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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. What "twin impacts" does Eagleton cite in the mid-Victorian period that was particularly worrisome to the ruling class?

2. What proposes a "severe problem" for Husserl's theory?

3. According to Eagleton, William Empson "insists on treating poetry as a species of ______language."

4. Who developed hermeneutics?

5. According to Eagleton, Stanley Fish's model excludes the possibility that there is a ______ of interpretations?

Short Essay Questions

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

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

3. During the eighteenth century, how was art perceived in England and why is it significant?

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

5. What kind of thought does a literary education not encourage, according to Eagleton, and what does this signify?

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

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

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

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

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Discuss Roland Barthes work on signs. In particular, how did he categorize signs in terms of their function?

Essay Topic 2

Discuss the women's movement.

1) Identify four major goals of the women's movement.

2) What is the relationship between politics and sexual ideology?

3) How did the women's movement respond to dominant literary theories?

Essay Topic 3

Choose one work of literature (a story, essay, poem, play, or novel) and one method of literary analysis (new criticism, structuralism, post-structuralism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis) and examine the work by utilizing a specific literary theory.

(see the answer keys)

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