Czarist Russia in the late 1800s
d) The post-war World War II military dictatorship in Greece
Ans: b)
 31. Noted for his "Art of Love," who was banished to a
remote outpost on the Black Sea in AD 8 on charges of
immorality?

a) Horace
b) Ovid
c) Virgil
d) Cicero
Ans: b)
 32. Gustave Flaubert's most famous book got him charged
with immorality, because its main character is an adulteress.
Who was she?

a) Mata Hari
b) Emma Bovary
c) Lady Chatterley
d) Anna Karenina
Ans: b)
 33. Which writer lost use of his left hand at the Battle of
Lepanto, was once kidnapped by Barbary pirates and started
his masterpiece while sitting in jail?

a) Leo Tolstoy
b) Voltaire
c) Geoffrey Chaucer
d) Miguel de Cervantes
Ans: d)
 34. "... A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" is
said by which character of a Shakespearen play?

a) Lady Macbeth
b) Richard II
c) Hamlet
d) Juliet
Ans: d)
 35. What is similar between the two Assamese novels
“Dhanya Nara Tanu Bhaal” and “Zakeri Nahike Upam”?

a) Both are Jnanpeeth award winner.

b) Both are written by the same author.
c) Both are based on the life of Sankardev.
d) Both are published in the same year.
Ans: c)
 36. Which Shakespearean play follows the adventures of
identical twin brothers, both named Antipholus?

a) As You Like It
b) The Comedy of Errors
c) Much Ado About Nothing
d) The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Ans: b)
 37. During which war did the battle take place that inspired
Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poem, "Charge of the Light
Brigade"?

a) Napoleonic Wars
b) Boer War
c) World War I
d) Crimean War
Ans d)
 38. Which of these playwrights won the Pulitzer Prize four
times, as well as the 1936 Nobel Prize for literature?

a) Eugene O'Neill
b) Ernest Hemingway
c) Tennessee Williams
d) William Faulkner
Ans: a)
39. Whose autobiography is “Mor Hridoy Ekhan Yoddhakhetra”?

a) Kanaksen Deka
b) Hiren Bhattacharya
c) Homen Borgohain
d) Bhabendranath Baruah
Ans: c)
 40. Why was playwright Ben Jonson thrown in jail in 1598?

a) Stealing bread
b) Divorcing his wife
c) Killing an actor in a duel
d) Plagiarizing Shakespeare
Ans: c)
 41. Which Jane Austen novel was originally titled "Elinor
and Marianne"?

a) Emma
b) Mansfield Park
c) Pride and Prejudice
d) Sense and Sensibility
Ans: d)
 42. What type of fish is caught by the old man in
Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea"?

a) Shark
b) Whale
c) Sawfish
d) Marlin
Ans: d)