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

2. How do linguists describe the effect of language where "the texture, rhythm and resonance of words are in excess of their abstractable meaning."
(a) "A disproportion between two signifieds."
(b) "A disproportion between two signifiers."
(c) "A disproportion between signifiers and signifieds."
(d) "A disproportion between one signifier for every other signified."

3. According to Eagleton, the sentence "this is awfully squiggly handwriting" from Knut Hamsun's "Hunger" tells him its literary because of what reason?
(a) The content.
(b) The context.
(c) The facts.
(d) The ideas.

4. According to Eagleton, formalism is the application of what to the study of literature?
(a) Linguistics.
(b) Sociology.
(c) Economics.
(d) Psychology.

5. According to Eagleton, Gibbon and the authors of Genesis share what in common?
(a) They both thought they were writing historical truth, but are read as fact by some and fiction by others.
(b) Both wrote fiction that is read as historical fact.
(c) Both wrote historical truth that is read as fiction.
(d) Both wrote fiction that is read as fact by some and fiction by others.

Short Answer 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?

2. What is "imaginative" literature or literature that is not necessarily true?

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

4. Eagleton argues that the readership his book has attracted dispels the notion that literary theory is what?

5. 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"?

(see the answer key)

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