Unit quiz: Architecture and discipline: how long fictions argue, and how critics answer them

Check understanding, separately from reading

5 questions · 80% to pass · no timer. This quiz checks the lessons in this unit. These authored questions assess recognition and application of the taught distinctions, not professional qualification. You may review the lessons and retry. Repeat attempts reuse the question bank; a remembered answer is not proof of transfer to a new situation.

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Question 1

A student argues that the fog in Bleak House “symbolises the Court of Chancery” and offers the anaphora of “Fog everywhere” as proof that Dickens means the fog to stand for the law. A tutor asks for the difference between the two claims. Which formulation is most accurate?The anaphora establishes that the fog is pervasive and that the chapter’s syntax is organised by it; the symbolic equivalence with Chancery is an interpretation supported by the chapter’s closing movement towards Lincoln’s Inn Hall, not by the repetition aloneThe two claims are identical, because a repeated image in a nineteenth-century novel is by definition a symbol

Question 2

Chapter XLII of The Portrait of a Lady reports a woman sitting alone and thinking for most of its length. A student calls it an interruption of the plot and proposes skipping it. Which reply is best grounded in the chapter’s text?The chapter is skippable because nothing changes in it, and a novel’s argument is carried by events rather than by reflectionThe chapter’s action is inference: Isabel tests and revises readings of her husband and of Lord Warburton, and the chapter’s metaphors, ending in the house “of darkness, of dumbness, of suffocation”, are the novel’s account of what her marriage is

Question 3

A student writes that the last sentence of Tess of the d’Urbervilles states Hardy’s own view that the universe is indifferent, and that the novel therefore teaches fatalism. Hardy’s 1892 postscript is cited in objection. What does the postscript actually show?Hardy treats the phrase as a literary allusion with a pedigree, defending it by citing Gloucester in King Lear, which makes the sentence a quoted tragic formula rather than a confession of the author’s creedThe postscript shows that Hardy was a Christian who accepted providence and wrote the phrase under editorial pressure

Question 4

A seminar reports that Eliot “refuted” Arnold’s rule of disinterestedness in 1923 because Eliot denied that criticism could be detached from tradition and belief. Which assessment of that report is most accurate?Eliot refuted Arnold because he showed that disinterestedness is impossible, and a refutation of a norm’s feasibility ends the argumentEliot replaced a standard with a tribunal: he kept the demand for judgment but located it in the common pursuit of true judgment by competent critics, which answers Arnold’s lack of an enforcing body while raising the question of who counts as competent

Question 5

A final essay offers a thesis about Dickens’s syntax, three quotations that support it, and a paragraph summarising the plot of Bleak House. The marker writes “no adverse case, no test”. What would repair the essay most directly?Name the strongest rival explanation, such as genre convention or a compositor’s punctuation, and specify a comparison passage where the same feature is absent, so the thesis predicts a difference a reader could checkAdd a fourth and fifth quotation from the same chapter, since more evidence of the same kind answers an objection

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