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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, the women's movement is not just about women having equal status and power as men, it is what?
(a) The acceptance of sexual difference in relations of status and power.
(b) The questioning of all status and power.
(c) The abdication of sex altogether in relations of status and power.
(d) The rejection of men's status and power.

2. According to Eagleton, why is it an illusion to think that he can be present to us in what he says and writes?
(a) Because language is only a tool, not something he is made of.
(b) Because he is a concrete entity but language is not.
(c) Because the language he uses is not a tool but something he is made of and therefore always divided.
(d) Because he is no longer present in the world but in some other present in the future.

3. What is the name of the Yale theorist who believed that all language is metaphorical?
(a) Paul de Man.
(b) Julia Kristeva.
(c) Northrop Frye.
(d) Michel Foucault.

4. According to Eagleton, what is the oldest form of literary criticism?
(a) Sociology.
(b) Rhetoric.
(c) Philosophy.
(d) Religion.

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

Short Answer Questions

1. Roland Barthes "double" sign is the "grandchild" of what kind of language of the Formalist and Czech structuralists?

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

3. Jacques Lacan argues that like _______ desire emerges from a lack, which it strives to fulfill.

4. What is the example Eagleton provides of a metalanguage, where one sign-system denotes another sign-system?

5. According to Roland Barthes, what kind of sign draws attention to its own arbitrariness?

Short Essay Questions

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

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

3. Why does Eagleton argue that politics should engage with questions of sexual ideology?

4. For Roland Barthes, what does literature embody and why is it significant?

5. How did post-structuralism develop and why is it significant?

6. Beyond helping the status of women, what is the women's movement's goal and why is it significant?

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

8. What is significant about the ways in which Sigmund Freud treated women and men?

9. How did Mikhail Bakhtin view language?

10. Why does Eagleton claim that Northrop Frye's work emphasized the "utopian root'" of all literature and what is his response?

(see the answer keys)

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