1. What was the significance of June 16?

   1. It was the day on which Dubliners was finally accepted for publication

   2. It was the date of his confirmation

   3. It was Joyce's first date with his lifelong partner, Nora Barnacle

   4. It was his birthday

2. Which playwright did Joyce hero-worship?

   1. Ben Jonson

   2. George Bernard Shaw

   3. Georg Buchner

   4. Henrik Ibsen

3. 

   Which of the following is not a quote from Joyce?

   1. To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now.

   2. Paternity is a legal fiction.

   3. Ireland is the old sow that eats her farrow.

   4. History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

4. What did Joyce refer to as 'electricity' and 'beefsteak'?

   1. Dante and Chaucer

   2. Italy and Ireland

   3. woman and man

   4. white and red wine

5. The framework of Finnegans Wake is based on a cyclical theory of history borrowed from which thinker?

   1. Giambattista Vico

   2. Friedrich Nietzsche

   3. Homer

   4. Arthur Schopenhauer

6. Joyce is often accused of being verbose and obscure. Yet which work did he claim to have written "in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, whatever he has seen and heard"?

   1. Dubliners

   2. Exiles

   3. Chamber Music

   4. Ulysses

7. When was the English ban on Ulysses lifted?

   1. 1936

   2. 1945

   3. 1924

   4. 1963

8. Which author admired Joyce so much that he not only worked as his secretary but is said to have crippled his much larger feet by wearing identical shoes?

   1. WH Auden

   2. Samuel Beckett

   3. TS Eliot

   4. Christopher Isherwood

9. Which novel did Joyce call 'the English Ulysses'?

   1. Dombey & Son

   2. Vanity Fair

   3. Clarissa

   4. Robinson Crusoe

10. 

    Who was brave or foolhardy enough to edit Finnegans Wake down into an (extremely useful) shorter edition?

    1. Seamus Deane

    2. Anthony Burgess

    3. David Lodge

    4. Alain de Botton

11. In the Homeric parallels of Ulysses, which character is Telemachus to Bloom's Ulysses?

    1. Stephen Dedalus

    2. Stephen Hero

    3. Buck Mulligan

    4. Blazes Boylan

12. Joyce died less than two years after publishing his mammoth 'night-language' dream-text, Finnegans Wake. What were his hints about his next project?

    1. That it would make Finnegans Wake look easy

    2. That it would be a children's book

    3. That it would be short, simple and a novel of reawakening

    4. That it would do for Trieste what Ulysses did for Dublin

13. What is the final word in Ulysses?

    1. Love

    2. Home

    3. Death

    4. Yes

14. "The only demand I make of my reader," Joyce once told an interviewer, is that ...

    1. "He knows how to drink and make love as well as read."

    2. "He finishes them."

    3. "He should devote his whole life to reading my works."

    4. "He acknowledge my genius, even if he does not understand it."

15. The last word in Finnegans Wake is

    1. No

    2. Jaysus

    3. Morning!

    4. The

16. "I guess the man's a genius, but what a dirty mind he has, hasn't he?" Whose critical verdict?

    1. Nora Joyce

    2. The Queen Mother

    3. Virginia Woolf

    4. Val Doonican

Solutions

1:C, 2:D, 3:A, 4:D, 5:A, 6:A, 7:A, 8:B, 9:D, 10:B, 11:A, 12:C, 13:D, 14:C, 15:D, 16:A

Scores

1. 5 and above.

   Joyce spent about seven years working on Ulysses. The same amount of time could probably see you getting a decent score. With luck.

2. 10 and above.

   "The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails" (Portrait of the Artist). Less paring, more reading, please.

3. 15 and above.

   Good effort, but not yet a masterpiece. Go into exile for a few years; that might help.

4. 16 and above.

   "A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery" (Ulysses). Well, if it worked for Joyce...