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

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How does "The Language of Flowers" end?
(a) With Count Leopold von Sacher-Masoch putting out a priest's eye.
(b) With a girl being sent away to school.
(c) With students strangling a young woman.
(d) With Sade tossing flower petals into a ditch of manure.

2. What flower is Marquis de Sade plucking petals off, at the end of "The Language of Flowers"?
(a) A carnation.
(b) A daisy.
(c) A rose.
(d) A lily.

3. Whom did Bataille join with to form the Popular Front?
(a) Marinetti.
(b) Breton.
(c) Marx.
(d) Picasso.

4. How does Bataille describe producing and selling in "The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade"?
(a) As revolutionary phases.
(b) As consumptive phases.
(c) As excretory phases.
(d) As primitive phases.

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

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

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

8. What was Bataille being punished for in "[Dream]"?
(a) Seeing his parents naked.
(b) Wetting himself.
(c) Playing with a hoop.
(d) Staying up too late.

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

10. How should materialism be disclaimed, in "Materialism"?
(a) By including all idealism.
(b) By superseding idealism with dialogue.
(c) By replacing idealism with matter.
(d) By excluding all idealism.

11. What does Bataille say surrealism is, in "The 'Old Mole' and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme [Superman] and Surrealist"?
(a) A childhood sickness of materialism.
(b) A reaction against childhood idealism.
(c) A form of world-weariness.
(d) A surplus of idealism.

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

13. How do philosophers use natural forms, in "The Language of Flowers"?
(a) As symbols of sacred abstraction.
(b) As symbols for the experience and association of natural forms.
(c) As primitive forms of the things themselves.
(d) As metaphors for other natural forms.

14. When did Bataille form the Popular Front?
(a) 1935.
(b) 1929.
(c) 1941.
(d) 1933.

15. What does Bataille say was the driving force beneath his heterodox theory?
(a) Oedipal terror.
(b) Homoerotic terror.
(c) Obsession with excrement.
(d) Obsession with priests.

Short Answer Questions

1. What writer coined the term conspicuous consumption?

2. What did Bataille say about his book "W.C."?

3. Who contributed to "Documents"?

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

5. What does Bataille remember his father spanking him with in "[Dream]"?

(see the answer keys)

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