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This quiz consists of 5 multiple choice and 5 short answer questions through Chapter 4, Post-Structuralism.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. In American deconstruction, why does literary criticism become an "ironic, uneasy business"?
(a) Because it lays bare the illusoriness of meaning.
(b) Because it lays bare the physicality of meaning.
(c) Because it lays bare the temporality of meaning.
(d) Because it lays bare the permanence of meaning.

2. According to the Soviet semiotician Yury Lotman, a poetic text is "semantically _________."
(a) Saturated.
(b) Irrational.
(c) Rational.
(d) Transparent.

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

4. In the eighteenth-century, what was the whole body of writing in society considered, including philosophy, letters, history, poems, and essays?
(a) Canon.
(b) Theory.
(c) Literature.
(d) Religion.

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

Short Answer Questions

1. Who is the founder of modern structural linguistics?

2. For Eagleton, hostility toward theory means what?

3. Literary texts are code-productive, code-transgressive, and code_____.

4. According to Eagleton, the French structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss did pioneering work on what?

5. What year did Terry Eagleton's "Literary Theory: An Introduction" first appear?

(see the answer key)

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