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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. What genre of writing does Eagleton provide that is an example of writing that is NOT considered to be literature?
(a) Comics.
(b) Science fiction.
(c) Romance.
(d) Young Adult.

2. 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 tell that it was a piece of poetry regardless of access to 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 see that poetry didn't exist by looking at its language.
(d) That we would be able to learn that it was a piece of poetry by looking at the language.

3. What is the name Edmund Husserl gave to his philosophical method?
(a) Reception theory.
(b) New criticism.
(c) Hermeneutics.
(d) Phenomenology.

4. According to Eagleton, what does his book try to demonstrate about a body of literary theory?
(a) That there are several bodies of literary theory that spring from and is applicable to literature alone.
(b) That there is sometimes a body of literary theory that springs from and is applicable to literature alone.
(c) That there is no body of literary theory that springs from or is applicable to literature alone.
(d) That there is one body of literary theory that springs from and is applicable to literature alone.

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

Short Answer Questions

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

2. 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?

3. What kind of language does Eagleton say people think of literature as?

4. Eagleton writes that "New Criticism was the ideology of an ________, _______intelligentsia who reinvented in literature what they could not locate in reality."

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

Short Essay Questions

1. Who developed reception theory and why is it significant?

2. What is hermeneutics and how is it significant?

3. In the nineteenth century, what was the outcome of religion as a result of the industrial revolution where new technologies and science were being developed?

4. What is the significance of Viktor Shklovsky's 1917 essay "Art as Device," according to Eagleton?

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

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

7. Why does Eagleton argue that the demarcation between fiction and fact in writing is "questionable"?

8. What is phenomenology and when did it emerge as a serious discipline?

9. What period of literature did the critic Roland Barthes focus on and why is it significant?

10. What were the Russian formalists responding to in terms of literary criticism?

(see the answer keys)

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