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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. Which of the following works did the narrator believe to be the most important Lacanian text for literary students and which was first delivered in 1957 to a "lay" audience of philosophy students?
(a) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.
(b) The Signification of the Phallus.
(c) Fetishism: the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real.
(d) The Insistence of the Letter.

2. Peter Barry explains that ________'s most significant thinking was contained in the essays "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" and "The Study of Poetry."
(a) Voltaire.
(b) Mark Twain.
(c) William Shakespeare.
(d) Matthew Arnold.

3. Author Peter Barry explains that a major "moment" in the history of postmodernism was the influential paper "Modernity-an Incomplete Project" delivered by the contemporary ________ theorist ________.
(a) Polish / Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
(b) English / Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
(c) French / Guy de Maupassant.
(d) German / Jurgen Habermas.

4. 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) Essays Ancient and Modern.
(b) The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism.
(c) The Waste Land.
(d) Prufrock and Other Observations.

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?
(a) German.
(b) English.
(c) French.
(d) Spanish.

Short Answer Questions

1. What where the only two universities in England in the nineteenth century?

2. The crucial essay "The Death of the Author" written in 1968 was the "hinge" around which ________ turned from structuralism to post-structuralism.

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

4. According to the chapter titled Theory Before Theory--Liberal Humanism, structuralism and post-structuralism originated in what country?

5. David Lodge, Professor of English at Birmingham, combined the ideas of structuralism with more traditional approaches in which one of his books?

Short Essay Questions

1. Do liberal humanists use the term "human nature"? Explain.

2. Briefly explain what post-structuralist critics do.

3. Briefly summarize author Peter Barry's own introduction to literary theory as seen in "My own stock-taking" found within the "Introduction."

4. What is "ecriture feminine"?

5. Explain the Oedipus complex of Sigmund Freud.

6. What are the three stages of the deconstructive process? Explain.

7. What is the purpose of displacement and condensation?

8. Who was I.A. Richards?

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

10. Why was Freudian interpretation interesting to literary critics?

(see the answer keys)

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