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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. During the last decades of the eighteenth-century, the word prosaic begins to acquire what a kind of connotation?
(a) A negative connotation.
(b) A unfamiliar connotation.
(c) A positive connotation.
(d) A familiar connotation.

2. According to Eagleton, the subject in phenomenology was the source of all what?
(a) Oppression.
(b) Violence.
(c) Meaning.
(d) Life.

3. The distinction between fact and fiction in defining literature is what?
(a) Important.
(b) Complicated.
(c) Questionable.
(d) Difficult.

4. Why is the example Eagleton gives of the sign in the London Underground system that "dogs must be carried on the escalator" a case of estrangement?
(a) Because the directive is unambigious and therefore inherently meaningful.
(b) Because the language is prosaic and straightforward.
(c) Because the statement is a directive where people who do not follow are estranged from society.
(d) Because of the ambiguities inherent in the statement, which raises questions about its meaning.

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

Short Answer Questions

1. Eagleton argues that reading literature in a new critical way was a recipe for what?

2. According to Eagleton, what kind of age do we live in, where "meaning, like everything else, is expected to be instantly consumable"?

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

4. Who silenced the Russian formalists, according to Eagleton?

5. According to Eagleton, why is E.D. Hirsch able to maintain his view that literary meaning is absolute and resistant to historical change?

Short Essay Questions

1. How did the romantic movement develop and why is it significant?

2. What is hermeneutics and how is it significant?

3. What was the dominant ideology of eighteenth-century England?

4. What does "concretize" mean and why is it significant?

5. What is Eagleton's goal in writing "Literary Theory: An Introduction"?

6. What did new American criticism focus on and why is it significant?

7. How is Martin Heidegger's philosophy similar to that of the Russian formalists?

8. How has the population in higher education changed in Britain since the 1960s and what it its significance?

9. What did the critic E.D. Hirsch, Jr. believe about the reader's relationship to a text?

10. What is "Tristram Shandy" and why is it significant?

(see the answer keys)

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