Instructions:This quiz is based on our readings for  Weeks 1-4. Copy/ paste this text into your own word processing program, preferably Word.  Put your name in the upper left corner of the first page.Then write the answers beneath each question using a different color or font. Save your work and return it to me as an attachment.  To do this, return to  "Assignments, Review Assignment 1" and click on  "Add Attachments."   After your assignment is attached, click on "submit."

Do not rely on your memory. Look at the texts. You may also consult discussion and lectures. You do not need additional sources. Be scrupulous in your acknowledgment of all sources including lectures, discussions, and texts.

Be sure to ask me questions about this assignment if there is anything you don’t understand.

Part One:5 points each.

Following are 6 quotations (also called “passages”) from our readings (including lectures).

Identify each one giving the title and the author, correctly spelled and punctuated.

Explain:

(a) the context of the passage --what is going on in the story when the passage occurs, explaining specifically who or what is being referred to in the passage, and

(b) the importance of the passage -- why the passage is important to the story as a whole (considering what happens afterward).

Here’s a sample answer (a passage from a book we haven’t read):

Example: “It wasn’t the army. It was some other army.”

Answer:

This is fromThe Handmaid’s Taleby Margaret Atwood.

This is what the main character and narrator Offred remembers as she is telling her husband Luke about losing her job just after the Gileadean take over. When the director told the women at her job that they would no longer be allowed to work, Offred noticed that the “army was there.” Later she realizes that it was not the US army but another army, presumably the army of Gilead.

This shows us that the take-over of the U.S. was done by an extremist sect, possibly a militia, and not by any standard Christian group. By the end of the book we know that the Gileadean regime did not last long.

Passages:

    1.Thinskins pissed me off. Everything about them was hopeless: their screams, their red faces, the smell of their blood; and there was always blood because it was night and they came from Emergency.  

    2. "Have you seen the garden? Not a flower in it. A single geranium or a daisy would give me hope.          If just one dead thing would come back."
"I've brought you seeds," he said. "You just need to plant them." 

    3. "No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human                     affairs were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as                 mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their affairs they were scrutinized and             studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient             creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water."

      4.Then Reinhold Hoffmann knew, as did Konrad Schneider at this same moment, that he had                 lost his race. And he knew that he had lost it, not by the few weeks or months that he had                     feared, but by millennia. The huge and silent shadows driving across the stars, more miles above his         head than he dared to guess, were as far beyond his little “Columbus” as it surpassed the log canoes of     paleolithic man.

       5. His couple seated themselves on the edge of the Formica countertop in the kitchenette,                 and Coretti hesitated in the middle of the empty carpet. Light-years of that carpet seemed to                 separate him from the others, but something called to him across the distance, promising rest and             peace and belonging. And still he hesitated, shaking with an indecision that seemed to rise from the         genetic core of his body’s every cell.

Part II.10 points each.

The following two passages are from Childhood’s End. (Chapter number is in parentheses).

As above, explain the circumstances/context of the passage (who is talking to whom, at what point in the narrative –don’t say “in Chapter 7” or “in the beginning of the book” but explain what is going on at that point of the plot. )

Then say why the passage is important to the novel as a whole, paying particular attention to what has happened by the end of the novel.

1. “I have often wondered what that might be. Tidying up our world and civilizing the human race is only a means – you must have an end as well. Will we ever be able to come out into space and see your universe – perhaps even help you in your tasks?”

“You can put it that way,” said Karellen – and now his voice held a clear yet inexplicable note of sadness that left Stormgren strangely perturbed. (Ch 4)

2.Of course, what happens then is up to them. Probably I’ll be sent home on the next ship – but at least I can expect to see something.I’ve got a four millimeter camera and thousands of meters of film:it won’t be my fault if I can’t use it. Even at the worst, I’ll have proved that man can’t be kept in quarantine forever. I’ll have created a precedent that will compel Karellen to take some action. (Ch.12)