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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. According to Eagleton, what kind of thought does literary education NOT encourage?

2. For the economist Eagleton discusses, "those economists who dislike theory or claimed to get along better without it" were what?

3. According to Eagleton, what happens when literary theory becomes "turgidly unreadable"?

4. How did the Romantic artist reflect her or his work in its detachment from history itself?

5. Eagleton's goal in "Literary Theory: An Introduction" is to provide a comprehensive account of literary theory for whom?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. How does Eagleton define elitism in literary studies and why is it important?

3. In the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries, what was considered "fact" and what was considered "fiction," and how is it significant?

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

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

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

7. How did new criticism emerge in England and America?

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

9. What is Eagleton's argument regarding the literary canon as the "unquestioned" great tradition of national literature?

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Discuss Eagleton's argument for a movement that would reform the academy and society at large by identifying and analyzing the 4 major goals of this political movement.

Essay Topic 2

Discuss modernism as a literary movement.

1) Identify two modernist writers and four characteristics of modernist literature.

2) Discuss the emergence of modernism and the literary theories that developed from this movement.

Essay Topic 3

Compare and contrast structuralism with phenomenology.

1) What are the basic tenets of each school of thought?

2) What are the similarities between them?

2) What are their differences?

(see the answer keys)

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