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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. Eagleton's goal in "Literary Theory: An Introduction" is to provide a comprehensive account of literary theory for whom?

2. For Eagleton, how did the romantics usher a "forestalling of reasoned critical enquiry"?

3. Eagleton provides the analogy of finding a "scrap of writing from a long-vanished civilization" to make what point about deciphering its meaning?

4. For Eagleton, opposition between "historical" and "artistic" truth does NOT apply to what?

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

Short Essay Questions

1. What is hermeneutics and how is it significant?

2. What is Eagleton's argument regarding the literary canon as the "unquestioned" great tradition of national literature?

3. What were the Russian formalists responding to in terms of literary criticism?

4. What is Eagleton's goal in writing "Literary Theory: An Introduction"?

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

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

7. What kind of thought does a literary education not encourage, according to Eagleton, and what does this signify?

8. Why does Eagleton argue that the demarcation between fiction and fact in writing is "questionable"?

9. How does Eagleton respond to critics who claim that literary theory as irrelevant or elitist and what are its implications?

10. How is Martin Heidegger's philosophy similar to that of the Russian formalists?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What is the basic problem of literary theory, according to Eagleton? Why does Eagleton that "literature" should not be any more important in terms of a field of study as film or television shows? For Eagleton, why is rhetoric a more comprehensive and constructive discipline and methodology?

Essay Topic 2

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 3

Define, discuss, and analyze the emergence and development of romantic aesthetic theory.

1) What were the romantic writers responding to in terms of the society in which they lived and worked?

2) What was the role of the romantic artist in society?

3) According to the romantics, why was the symbol so central to the meaning of a text?

4) What are some of the lasting effects of romantic theory?

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