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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 3, Structuralism and Semiotics.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. According to Eagleton, structuralism maintains that "individual units of any system have meaning only by virtue of" what?
(a) Their connection to religion.
(b) Their status in the world.
(c) Their meaning for the critic.
(d) Their relations to one another.

2. According to Eagleton, "in the terminology of reception theory, the reader _________ the literary work, which is in itself no more than a chain of organized black marks on a page."
(a) Rationalizes.
(b) Terrorizes.
(c) Concretizes.
(d) Sanitizes.

3. What text did Tzvetan Todorov attempt a grammatical analysis of so that the characters were nouns, their attributes adjectives, and actions verbs?
(a) Updike's "Rabbit."
(b) Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment."
(c) Boccaccio's "Decameron."
(d) Twain's "Tom Sawyer."

4. According to Eagleton, "if one were asked to provide a single explanation for the growth of English in the later nineteenth century" what would it be?
(a) The success of religion."
(b) The success of government.
(c) The failure of government."
(d) The failure of religion.

5. What date does Eagleton settle on as the "beginnings of the transformation which has taken over literary theory in this century"?
(a) 1977.
(b) 1917.
(c) 1957.
(d) 1937.

Short Answer Questions

1. What proposes a "severe problem" for Husserl's theory?

2. What is the name of the pioneering essay the Russian formalist wrote that is the "beginnings of the transformation which has taken over literary theory in this century"?

3. According to Eagleton, what kind of age do we live in, where "meaning, like everything else, is expected to be instantly consumable"?

4. What genre of writing does Eagleton provide that is an example of writing that is NOT considered to be literature?

5. What are Northrop Frye's three recurrent patterns of symbolism in literature?

(see the answer key)

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