Contemporary Literary Cultures and Research Methodologies: Prizes, Festivals, Methods and Integrity

Practice questions (18)

Attempt each one before opening the answer. Every explanation names the tempting wrong option as well as the right one, because that is where marks are lost.

1. Which prize is given for a single work of fiction translated into English and published in the UK or Ireland, with the prize money shared equally between the author and the translator?

   1. The International Booker Prize
   2. The Booker Prize
   3. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
   4. The Nobel Prize in Literature
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   Answer: A — The International Booker Prize

   The International Booker honours translated fiction and divides the money between author and translator. The tempting alternative is the Booker Prize itself, which is for novels originally written in English; the Pulitzer is an American prize, and the Nobel honours an author’s body of work, not a single translated book.

2. Which statement correctly distinguishes the Sahitya Akademi from the Bharatiya Jnanpith?

   1. The Jnanpith Award is run by the Government of India, while the Sahitya Akademi is a private trust belonging to a publishing house
   2. The Akademi is a government-founded national academy (1954), whereas the Jnanpith Award is run by a non-governmental trust
   3. Both are administered by the same ministry, and both give awards only for works that were written originally in the English language
   4. The Sahitya Akademi is an international body founded in London, while the Jnanpith is a state academy serving a single Indian state
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   Answer: B — The Akademi is a government-founded national academy (1954), whereas the Jnanpith Award is run by a non-governmental trust

   The Akademi is the government-founded national academy (1954) and the Jnanpith is run by a non-governmental trust. The option that reverses the pair is the tempting error; the other two are false because both institutions honour writing in Indian languages and neither is an international or state body.

3. Which of the following prize-and-body pairings are correct?

   1. Nobel Prize in Literature — the Swedish Academy
   2. Pulitzer Prize — administered by Columbia University under Joseph Pulitzer’s bequest
   3. Sahitya Akademi Award — administered by Bharatiya Jnanpith
   4. Booker Prize — a novel written in English and published in the UK or Ireland
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   Answer: A — Nobel Prize in Literature — the Swedish Academy; B — Pulitzer Prize — administered by Columbia University under Joseph Pulitzer’s bequest; D — Booker Prize — a novel written in English and published in the UK or Ireland

   The Nobel (Swedish Academy), the Pulitzer (Columbia University) and the Booker (English-language novel published in the UK or Ireland) are correctly described. The Sahitya Akademi Award is given by the Sahitya Akademi itself; Bharatiya Jnanpith is a different body that gives the Jnanpith Award.

4. A researcher wants to study how publishers and agents buy and sell translation rights across languages. Which setting is the most direct site of that activity?

   1. A literary prize ceremony that publicly announces the winning book
   2. A congress of PEN International on freedom of expression and writers at risk
   3. An international trade book fair, such as the Frankfurt Book Fair
   4. A university seminar on the theory and ethics of literary translation
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   Answer: C — An international trade book fair, such as the Frankfurt Book Fair

   Rights are negotiated at trade fairs, where publishers and agents meet to buy and sell them. A prize ceremony builds visibility, PEN is an advocacy body, and a seminar discusses translation without trading rights.

5. Which of the following statements about literary associations and networks are correct?

   1. PEN International, founded in London in 1921, defends freedom of expression and writers at risk
   2. The Modern Language Association publishes the MLA Handbook
   3. The International Comparative Literature Association awards the Nobel Prize in Literature
   4. The All-India Progressive Writers’ Association held its first conference at Lucknow in 1936, with Premchand presiding
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   Answer: A — PEN International, founded in London in 1921, defends freedom of expression and writers at risk; B — The Modern Language Association publishes the MLA Handbook; D — The All-India Progressive Writers’ Association held its first conference at Lucknow in 1936, with Premchand presiding

   PEN International, the MLA (publisher of the MLA Handbook) and the Progressive Writers’ Association (Lucknow, 1936, Premchand presiding) are correctly described. The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded by the Swedish Academy, not by the comparatists’ association, so that statement is the false one.

6. Which activity belongs most specifically to archival research?

   1. Observing a reading community over an extended period of fieldwork and recording what its members say and do
   2. Counting word frequencies across a large corpus of published novels to map patterns of vocabulary over time
   3. Studying how words, images, colour and layout combine on a single page of a graphic narrative
   4. Establishing the provenance, date and authenticity of manuscripts before using them as evidence
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   Answer: D — Establishing the provenance, date and authenticity of manuscripts before using them as evidence

   Establishing provenance, date and authenticity of primary records is the core of archival work. Observing a community is ethnography, counting word frequencies is corpus or distant reading, and studying word-image-layout interplay is multimodal analysis.

7. Over a year a researcher attends village performances of an oral epic, interviews the performers, notes how her own background as an outsider shapes what she sees, and later shows her draft to the performers for comment. Which description fits best?

   1. Archival textual criticism that compares the surviving manuscripts of the epic and records their variant readings
   2. Distant reading of a large corpus of epics to find statistical patterns in their word use across regions
   3. Critical discourse analysis of a printed edition of the epic, relating its wording to institutions of power
   4. Ethnographic fieldwork: participant observation, thick description and reflexivity about her own position
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   Answer: D — Ethnographic fieldwork: participant observation, thick description and reflexivity about her own position

   Sustained attendance, interviews, a record of her own position and feeding results back to the community are the marks of ethnography. Archival textual criticism is the tempting rival because the object is an epic, but she works with living performance and people, not with manuscripts.

8. A study examines how newspaper reports of a major literary prize use words such as “authentic” and “universal” to present some writers as legitimate and others as marginal, and links these wordings to power relations in the literary field. Which approach is this?

   1. Critical discourse analysis, which relates language in use to social power
   2. Stylometry, which attributes authorship from the frequency of common words
   3. New Critical close reading, which treats each text as a self-contained verbal object
   4. Genetic criticism, which reconstructs how a work changed across its drafts
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   Answer: A — Critical discourse analysis, which relates language in use to social power

   Linking wording in public texts to power and legitimacy is critical discourse analysis. Close reading would treat the report as a self-contained object and ignore the power relations, stylometry counts word frequency for attribution, and genetic criticism studies drafts.

9. A researcher asks a language model to summarise a long novel and to propose three scholarly references, and cites them after checking only that the titles sound plausible. A reviewer later finds that one reference does not exist and that the summary misstates a key event. Which assessment is most accurate?

   1. Only the non-existent reference is a problem; errors in a summary are acceptable because summarising a long novel is exactly the model’s job
   2. Both failures are hers: model output is unverified and must be checked against the primary text and the sources before it is used or cited
   3. No integrity issue arises, because titles that look plausible are enough to satisfy the researcher’s duty to cite her sources properly
   4. The fault lies with the model’s developer, since a researcher who names the tool she used is relieved of responsibility for what it outputs
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   Answer: B — Both failures are hers: model output is unverified and must be checked against the primary text and the sources before it is used or cited

   The researcher remains accountable for every claim and citation, so both the invented reference and the misstated event are hers to have caught. Disclosure does not transfer responsibility to the developer, and a plausible-sounding title is not verification, which is the tempting but wrong view.

10. Under the policies most major publishers have adopted, which of the following are responsible practices when AI tools assist research?

    1. Disclosing the use of the tool as the journal or institution requires
    2. Checking the model’s outputs against the primary texts and the actual sources
    3. Listing the AI tool as a co-author so that responsibility is shared with it
    4. Remaining accountable for every claim and citation in the final paper
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    Answer: A — Disclosing the use of the tool as the journal or institution requires; B — Checking the model’s outputs against the primary texts and the actual sources; D — Remaining accountable for every claim and citation in the final paper

    Disclosure, verification and retained accountability are the standard expectations. Listing a tool as co-author is not accepted under the common publisher policy, because authorship carries accountability that software cannot bear.

11. A study of a graphic memoir examines how panel layout, lettering, colour and words work together to produce meanings that none of them could produce alone. Which approach is this?

    1. Archival research, which establishes the provenance of manuscripts and letters
    2. Stylometry, which attributes authorship from statistical patterns of word use
    3. Multimodal analysis, which studies how several modes of meaning combine
    4. Ethnography, which studies readers through extended participant observation
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    Answer: C — Multimodal analysis, which studies how several modes of meaning combine

    Several modes (layout, lettering, colour, words) combining to make meaning is the definition of multimodal analysis. The other approaches study authorship statistics, manuscripts or readers, none of which is the object here.

12. In Toulmin’s model of argument, which element states the general principle that licenses the step from the evidence to the claim?

    1. The warrant, which links the grounds to the claim
    2. The rebuttal, which names conditions under which the claim fails
    3. The qualifier, which signals how strong the claim is
    4. The grounds, which are the evidence offered for the claim
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    Answer: A — The warrant, which links the grounds to the claim

    The warrant is the licensing principle that connects grounds to claim. The grounds are the evidence itself, the tempting wrong choice; the qualifier states strength and the rebuttal states exceptions.

13. Which of the following is the strongest thesis statement for a literary essay?

    1. This essay discusses the theme of migration in the novel and the many different ways in which the author deals with this important and timely subject throughout the book
    2. By tracing its repeated image of thresholds, the essay argues that the novel presents migration as perpetual suspension, not arrival, which recasts its conventional ending
    3. Many critics have written about migration in the novel, and their views differ widely on how it should be read, understood and placed within the author’s wider body of work
    4. The novel is a moving and beautiful book that most readers will enjoy and remember, because it treats the difficult subject of migration with great sensitivity and warmth
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    Answer: B — By tracing its repeated image of thresholds, the essay argues that the novel presents migration as perpetual suspension, not arrival, which recasts its conventional ending

    A thesis is a specific, arguable, non-obvious claim that evidence can support: here, a reading of thresholds that recasts the ending. The statement that merely discusses the theme is only a topic announcement, the statement about what critics have written is a survey of opinion, and the statement praising the book is a matter of taste, so none takes a position the essay must prove.

14. Which practice best shows engagement with scholarly discourse in a research paper?

    1. Quoting prominent critics at length to display agreement, so that no argument of one’s own ever has to be made or defended
    2. Omitting every critic with whom one disagrees, so that the argument appears to have been accepted by everyone in the field
    3. Stating fairly what earlier critics argued, finding a gap or disagreement, and placing one’s own claim in relation to them
    4. Appending a long bibliography at the end without relating any single item in it to the claim the paper itself makes
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    Answer: C — Stating fairly what earlier critics argued, finding a gap or disagreement, and placing one’s own claim in relation to them

    Engagement means fair report of the existing conversation, identification of the gap, and positioning of the new claim. Long quotation for agreement, silent omission of dissent and a bibliography unrelated to the claim all avoid the conversation rather than join it.

15. A student keeps the structure and most key phrases of a paragraph from a critic’s article, changing only a few words, and gives no citation. How should this be classed?

    1. Legitimate paraphrase, because no sentence has been copied word for word from the critic’s article, so nothing needs crediting
    2. Merely a formatting fault in the citation style, with no integrity issue of any kind involved in leaving the citation out
    3. Acceptable, because the idea belongs to the general field of study and therefore needs no source or acknowledgement at all
    4. Plagiarism (patchwriting): close paraphrase without attribution still passes off another’s expression as one’s own
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    Answer: D — Plagiarism (patchwriting): close paraphrase without attribution still passes off another’s expression as one’s own

    Patchwriting, changing a few words while keeping a source’s structure and phrasing, is a form of plagiarism, and a missing citation is an attribution failure, not a formatting slip. Not copying word for word is the tempting defence, but plagiarism covers ideas and close paraphrase too.

16. A similarity-checking report on a dissertation chapter shows 22% overlap with other sources. On inspection, most of the matched text is the reference list and passages in quotation marks with citations. What is the correct reading?

    1. It is only a screening signal: a person must read the matches, and cited quotations and reference lists are not plagiarism in themselves
    2. The figure proves plagiarism, because any overlap above zero shows that the writer copied text from other sources without permission or credit
    3. The chapter is certainly original, because the software has checked every sentence and verified that all of it is the author’s own work
    4. The reference list and the quotations must be deleted so that the similarity figure falls to zero and the report looks perfectly clean
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    Answer: A — It is only a screening signal: a person must read the matches, and cited quotations and reference lists are not plagiarism in themselves

    A similarity index is only a screening signal and needs a human reader; quotations with citations and reference lists inflate it without being misconduct. Treating the number as proof, as certification of originality, or as a target to drive to zero by deleting required citations all misread what the tool does.

17. Which of the following are breaches of academic integrity?

    1. Inventing a quotation and attributing it to a real critic
    2. Submitting substantially the same paper for two separate courses without disclosing the overlap
    3. Citing a work as though it had been read when the passage was seen only in another author’s book
    4. Quoting a source accurately within quotation marks, with a full citation
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    Answer: A — Inventing a quotation and attributing it to a real critic; B — Submitting substantially the same paper for two separate courses without disclosing the overlap; C — Citing a work as though it had been read when the passage was seen only in another author’s book

    Fabricating a quotation, submitting the same work twice without disclosure (self-plagiarism or duplicate submission) and citing a work one has not consulted as if read are all breaches. An accurate quotation in quotation marks with a full citation is the correct practice, not a breach.

18. A writer wants to use a sentence by a critic that she found only in a book review quoting the critic. She has not read the critic’s own essay. What is the honest practice?

    1. Cite the original essay alone as though she had read it, since the sentence is the critic’s own and the review merely repeats it
    2. Cite it as quoted in the review (“qtd. in”), or obtain and check the original essay before citing it directly
    3. Paraphrase it without quotation marks, so that neither the critic nor the review has to be named in the paper
    4. Omit any citation, because a quotation inside a published review is already public and needs no further acknowledgement
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    Answer: B — Cite it as quoted in the review (“qtd. in”), or obtain and check the original essay before citing it directly

    One cites what one actually consulted: either acknowledge the review as the route (qtd. in) or read the original. Citing the original as though read misrepresents the research; omitting a citation or paraphrasing to avoid naming sources is itself uncredited use.