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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. From the viewpoint of Roland Barthes, Eagleton argues that "reading is less like a _______ than a _________."

2. Eagleton argues that for Stanley Fish, what a text "does" to us is a matter of what we do to what?

3. What example from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries does Eagleton provide that was not considered purely factual?

4. According to the Russian critic Roman Jakobson, literature represents "organized ______committed on ordinary _______."

5. For Eagleton, E.D. Hirsch attempts to "offer a form of knowledge" that is what?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is phenomenology and when did it emerge as a serious discipline?

2. In the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, what was considered "fact" and what was considered "fiction," and how is it significant?

3. How does Eagleton define elitism in literary studies and why is it important?

4. What is the reach of the "theoretical revolution" and why is it significant?

5. How does phenomenological criticism view literature and what is Eagleton's response?

6. How did new criticism emerge in England and America?

7. How did the Russian formalists answer the question "what is literature?" and why was it significant?

8. What did the critic E.D. Hirsch, Jr. believe about the reader's relationship to a text?

9. What is Eagleton's major problem with formalism and why is it significant?

10. Who developed reception theory and why is it significant?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Discuss the ways in which the concept of literature has changed from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century.

1) What was considered literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?

2) How do the romantic movement transform the definition of literature?

3) What was the function of literature during the Victorian era?

Essay Topic 2

Choose one work of literature (a story, essay, poem, play, or novel) and one method of literary analysis (new criticism, structuralism, post-structuralism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis) and examine the work by utilizing a specific literary theory.

Essay Topic 3

Discuss Roland Barthes work on signs. In particular, how did he categorize signs in terms of their function?

(see the answer keys)

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