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GRE Literature: World Literature

Subjects : gre, literature
Instructions:
  • Answer 50 questions in 15 minutes.
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  • Match each statement with the correct term.
  • Don't refresh. All questions and answers are randomly picked and ordered every time you load a test.

This is a study tool. The 3 wrong answers for each question are randomly chosen from answers to other questions. So, you might find at times the answers obvious, but you will see it re-enforces your understanding as you take the test each time.
1. Vasili'S cold - imperious - and beautiful daughter - who seduces Pierre into marriage - only to take up with another man immediately. She has affairs with many men - including her brother Anatole. Though known in social circles as a witty woman - she


2. Jack and Nora Clitheroe - The final acts take place on the Easter Rising of 1916.


3. A beautiful young woman who is courted by both Levin and Vronsky - and who ultimately marries Levin. Modeled on Tolstoy'S real-life wife - she is sensitive and perhaps a bit overprotected - shocked by some of the crude realities of life.


4. Concerns a young poet trying to make a name for himself - who becomes trapped in the morass of society's darkest contradiction - Lucien de Rubempré - Eve Chardon - David


5. Ends: 'Yes - they will trample me underfoot - the numbers marching one two three - four hundred million five hundred six - reducing me to specks of voiceless dust - just as - in all good time - they will trample my son who is not my son - and his son


6. Ends: 'But that is the beginning of a new story—the story of the gradual renewal of a man - the story of his gradual regeneration - of his passing from one world into another - of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a


7. Wrote 'The Laugh of the Medusa'






8. The novel depicts the inward journey of Mrs. Curren - an old classics professor. She lives in the Cape Town of the Apartheid era - where she is slowly dying of cancer. She has been philosophically opposed to the Apartheid regime her entire life - but


9. Anna Karenina'S husband. Formal - duty-bound - and cowed by social convention - he constantly presents a flawless facade of a cultivated and capable man.






10. Two married couples - one twenty years older and bitterer than the other - engage in an evening of merciless personal attack - George and Martha - Nick and Honey


11. Tomas and Tereza


12. Ends: 'The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life - and rest in unvisited tombs.'


13. Two students - John and Alan - cuckold a miller.


14. Opens opens in a country store - which is doubling as a Justice of the Peace Court. A hungry boy named Sarty Snopes craves the meat and cheese in the store.


15. A historical psychological novel in two volumes - chronicling an aesthete carpenter'S son and his attempts to socially rise beyond his plebeian upbringing with a combination of talent and hard work - deception and hypocrisy — yet who ultimately allow


16. Parnell and Cranly


17. The husband of Emma Bovary.






18. Reification and class consciousness - Wrote 'The Theory of the Novel' and 'The Historical Novel'






19. Wrote 'Problems of Dostoyevsky' and 'Rabelais and His World'






20. The protagonist - Olga - has always been in love with someone—starting with her father as a young child—and that she inspires mutual affection from most of the people she meets. She marries Kukin and - after his death - Vasily.


21. His main themes include the duality of human nature: sometimes dramatized as the disparity between a character'S decorous social persona and inner corruption - and sometimes as a conflict between two characters (often brothers) who embody the salient






22. The Kafka-influenced novel concerns a dejected researcher who becomes convinced that inanimate objects and situations encroach on his ability to define himself - on his intellectual and spiritual freedom. The protagonist is Antoine Roquentin - Anna


23. Wrote 'Epistemology of the Closet' and 'Between Men'






24. Ends: 'Yes - she thought - laying down her brush in extreme fatigue - I have had my vision.'


25. A flirtatious - witty - young socialite who sends identical love letters to Alceste - Oronte - Acaste - and Clitandre.


26. Gregers and Hjalmar Ekdal


27. Ejlert Lovborg and Thea Elsted


28. Criminal who also goes by Trompe-la-Mort - Jacques Collin - and Abbé Herrera






29. The narrator of 'The Plague -' although he is not revealed to be so until the conclusion.






30. Semi-autobiographical novel that provides a portrait of life in Knoxville - Tennessee - showing how the sudden death of a father affects a young widow - her two children - her atheistic father and the dead man'S alcoholic brother. Protagonist is Rufu


31. It describes the exploits of a discharged U.S. Navy sailor named Benny Profane - his reconnection in New York with a group of pseudo-bohemian artists known as the Whole Sick Crew - and the quest of an aging traveller named Herbert Stencil to identify


32. Based on Euripides' 'Hippolytus' - Tells of a mother'S love for her step-son during her husband'S absence. She drinks poison at the end.


33. Metafictional American writer who wrote 'Lost in the Funhouse' and 'Chimera'






34. Her novels are more notable for their style and characterisation than for their plots. A superficial reading gives the impression that they are sketches of village or suburban life - and comedies of manners - studying the social activities connected






35. The illegitimate son of a wealthy count - who upon receiving an unexpected inheritance is suddenly burdened with responsibility and conflict. His former carefree behavior vanishes and he enters upon a philosophical quest of how one should live a mora






36. Chronicles the tragedy of Edward Ashburnham and his own seemingly perfect marriage and that of two American friends. The novel employs a series of flashbacks in non-chronological order - as well as an unreliable narrator.


37. Achilles' son






38. Wrote 'The Shadow of a Gunman' and 'Red Roses for Me'


39. Wrote 'The Myth of Sisyphus' and 'The Rebel'






40. Wrote exclusively in Alexandrine. His dramaturgy is marked by his psychological insight - the prevailing passion of his characters - a strong Jansensist sense of fate - and the nakedness of both the plot and stage.






41. Wrote 'The Discourse on Language' - Wrote 'Truth and Power' and 'What is an Author?'






42. His plays are generally considered untranslatable.






43. The protagonist of 'The Stranger'






44. Anastasie and Delphine


45. Orgon and Elmire - Damis - Mariane - and Dorine


46. Dmitri Razumikhin and Katerina Ivanova


47. The story is about a businessman called Blake - who is accosted on a train at gunpoint by his former secretary - named Miss Dent. The woman is mentally ill - and is particularly upset with how Blake left her after a one-night stand and then fired her


48. A gentleman'S debating club founded by Ben Franklin.






49. Wrote 'Allegories of Reading' and 'The Resistance to Theory' - Wrote 'Semiology and Rhetoric'






50. Distinguished between the semiotic and the symbolic - intertextuality and abjection - Wrote 'Powers of Horror' - Wrote 'From One Identity to Another' and 'Women'S Time'