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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. According to Eagleton, why did the Russian formalists NOT see a literary work as a vehicle for ideas, reflection of reality, or transcendental truth?

2. During the last decades of the eighteenth-century, the word prosaic begins to acquire what a kind of connotation?

3. Who was Husserl's most famous pupil who broke with his system of thought?

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

5. According to Eagleton, "theory was a way of _______ literary works from the ________of civilised sensibility'"

Short Essay Questions

1. How has the population in higher education changed in Britain since the 1960s and what it its significance?

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

3. What kinds of writing were considered literature in the eighteenth-century and why is this significant?

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

5. How did the romantic movement develop and why is it significant?

6. What is "Tristram Shandy" and why is it significant?

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

8. What did new American criticism focus on and why is it significant?

9. What period of literature did the critic Roland Barthes focus on and why is it significant?

10. Why does Eagleton call the emergence and development of literary theory a "theoretical revolution" and what does it signify?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Discuss Sigmund Freud's Oedipus complex.

1) Identify and analyze the three stages of human development-- the oral, anal, and phallic stage.

2) Compare and contrast Freud's views on males and females.

Essay Topic 2

Compare and contrast the work of Northrop Frye with Stanely Fish. What are their methodologies?

Essay Topic 3

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?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 873 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample