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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 provides the analogy of finding a "scrap of writing from a long-vanished civilization" to make what point about deciphering its meaning?
(a) That we would be able to see that poetry didn't exist by looking at its language.
(b) That we would not know whether it was a piece of poetry or ordinary language.
(c) That we would be able to learn that it was a piece of poetry by looking at the language.
(d) That we would be able to tell that it was a piece of poetry regardless of access to its language.

2. According to Eagleton, what idea is "truly elitist" in literary studies?
(a) "The idea that literature should not be read by those without a higher degree."
(b) "The idea that literature is the only way to understand a particular culture."
(c) "The idea that works of literature can only be appreciated by those with a particular sort of cultural breeding."
(d) "The idea that literature can only be understood by writers of literature."

3. According to Eagleton, what kind of thought does literary education NOT encourage?
(a) Irrational thought.
(b) Rational thought.
(c) Analytical thought.
(d) Creative thought.

4. The Russian formalists rejected what kind of doctrines that had influenced literary criticism?
(a) Quasi-mystical symbolist doctrines.
(b) Quasi-mystical religious doctrines.
(c) Quasi-mystical psychoanalytic doctrines.
(d) Quasi-mystical fictional doctrines.

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

Short Answer Questions

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

2. According to Eagleton, what happens when literary theory becomes "turgidly unreadable"?

3. According to the Russian formalist Osip Brik, Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" would have been written if Pushkin had what?

4. What example from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries does Eagleton provide that was not considered purely factual?

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

(see the answer key)

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