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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. According to the narrator in the chapter "Psychoanalytic Criticism," who did Sigmund Freud link the situation of Hamlet in the play to?
(a) Shakespeare.
(b) Zeus.
(c) God.
(d) Oedipus.

2. Which of the following works of T.S. Eliot was a collage of juxtaposed, incomplete stories, or fragments of stories according to the chapter titled "Postmodernism"?
(a) Prufrock and Other Observations.
(b) Essays Ancient and Modern.
(c) The Waste Land.
(d) The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism.

3. The chapter "Feminist Criticism" informs the reader that "for her notion of the basic opposition between semiotic and the symbolic Kristeva was indebted to Jacques Lacan and his distinction between two realms, the ________ and the ________.
(a) Story / discourse.
(b) Reference / referent.
(c) Imaginary / symbolic.
(d) Syntagm / syntagmatic.

4. In Percy Bysshe Shelley's ________(1821) saw poetry as essentially engaged in what a group of twentieth-century Russian critics later called "defamiliarization."
(a) Queen Mab.
(b) The Necessity of Atheism.
(c) Cenci.
(d) A Defence of Poetry.

5. What does the narrator say the reader will have the most difficulty as the result of what?
(a) The way theory is taught.
(b) The way theory is told.
(c) The way theory was created.
(d) The way theory is written.

Short Answer Questions

1. According to the chapter titled Structuralism, what is another term for "alba," the poetic form dating from the twelfth century in which lovers lament the approach of daybreak?

2. What is the name given to the movement that dominates the arts and culture of the first half of the twentieth century?

3. In the chapter titled Structuralism, the narrator explains that ________ applied the structuralism method to the general field of modern culture.

4. The narrator explains that the first prestigious name in English writing about literature was that of ________, who wrote his "Apology for Poetry" in about 1580.

5. What language does the narrator describe as being a Romance language that takes most of its words directly from Latin, and lacks the reassuring Anglo-Saxon layer of vocabulary?

Short Essay Questions

1. Briefly explain what post-structuralist critics do.

2. What is a theoretical difference between structuralist and post-structuralist?

3. Discuss how J.A. Cuddon describes postmodernism in his "Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory."

4. Compare post-colonialism to postmodernism as discussed in the chapter "Theory Before Theory--Liberal Humanism."

5. What is the most basic difference between liberal humanist and structuralist reading?

6. What is the purpose of displacement and condensation?

7. How does Disneyland fit into the concept of hyperreality according to Baurdrillard?

8. Who was Jean Baudrillard? How was he associated with "the loss of the real"?

9. In which way is post-structuralism more fundamental than structuralism?

10. Why was Freudian interpretation interesting to literary critics?

(see the answer keys)

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