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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 is NOT a material reality in the oppression of women?
(a) Unequal wages.
(b) Job Discrimination.
(c) Motherhood.
(d) Equal wages.

2. What is the example Eagleton provides of a metalanguage, where one sign-system denotes another sign-system?
(a) The relation between philosophy and religion.
(b) The relation between philosophy and literature.
(c) The relation between literary criticism and literature.
(d) The relation between literary criticism and religion.

3. According to Eagleton, literary theorists "are not so much ______of doctrine as ________of a discourse."
(a) Critics; creators.
(b) Teachers; students.
(c) Purveyors; custodians.
(d) Writers; readers.

4. According to Eagleton, why is Shakespeare considered great literature?
(a) Because he is great literature.
(b) Because the masses constitute him as great literature.
(c) Because he is better than other literature.
(d) Because the literary institution constitues him as great literature.

5. Jacques Lacan argues that like _______ desire emerges from a lack, which it strives to fulfill.
(a) Identity.
(b) Language.
(c) Faith.
(d) Myth.

Short Answer Questions

1. Who said "there is no cultural document that is not at the same time a record of barbarism"?

2. For Jacques Lacan, "meaning is always in some sense an _______."

3. Why should politics engage with questions of sexual ideology, according to Eagleton?

4. Why do feminists embrace the work of Jacques Lacan, despite the fact that he was contemptuous of the women's movement?

5. What is the difference between metaphor and metonymy?

Short Essay Questions

1. How did Northrop Frye attempt to combine the formalist focus on the text with the essence of new American criticism?

2. Who developed semiotics and what was his contribution to literary theory?

3. How did Mikhail Bakhtin view language?

4. What are the three stages of development in psychoanalysis and how do they relate to literary theory?

5. Why does Eagleton reject the idea of a disconnected individual in society?

6. According to Eagleton, why should the notion of literary theory be abolished?

7. Who is Ferdinand de Saussure and what was his contribution to the field of literary theory?

8. How does the philosopher Jacques Derrida conceive of language?

9. What is Sigmund Freud's Oedipus complex and why is it significant?

10. What was the significance of the Prague structuralists?

(see the answer keys)

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