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

2. According to Eagleton, why is Hans-Georg Gadamer not concerned about bringing our cultural preconceptions to a literary work?
(a) Because like the literary work, they come from tradition.
(b) Because like the literary work, they come from modernity.
(c) Because unlike the literary work, the come from tradition.
(d) Because unlike the literary work, they come from modernity.

3. The German philosopher Edmund Husserl argued that objects can be regarded as things ______ by consciousness.
(a) Understood.
(b) Realized.
(c) Evaluated.
(d) Intended.

4. According to Viktor Shklovsky, what novel was "the most typical novel in world literature" because it impeded its own story-line so that it never gets off the ground?
(a) "Tristram Shandy."
(b) "Animal Farm."
(c) "Don Quixote."
(d) "History of the Rebellion."

5. Eagleton argues that the criteria for what counted as literature in the eighteenth-century was what?
(a) Ideological.
(b) Religious.
(c) Practical.
(d) Canonical.

Short Answer Questions

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

2. What word does Eagleton discuss that is both a descriptive term to mean "literally untrue" as well as an evaluative term to mean "visionary" or "inventive"?

3. What date does Eagleton settle on as the "beginnings of the transformation which has taken over literary theory in this century"?

4. According to Eagleton, "theory was a way of _______ literary works from the ________of civilised sensibility'"

5. What kind of analysis is phenomenology, according to Eagleton?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. What was the romantics relationship to the symbol and why is it significant?

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

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

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

6. What is Eagleton's major problem with formalism and why is it significant?

7. How did the Russian formalists answer the question "what is literature?" and why was it significant?

8. What is hermeneutics and how is it significant?

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

10. How does Eagleton respond to critics who claim that literary theory as irrelevant or elitist and what are its implications?

(see the answer keys)

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