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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What did Bataille describe in "The Lugubrious Game"?
(a) Sex play with eyeballs.
(b) A brown smudge.
(c) Anal fixation.
(d) Bestiality.

2. What paradoxical action does Bataille describe in "Materialism"?
(a) The attempt to translate sex into language.
(b) The desire to stop using language for natural functions.
(c) The attempt to rid one's thoughts of spiritualism.
(d) The attempt to free the eye from aesthetics.

3. What were Bataille's feelings for Breton?
(a) Supplication.
(b) Admiration.
(c) Hostility.
(d) Indifference.

4. When was George Bataille born?
(a) 1897.
(b) 1902.
(c) 1899.
(d) 1892.

5. How does surrealism rebel at first, in "The 'Old Mole' and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme [Superman] and Surrealist"?
(a) With subtle disorientation of meaning.
(b) With all-out deformation of images.
(c) With all the proletarians.
(d) Without the lower classes.

6. Whom did the Popular Front join with?
(a) Communists and Socialists.
(b) Bureaucrats and Communists.
(c) Democrats and Socialist Democrats.
(d) Fascists and totalitarians.

7. What does the title of "The Solar Anus" refer to?
(a) The blinding effect of seeing a girl's anus.
(b) The passage out of purgatory.
(c) The regeneration of the universe in stars that eat planets.
(d) The source of all matter.

8. Why was Bataille annoyed while riding his bicycle?
(a) The schoolyard was fenced in.
(b) The house was too small for his turns.
(c) The pavement was broken up by streetcar tracks.
(d) The sand was slushy with high tide.

9. What interrupts the road in "[Dream]"?
(a) Children.
(b) Fishermen.
(c) Construction workers.
(d) Rats and vermin.

10. What feeling does Bataille exaggerate in "The Lugubrious Game"?
(a) Respect.
(b) Admiration.
(c) Irreverence.
(d) Mournfulness.

11. What did "Acephale" primarily consist of?
(a) Surrealist writing.
(b) Anarchistic literature.
(c) Bataille's writing.
(d) Fascist rants.

12. How does Bataille describe his memory of his father pulling down his pants in "[Dream]"?
(a) Terrible and magnificent.
(b) Unimportant.
(c) Catastrophic.
(d) Humiliating and painful.

13. What claim does Bataille discuss in "The Deviations of Nature"?
(a) That nothing is more horrifying than rats at carnivals.
(b) That nothing is more horrifying than snakes.
(c) That nothing is more horrifying that carnival freaks.
(d) That nothing is more horrifying than man.

14. What does Bataille say conspicuous consumption was used for?
(a) Destroying the foundation of wealth.
(b) Attacking the inequalities in the economy.
(c) Affirming the position of the rich.
(d) Devaluing the trappings of wealth.

15. How does Bataille describe the mandrake root?
(a) Holy.
(b) Obscene.
(c) Noisy.
(d) Human.

Short Answer Questions

1. What do flowers witness, in "The Language of Flowers"?

2. Why did Bataille leave his job in 1942?

3. What flower is Marquis de Sade plucking petals off, at the end of "The Language of Flowers"?

4. Whom did Bataille join with to form the Popular Front?

5. What kind of eye does Victor Hugo describe in a poem Bataille cites?

(see the answer keys)

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