WELD / CO Lit 2012: Beauty is Tlooth, Tlooth beauty
Packet 06
1. Ginés Perez de Hita inspired this author’s novella The Last of the Abencerrages. The manuscript of one of
his works supposedly saved his life by stopping two bullets from hitting him, and that work was harshly
criticized by the Abbé Morellet. This author intended to have his autobiography published at least fifty years
after his death, hence its title, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave. He wrote a novella whose lonely title character
resolves to commit suicide, but finds solace in the friendship of his sister Amélie, until she decides to enter a
convent, leading him to move to Louisiana. That novella is the sequel to a novella in which Chactas is inspired to
become a Christian by the death of his beloved, the title woman. His defense of Catholicism, The Genius of
Christianity, was instrumental in ushering in the Romantic movement in his country. For 10 points, name this
French author of Atala and René.
ANSWER: François-René de Chateaubriand
2. These things appear in the title of a novel about Akira Kumo, who hires Virginie Latour to catalog his
books about them; that novel was written by Stéphane Audeguy. The speaker of a poem titled after one of
them states that “if you wish I can be irreproachably gentle, not a man, but” one of these objects. One of them
narrates a poem in which it declares “Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and
unbuild it again.” A 2004 novel whose title mentions them consists of six nested stories, including “An Orison of
Sonmi~451.” A short story titled for one of them is about the feelings of insecurity experienced by Chandler , who is
envious of Gallaher’s success. In one poem, an exiled yaksha convinces one of these things to carry a message to his
wife. The aforementioned works are by Mayakovsky, Shelley, David Mitchell, Joyce, and Kalidasa. For 10 points,
name these objects which lend their name to an Aristophanes play mocking philosophers.
ANSWER: clouds
3. This character inspired a 2001 book about writers who give up writing by Enrique Vila-Matas, and he is
also the subject of an essay about his “formula” by Gilles Deleuze, which compares him to the main character
of The Man Without Qualities. The narrator of the work in which he appears praises his “great stillness” and
“unalterableness of demeanor under all circumstances,” and compares him to a man named Samuel Adams
who was murdered by John C. Colt. This character ultimately dies of starvation after being imprisoned at the Tombs,
causing the narrator to exclaim “Ah, humanity!” His co-workers include two people of opposite temperaments
nicknamed Turkey and Nippers, and his refusal to leave his office is just one example of the many things he “would
prefer not to” do. For 10 points, name this scrivener from a Melville short story.
ANSWER: Bartleby, the Scrivener
4. One author from this country wrote about a man who loved attending funerals in the aptly-named short
story “The Man Who Loved Attending Funerals,” and also founded the magazine BIM. A Canadian author
born in this country wrote a novel about Mary Mathilda, who claims to have murdered the plantation owner
Mr. Bellfeels. An American writer whose parents are from this country wrote about the influence of women
from this country on her writing in the essay “The Making of a Writer,” but is better known for two novels
whose title characters are Avey Johnson and Selina Boyce. Those novels are Praisesong for the Widow and Brown
Girl, Brownstones. A non-Sebald author from this country wrote In the Castle of My Skin and The Emigrants. A
poet from this nation used the refrain “Rome burns and our slavery begins” in his long poem X/Self. For 10 points,
name this Caribbean nation home to George Lamming and Kamau Brathwaite.
ANSWER: Barbados
5. One of this author’s novels begins with the sentence “From my window, the deep solemn massive street,”
although the opening sentence of its second paragraph is much more famous. That novel’s narrator is a
fictionalized version of this author who tells Natalia about his unsuccessful first novel, All the Conspirators.
He collaborated with Swami Prabhavananda on several translations, including one of the Bhagavad Gita.
Another of his collaborations was the play On the Frontier. His protagonists include Stephen Monk, who is
widowed by Elizabeth, and a gay professor named George. This author of The World in the Evening is more famous
for creating characters like Sally Bowles, who appears in a novel which is often collected along with a novel about
Mr. Norris. Adaptations of his work include the movie A Single Man, the musical Cabaret, and the play I Am a
Camera. For 10 points, name this frequent collaborator of W. H. Auden who also wrote The Berlin Stories.
ANSWER: Christopher Isherwood
6. A long poem by this poet opens with Lee falling of a sea-cliff and being nursed back to health by his sister.
One of his poems depicts people gathering shellfish at ebb-tide, and when they leave the speaker wonders why
a single bird is more dear to him than many people. That poem expresses an idea which he called “the
rejection of human solipsism” in the preface to one of his collections, and it is also expressed in a poem in which
he says “I’d rather, except the penalties, kill a man than” one of the title creatures. His narrative poems include one
dealing with incest in the Cauldwell family as well as an adaptation of the Oresteia called “The Tower Beyond
Tragedy.” This author of The Double Axe and “Hurt Hawks” is also known for works like The Women at Point Sur
and “Tamar.” For 10 points, name this “inhumanist” poet of “Roan Stallion” from California.
ANSWER: Robinson Jeffers
7. The protagonist of this novel agrees to play a game where he rolls a die and has to take a suicide pill if the
number six comes up. This novel’s protagonist reads the confession of the murderer Robert Foulkes before
seeing a vision of him. One character in this novel tells of a man whose sumptuously furnished villa burns
down on the same day that a Norwegian madman has a vision of a pillar of fire. He also tells of how he was
ordered to execute two men by the Germans during World War II, but refused, leading to the execution of eighty
men. The protagonist falls in love with a woman who is distinguished from her twin by the scar on her wrist and
who variously presents herself as the actress Julie Holmes and the reincarnation of Lily, the dead lover of Maurice
Conchis. For 10 points, name this novel by John Fowles in which Nicholas Urfe gets involved in a mysterious
“godgame” on a Greek island.
ANSWER: The Magus
8. One character in this novel gets frustrated when another character cannot tell the difference between
someone with one eye and someone with two eyes, or someone with one leg and someone with two legs. One
city in this novel is controlled by a group of eunuchs, and that city’s nominal ruler wears a veil over his face
to hide his leprosy. A siege is prevented in this novel when a cow is stuffed with wheat and sacrificed to make it
look like a city is more prosperous than it actually is. The title character of this novel, who has an incestuous love
for Beatrice, covers up his adoptive father’s death by throwing him in the Saleph River. He also falls in love with a
hypatia named Hypatia while on a quest with Kyot, the Poet and others to find Prester John, which he recounts to the
historian Niketas Choniates. For 10 points, name this novel by Umberto Eco.
ANSWER: Baudolino
9. The main character of this story strokes a cat, but thinks that the contact is an illusion, since the cat lives in
the “eternity of the instant,” unlike humans. The narrator’s statement that “reality favors symmetries and
slight anachronisms” may be ironic, under the interpretation that the latter half of this story is actually a
hallucination. A shopkeeper tells the main character to ignore a group of men who spit breadcrumbs at him,
but he turns to face them instead, leading to the climactic event of this story, which occurs after someone tosses him
a dagger, which he feels will “merely serve to justify his murder.” The main character of this story contracts
septicemia after hitting his forehead on a beam while eagerly examining a copy of the Arabian Nights, and as a
result travels to the title location, where he gets into a knife fight with a gaucho. For 10 points, name this Jorge Luis
Borges short story about Juan Dahlmann.
ANSWER: “The South” [or “El Sur”]
10. One character in this play half-jokingly claims that she will cast a spell on another character to make him
put on his hat and overcoat and follow her. At the end of this play, two sisters join hands over the body of the
title character and argue over whether he was killed by the cold or by the night air. The title character of this
play believes that he was betrayed by his friend Hinkel. Characters in this play include a 15-year-old daughter of
a clerk named Frida and a divorcee named Fanny Wilton, both of whom travel with the title character’s son, Erhart.
The title character of this play never leaves his house even though he has been out of prison for eight years, and he
lives on a different floor in the house than his wife, Gunhild, whose argument with her twin sister Ella Rentheim
takes up much of the first act. For 10 points, name this Ibsen play about a disgraced banker.
ANSWER: John Gabriel Borkman
11. In one book, this author wrote about Abel, who becomes a marine biologist because of his love for the title
blue groper. This author created two characters who flirt with death by performing daring stunts in a river,
nicknamed Pikelet and Loonie. He collaborated with Lucky Oceans to create a soundtrack for one of his
novels, in which a fish smuggler is pursued by the jealous fisherman Jim Buckridge. The aforementioned
novels are Blueback, Breath, and Dirt Music, respectively. In his most famous novel, luck is referred to as “the
shifty shadow of God.” In that novel, Sam loses four of his fingers in an accident and Fish is permanently braindamaged after he nearly drowns. That novel by this author is about the Pickles and Lamb families, who both live on
the title street. For 10 points, name this Australian author of Cloudstreet.
ANSWER: Tim Winton
12. In one novel set in this country, the villainous title character intercepts a letter from the Queen to her
lover. One resident of this country is a silversmith named Stephen Nados, who is one of the many suitors of
the title character of another work set in this country, a collection of nine linked stories in which a princess of
this country toys with men’s affections. The aforementioned works are Rupert of Hentzau and The Heart of
Princess Osra, respectively. This country, whose capital is Strelsau, influenced George Barr McCutcheon’s fictional
country of Graustark, and it lends its name to a genre of swashbuckling romances set in fictional countries.
Residents of this country include Princess Flavia, Colonel Sapt, and Fritz von Tarlenheim. In the most famous work
set here, Rudolf Rassendyll impersonates its king, who is locked up in a castle. For 10 points, name this setting of
Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda.
ANSWER: Ruritania
13. This author wrote about Mustache Sal, a woman who has sex with pretty much everyone, in a novel which
also includes a character with the delightful name Field Marshal Theda Doompussy Blackwell. That novel is
a western about Drag Gibson, Chief Showcase, and the Loop Garoo Kid. He co-founded the Before Columbus
Movement, and wrote a novel about the murder of Ed Yellings. This author of Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down
and The Last Days of Louisiana Red created a philosophy known as Neo-HooDooism, demonstrated in novels like
Flight to Canada, as well as a novel in which much of the plot is driven by the search for an ancient Egyptian book,
which is possessed at various points by Abdul Sufi Hamid and Hinckle Von Vampton, and which is sought by both
the Wallflower Order and the Jes Grew movement. For 10 points, name this author of Mumbo Jumbo.
ANSWER: Ishmael Reed
14. Both John Steinbeck and Sidney Lanier used this work as the basis for books for children on the same
subject. The preface to this work notes that it is “known through the universal world that there be nine
worthy and the best that ever were,” namely “three Paynims, three Jews, and three Christian men.” W. F.
Oakeshott discovered a manuscript of this work, known as the Winchester Manuscript, which is thought to be
closer to the original than William Caxton’s text. The second book of this work is largely a translation of an
alliterative Middle English poem with a similar title. Along with the Mabinogion, it was Tennyson’s primary source
in writing Idylls of the King. For 10 points, name this mythological compilation by Thomas Malory.
ANSWER: Le Morte d’Arthur [or The Death of Arthur]
15. The author of this work says that he would not like to have a crooked nose even if it meant having
handsome black eyes and black hair. It compares the evolution of vocabulary to the way that trees change
their leaves. It also mocks the insistence on educating Roman youths in the ability to divide sums of money,
while the Greeks were given eloquence by the Muse. This work asks what a painter’s ability to draw a cypress
matters if the painter has been commissioned to paint a sailor swimming away from a shipwreck after discussing
the spectacle of a human head being joined to a horse’s neck. It argues that a play should have exactly five acts, and
that small mistakes in composition should be forgiven, because “even Homer nods.” It also argues that poetry should
be given the same consideration as painting, thus coining the phrase “ut pictura poesis,” and it also coined the phrase
“in medias res.” For 10 points, name this treatise on poetics by Horace.
ANSWER: Ars Poetica [or The Art of Poetry]
16. In this novel, Nezha kills the son of the Dragon King of the East, who had sent him to investigate a weapon
that causes rivers to bleed. A major character in this novel spends forty years at Mount Kunlun, leaving at
the age of 72. Because its author quotes extensively from the Yellow Court Record, it is thought to have been
written by a follower of Daoism. This novel begins with King Zhou lusting after Nuwa, who sends a vixen spirit
called Daji to help bring about his downfall. It is set during the fall of the Shang dynasty and the rise of the Zhou
dynasty. The final chapter sees King Wu create the nobility and the penultimate chapter sees Jiang Ziya deify 365
gods in an event that names this novel. For 10 points, name this Ming dynasty fantasy novel.
ANSWER: The Investiture of the Gods [or The Creation of the Gods; or Fengshen Bang; or Fengshen Yanyi]
17. This novel describes a children’s game called “I Declare War,” in which the participants represent
countries and a bouncing ball represents missiles. The protagonist of this novel has a nightmare in which the
picture of George Washington on a stamp is replaced by a picture of Hitler. The protagonist’s downstairs
neighbor commits suicide by hanging himself in a closet, leaving his son, Seldon Wishnow, without a father. The
narrator’s aunt Evelyn dances with Joachim von Ribbentrop at the White House in this novel, whose other historical
characters include Walter Winchell, who is assassinated after announcing that he is running for president. The
narrator’s cousin Alvin loses a leg fighting for the Canadian army in World War II, which the United States doesn’t
enter until 1942. For 10 points, name this novel in which Charles Lindbergh becomes President of the United States,
by Philip Roth.
ANSWER: The Plot Against America
18. In this novel, the protagonist’s cellmate muses that the only “path to invulnerability” is to renounce all
one’s attachments, after hearing that the protagonist is only allowed to see his wife once a year. In one scene
in this novel, Soviet prisoners are treated well for one day because Eleanor Roosevelt is visiting to inspect the
prisons. There are two versions of this novel, one with nine fewer chapters than the other; the full version was not
published in English until 2009. An autobiographical character in this novel is a mathematician who refuses to
become a cryptographer, Gleb Nerzhin. This novel begins with a phone call made by Volodin to the U.S. embassy,
which results in his arrest. It describes life in a sharashka, and as in another of its author’s works, many of its
characters are zeks. For 10 points, name this Solzhenitsyn novel with a Dantean name.
ANSWER: In the First Circle [or V kruge pervom]
19. This author created a character who is compared to a flying fish which is hated by the rest of the fish in
the sea. One play by this author contains the first notable English use of the pseudo-Italian phrase che sera,
sera, spoken as part of a monologue about the idea that “the reward of sin is death.” Two of this author’s
plays include characters named Callapine, one of whom is an Ottoman pasha and the other is the son of a
Turkish king who is killed by the title character, who asks “It is not passing brave to be a king?” He wrote an
unfinished poem about two lovers which was completed by George Chapman, but is better known for a poem which
inspired a reply by Sir Walter Raleigh. One of this author’s characters says “make me immortal with a kiss” to
Helen, whom he describes as “the face that launch’d a thousand ships.” For 10 points, name this author of plays like
Edward II, Doctor Faustus, and The Jew of Malta.
ANSWER: Christopher Marlowe
20. This poem asks, “Was he to bray this in profoundest brass / Arointing his dreams with fugal requiems?”
One character in this poem “lettered herself demurely as became a pearly poetess,” and that character has
three sisters. The speaker of this poem asks whether the main character could “stem verboseness in the sea.”
The main character of this poem is described as a “Socrates of snails, musician of pears, principium and lex.”
Two sections of this poem are introduced by the word nota, one instance of which is followed by the statement that
“man is the intelligence of his soil.” This poem includes sections like “Approaching Carolina” and “Concerning the
Thunderstorms of Yucatan.” The different sounds made by the title letter of this poem are exemplified in the line
“Exchequering from piebald fiscs unkeyed.” For 10 points, name this Wallace Stevens poem about a voyage
undertaken by Crispin.
ANSWER: “The Comedian as the Letter C”
TB. This man wrote a poem which begins with a rundown of the title figure’s vital statistics before asking
“What did you expect? Talons? Oversize incisors? Green saliva? Madness?” That poem is called “All There
Is to Know About Adolf Eichmann.” One of this writer’s works is a collection of fifty prayer-like prose
poems. This author of Book of Mercy and Book of Longing also wrote The Spice-Box of Earth and Flowers for
Hitler, but his first collection was Let Us Compare Mythologies. His collection Death of a Lady’s Man has a similar
title to a 1977 album he released which included a song featuring backup vocals by Allen Ginsberg, “Don’t Go
Home with Your Hard-On.” A more famous song, from his album Various Positions, says “There’s a blaze of light
in every word” and describes “a secret chord that David played, and it pleased the Lord.” For 10 points, name this
Canadian poet and songwriter who sang “Hallelujah.”
ANSWER: Leonard Cohen