Places, Everyone! Trivia Quiz

Answer: Dublin

"Dubliners" was written by James Joyce, one of Ireland's greatest writers and one of the most important writers in the English language. The publication of this book of stories coincides with a time when Ireland was emerging as an independent country separate from Great Britain, and was searching to establish a national identity.

Many of the main characters of the stories are also searching for identity and an understanding of themselves, and the climaxes revolve around moments of epiphany for them.

For example, in the story "Araby", an Irish boy chastises himself for his vanity after he is treated with disdain by an English shopkeeper at a fair and he begins to see his place in the world. Thus, the setting and the title of the collection are highly important to an understanding of this text.

Interestingly, some of the characters in the "Dubliners" stories have minor roles in Joyce's later novel "Ulysses".

Answer: London

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, wishing to create an element of verisimitude, used a very real street in the very real city of London; however, not wishing to create any inconvenience to anyone who lived on Baker Street, he made up the numerical address. At the time of Doyle's writing the Sherlock Holmes stories, Baker Street went only as high as number 85. Not until 1930 did the street extend into the 220s. In 1932, Abbey National Building Society moved into the buildings of 219 through 229. Because the mail "for" Sherlock Holmes became so overwhelming, the company had to hire a secretary to respond to it.

Doyle lived from 1859 to 1930, and while he was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and spent his childhood there, Sherlock Holmes lived in London.

The photograph shows the River Thames, the Westminster Bridge, the Palace of Westminster (or Houses of Parliament), and, of course, the Elizabeth Tower (or Clock Tower) with Big Ben.

Answer: Lafayette County, Mississippi

Shortly after William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, in 1897, his family moved to Oxford, Mississippi, in Lafayette County, where he grew up. He attended a semester at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) and failed all of his courses, including English. His father, who was the financial officer at the university, got him a job at the campus's post office, but he was fired after continually neglecting customers while he played cards in the back.

He frequently used Oxford and the surrounding area as the setting for his stories; however, he would substitute other names for the real place names. For example, he used the name Jefferson for the city of Oxford, and he used Yoknapatawpha County for Lafayette County. Faulkner made up the county name by combining two words from the native Chickasaw language--"yocona" and "petopha", meaning "split land". While Lafayette County is named after the French military leader who assisted the colonial armies during the American Revolution, most of the residents in that area pronounce the name La-FAY-et.

Answer: New York City

"The Great Gatsby" is generally considered F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, a book that examines the corruption of the American Dream and the reckless behavior of Americans during the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties. From Long Island extend two promontories--Manhasset Neck and Great Neck, which Fitzgerald refers to as East Egg and West Egg, respectively.

The aristocrats live in East Egg while the nouveaux riches live in West Egg, and the bitter conflict that exists between the two classes destroys the lives of those caught up in it.

The resulting destruction of society is represented by the part of the island--the "valley of ashes"--the Eggers must drive through on their way into "the city"--Manhattan.

Answer: Pamplona, Spain

In 1926, a year after the publication of Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby", Ernest Hemingway published his very first novel, "The Sun Also Rises". It met with mixed reviews from the critics but is now considered his best novel. Better than any of his later novels, "The Sun Also Rises" demonstrates Hemingway's style of writing: simple, sparsely worded sentences, restrained description, and an objective narrative point of view. This style came to be known as the Iceberg Theory of writing, a style that involved relying on an implicit greater theme or meaning beyond the surface of a deceptively simple and sparsely worded story. Such a style worked very well during the modernist period of literature, for most modernists believed that truth was subjective. Hemingway's fiction provided a glimpse of life as a viewer might witness in the real world, and, as in the real world, the reader has to rely on his or her own judgment to interpret what he or she sees or is experiencing. There is no narrative voice in the real world explaining to an individual what that individual is observing.

The setting of Pamplona is important to Hemingway because it serves as a contrast to the setting of Paris. The peacefulness of the Spanish countryside, where Jake goes fishing for a few days, and the rich joyful traditions of the bullfighters in Pamplona all represent a desirable life, opposed to the expatriate culture in Paris, as it is represented in the novel, where Americans have been corrupted to live without the values of paying what they owe and working for what they have.

Answer: the Congo

The settings of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" are most important to the understanding of the story. While Charles Marlow relates of his experiences journeying the Congo, he describes a number of scenes of waste, brutality, and chaos. His entire story is told to the men who sit on a boat on another river, the Thames, and they sit in the darkness of the night as they listen to Marlow relate his tale of "The horror! The horror!" (the final words whispered by Kurtz before he dies).

The juxtaposition of the two settings contributes to the novella's point that all of humanity consists of cruel creatures; London and the British Empire are no less savage than the jungles of Africa they wish to tame and subjugate.

Answer: St. Petersburg

Fyodor Dostoevsky's choice to set his story in St. Petersburg is most definitely a deliberate one. The novel opens with "On an exceptionally hot evening ... ", and the city is known for its oppressively hot summers. This suffocating atmosphere couples perfectly with Dostoevsky's view of the city as a noisy, smelly, overly crowded, impoverished place of shabby buildings.

The disorder of Raskolnikov's environment represents the disorder within his own psyche.

Answer: South Africa

Stephen Kumalo journeys to Johannesburg to find his son, and on the way he grows increasingly aware of not only the disintegration of his people's tribal values but also the growing moral poverty of the land in general, a land whose society is crumbling due to racial and economic divisions. Johannesburg, with all of its mazes of streets and shanty towns, becomes a perfect yet unfortunate representation of the society's confusion and disintegration. Hope seems within reach when Jarvis, who is ready to blame Kumalo's son wholeheartedly for the death of his own son, reads his son's personal papers about social and racial injustice and begins a radical conversion to understanding and compassion.

Answer: San Francisco

In Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club", four Chinese American immigrant mothers meet in San Francisco and begin the mahjong club they refer to as "the Joy Luck Club". As we hear three of the mothers tell stories about their childhoods in China, each one tells of her own mother.

At other points in the novel, we hear from the four mahjong players' daughters, and each of them tells stories of their childhood and of their current lives. The mahjong players struggle to hold on to their identities as they leave their Chinese culture to embrace an American one, and their daughters express their own struggles with trying to establish identities in an American culture while having mothers that pressure them because of the understanding of motherhood and social standing they learned. San Francisco was the perfect setting for the novel as it not only represents a liberal, cosmopolitan American culture, but it also is located across the Pacific Ocean from China and creates a convenient juxtaposition.

Answer: St. Louis, Missouri

While born in Columbus, Mississippi, Williams lived only a few years in that state before his father moved the family to St. Louis, Missouri, where he was employed at an International Shoe Company factory. Eventually, Williams himself went to work there after his father essentially forced him to leave the University of Missouri to help earn money. Williams, however, was not going to give up his desire to be a writer, so after a very long day at the factory, he would come home and stay up all night with coffee and cigarettes while he composed on a typewriter.

This lifestyle exhausted him and eventually led to a nervous breakdown. St. Louis was not a happy place for Williams, and it became the perfect setting for the Wingfield family.