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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 5, Psychoanalysis.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. According to Eagleton, why is it an illusion to think that he can be present to us in what he says and writes?
(a) Because he is a concrete entity but language is not.
(b) Because he is no longer present in the world but in some other present in the future.
(c) Because the language he uses is not a tool but something he is made of and therefore always divided.
(d) Because language is only a tool, not something he is made of.

2. According to Eagleton, why is Hans-Georg Gadamer not concerned about bringing our cultural preconceptions to a literary work?
(a) Because unlike the literary work, the come from tradition.
(b) Because like the literary work, they come from tradition.
(c) Because unlike the literary work, they come from modernity.
(d) Because like the literary work, they come from modernity.

3. According to Eagleton, the Western philosophical tradition has "consistently vilified" what?
(a) Man.
(b) Writing.
(c) Speech.
(d) Myth.

4. How many decades, according to Eagleton, has there been a "striking proliferation of literary theory" since the publication of the Russian formalist's pioneering essay?
(a) Six.
(b) Five.
(c) Two.
(d) One.

5. In American deconstruction, why does literary criticism become an "ironic, uneasy business"?
(a) Because it lays bare the illusoriness of meaning.
(b) Because it lays bare the temporality of meaning.
(c) Because it lays bare the physicality of meaning.
(d) Because it lays bare the permanence of meaning.

Short Answer Questions

1. During the Romantic period, how is literature more than "idle escapism"?

2. According to the Soviet semiotician Yury Lotman, a poetic text is "semantically _________."

3. According to Eagleton, "the tactic of _________criticism ... is to show how texts come to embarrass their own ruling systems of logic."

4. For the Romantics, why was their vision of a just society was inverted into a nostalgia for an old and "organic" England?

5. According to Eagleton, what is ironic about those who complain of the difficulty of literary theory?

(see the answer key)

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