About this Demo Quizz: This page contains questions intended to familiarize students with the type of questions that will be asked in the English 25 reading quizz. After taking this demo quizz, press the "submit" button to learn how you did. The demo quizz is just to help students prepare for the exam; your score here is not necessarily predictive since the specific questions will change and also vary in difficulty.

About the Real Quizz to Come: The actual quizz will be conducted in class in written form. It will cover only assigned works (textual or visual) on the schedule of readings (not optional or supplementary materials). Questions will focus on main or central features of the works, often those that have been discussed in lecture.

(Last revised 2/19/01 ) (recommended browser)

Instructions Each answer in this demo quizz counts for 5 points For the identification questions, full credit is awarded for the full name of the author (correctly spelled); one point off for the last name only Fill in the answers and then press the "submit answers" link at the bottom of the page for an instant evaluation of your performance (plus the right answers for questions you missed)   Some Reference Points for Discussion Short Answer Questions (1) What word from the Latin for "breath" or "air" does Walter Benjamin use to describe the unique "presence" of natural objects or traditional art works in his "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"? (2) In Fredric Jameson's "Postmodernism and Consumer Society," "nostalgia" films demonstrate what principle of postmodern aesthetics that is contrasted with "parody"? (3) According to Joseph H. Boyett and Henry P. Conn's Workplace 2000 and similar works we have read, the most basic unit of labor in the new corporations is no longer the individual worker but the _____, which often meets weekly and manages itself. [fill in the blank] (4) Name one of the artificial intelligences that have a role in William Gibson's Neuromancer.     Multiple Choice (5) In his Holding On to Reality, Albert Borgmann often draws for examples from which prehistorical people?: Australian aborigines before the arrival of Europeans Neanderthal man Salish and other Native-American tribes in the Montana area South-American Indian tribes (6) Which form of mechanical reproduction does Walter Benjamin not discuss in his "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"? Photography Television Film (7) One of the reasons that writing is bad compared to orality, according to Plato's Phaedrus, is that: Manuscripts and books are too physically perishable Without a copyright system, authors' works can too easily be used without permission Writing takes too long to master, requiring years of schooling Texts offer only a show of knowledge, whereas real knowledge exists only in an oral form that relies on memory (8) In Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy, Homer's epic works are discussed as examples of: Early literate culture "Primary oral culture" "Secondary orality" Chirography     Identifications (9) Who wrote the following? "The most accurate word in Western culture to describe what happens in a learning organization is one that hasn't had much currency for the past several hundred years. . . . The word is 'metanoia' and it means a shift of mind." (10) Who wrote the following phrase, which has since become famous? "Creative destruction" (11) Who wrote the following? "The blued finish of firearms is a process, controlled, derived from common      rus, but there under so rare and uncommon a patina that many years untouched until I took it up and turning, entranced, down the unpainted        stair, to the hallway where I swear I never heard the first shot." (12) Who wrote the following? "The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem." (13) Who wrote the following?                             "Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened:--that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on,-- Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things." (14) Who wrote the following? "The ancestral environment is the ground state of information and reality. Human beings evolved in it, and so did their ability to read its signs." (15) Who wrote the following? "Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding. . . ." (16) Who gave the following long title to one of his works? "Rowan leaves laid around hole collecting the last few leaves nearly finished dog ran into hole started again made in the shade on a windy,sunny day " (17) What group wrote the following? If you cannot remember the name of the group, then instead identify what "ECD" stands for. "The strategy and tactics of ECD should not be a mystery to any activists. They are the same as traditional CD. ECD is a nonviolent activity by its very nature, since the oppositional forces never physically confront one another. As in CD, the primary tactics in ECD are trespass and blockage. Exits, entrances, conduits, and other key spaces must be occupied by the contestational force in order to bring pressure on legitimized institutions engaged in unethical or criminal actions. Blocking information conduits is analogous to blocking physical locations; however, electronic blockage can cause financial stress that physical blockage cannot, and it can be used beyond the local level. ECD is CD reinvigorated. What CD once was, ECD is now." (18) Who wrote the following? "Originally the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult. We know that the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual--first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function." (19) Who wrote the following?      "The structure meant is a structure of meanings, evaluations, and interpretations; and the principle of unity which informs it seems to be one of balancing and harmonizing connotations, attitudes, and meanings. But even here one needs to make important qualifications: the principle is not one which involves the arrangement of the various elements into homogenous groupings, pairing like with like. It unites the like with the unlike. It does not unite them, however, by the simple process of allowing one connotation to cancel out another nor does it reduce the contradictory attitudes to harmony by a process of subtraction. The unity is not a unity of the sort to be achieved by the reduction and simplification appropriate to an algebraic formula. It is a positive unity, not a negative; it represents not a residue but an achieved harmony.      The attempt to deal with a structure such as this may account for the frequent occurrence in the preceding chapters of such terms as ambiguity, paradox, complex of attitudes, and—most frequent of all, and perhaps most annoying to the reader—irony. " (20) Who wrote the following?" "The medium is the message." Submit answers for feedback