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

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

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

4. According to Eagleton, what kind of age do we live in, where "meaning, like everything else, is expected to be instantly consumable"?
(a) Esoteric.
(b) Modern.
(c) Traditional.
(d) Postmodern.

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

Short Answer Questions

1. For Eagleton, opposition between "historical" and "artistic" truth does NOT apply to what?

2. For the economist Eagleton discusses, "those economists who dislike theory or claimed to get along better without it" were what?

3. According to Eagleton, the Russian formalist shifted their attention to the "material reality" of what?

4. According to Eagleton, the formalists were not out to define literature but they were out to define what?

5. Eagleton provides the analogy of finding a "scrap of writing from a long-vanished civilization" to make what point about deciphering its meaning?

(see the answer key)

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