View a FREE sample

This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What novel by John Updike does Eagleton discuss from the position of reception theory?
(a) Terrorist.
(b) Of the Farm.
(c) Couples.
(d) Rabbit Run.

2. For the Romantics, why was their vision of a just society was inverted into a nostalgia for an old and "organic" England?
(a) Because they refused to give up their privilege as writers in industrial society.
(b) Because their vision of a just society was a corrupted version of industrial capitalism.
(c) Because they lacked the means of transforming industrial capitalism.
(d) Because they were revolutionaries who were imprisoned in the old system.

3. Eagleton provides the analogy of finding a "scrap of writing from a long-vanished civilization" to make what point about deciphering its meaning?
(a) That we would not know whether it was a piece of poetry or ordinary language.
(b) That we would be able to see that poetry didn't exist by looking at its language.
(c) That we would be able to learn that it was a piece of poetry by looking at the language.
(d) That we would be able to tell that it was a piece of poetry regardless of access to its language.

4. During the Romantic period, how is literature more than "idle escapism"?
(a) It is the acceptance of totalarian values rejected in English society.
(b) It is the rejection of creative values celebrated in English society.
(c) It is the affirmation of creative values expunged from English society.
(d) It is the celebration of totalarian values enforced in English society.

5. According to Viktor Shklovsky, what novel was "the most typical novel in world literature" because it impeded its own story-line so that it never gets off the ground?
(a) "Tristram Shandy."
(b) "Animal Farm."
(c) "Don Quixote."
(d) "History of the Rebellion."

6. During the 1960s, what kind of students began to enter higher education that broke down assumptions about literary studies?
(a) Students from supposedly "third-world" countries.
(b) Students from supposedly "cultivated" backgrounds.
(c) Students from supposedly "uncultivated" backgrounds.
(d) Students from supposedly "first-world" countries.

7. What kind of analysis is phenomenology, according to Eagleton?
(a) Uncritical and non-evaluative.
(b) Discursive and non-evaluative.
(c) Uncritical and discursive.
(d) Critical and discursive.

8. Eagleton argues that the readership his book has attracted dispels the notion that literary theory is what?
(a) Misguided.
(b) Boring.
(c) Elitist.
(d) Simple.

9. What is the German word for how reality is not objective, but experienced and organized by an individual subject?
(a) Vorgeschichte.
(b) Wendepunkt.
(c) Bildungsroman.
(d) Lebenswelt.

10. What three sequential stages does Eagleton point out in the development of modern literary theory?
(a) The preoccupation with the author, the exclusive concern with the text, and a shift toward the reader.
(b) The preoccupation with the critic, the exclusive concern with the author, and a shift toward the text.
(c) The preoccupation with the text, the exclusive concern with the reader, and a shift toward the author.
(d) The preoccupation with the reader, the exclusive concern with the text, and a shift toward the critic.

11. During the last decades of the eighteenth-century, the word prosaic begins to acquire what a kind of connotation?
(a) A unfamiliar connotation.
(b) A familiar connotation.
(c) A negative connotation.
(d) A positive connotation.

12. What proposes a "severe problem" for Husserl's theory?
(a) Language.
(b) Truth.
(c) Consciousness.
(d) Individuality.

13. According to the Russian formalist Osip Brik, Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" would have been written if Pushkin had what?
(a) Died young.
(b) Been uneducated.
(c) Not lived.
(d) Married early.

14. What year did Terry Eagleton's "Literary Theory: An Introduction" first appear?
(a) 1943.
(b) 1993.
(c) 1983.
(d) 1963.

15. According to the Russian critic Roman Jakobson, literature represents "organized ______committed on ordinary _______."
(a) Protest; speech.
(b) Violence; speech.
(c) Violence; people.
(d) Religion; writing.

Short Answer Questions

1. Who was glad to abandon the "feminine vagaries of literature" in favor of penning war propaganda?

2. According to Eagleton, literature is definable "not according to whether it is fictional or "imaginative," because it uses language in ____ways."

3. Who silenced the Russian formalists, according to Eagleton?

4. For Eagleton, hostility toward theory means what?

5. According to Eagleton, the sentence "this is awfully squiggly handwriting" from Knut Hamsun's "Hunger" tells him its literary because of what reason?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 690 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample