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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Introduction: What is Literature?.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. Eagleton argues that if literature includes much factual writing, it also excludes "quite a lot of" what?
(a) Fiction.
(b) Nonfiction.
(c) Biography.
(d) Autobiography.

2. What kind of language does Eagleton say people think of literature as?
(a) Difficult.
(b) Dull.
(c) Ordinary.
(d) Strange.

3. According to Eagleton, the formalists were not out to define literature but they were out to define what?
(a) Realism.
(b) Literariness.
(c) Inventiveness.
(d) Criticism.

4. What example from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries does Eagleton provide that was not considered purely factual?
(a) News.
(b) Novels.
(c) Sermons.
(d) Decrees.

5. During the 1960s, what kind of students began to enter higher education that broke down assumptions about literary studies?
(a) Students from supposedly "uncultivated" backgrounds.
(b) Students from supposedly "third-world" countries.
(c) Students from supposedly "cultivated" backgrounds.
(d) Students from supposedly "first-world" countries.

Short Answer Questions

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

2. According to Eagleton, "properly understood, literary theory is shaped by a ______impulse rather than an _______one."

3. How do linguists describe the effect of language where "the texture, rhythm and resonance of words are in excess of their abstractable meaning."

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

5. The distinction between fact and fiction in defining literature is what?

(see the answer key)

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