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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, "Literary Theory: An Introduction" has managed to reach readers beyond __________.

2. According to Eagleton, the subject in phenomenology was the source of all what?

3. What kind of language does Eagleton say people think of literature as?

4. During the Romantic period, how is literature more than "idle escapism"?

5. Eagleton argues that for Stanley Fish, what a text "does" to us is a matter of what we do to what?

Short Essay Questions

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

2. Why is literature an unstable term, according to Eagleton?

3. Why does Eagleton call the emergence and development of literary theory a "theoretical revolution" and what does it signify?

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

5. In the nineteenth century, what was the outcome of religion as a result of the industrial revolution where new technologies and science were being developed?

6. How has the population in higher education changed in Britain since the 1960s and what it its significance?

7. What is the significance of Viktor Shklovsky's 1917 essay "Art as Device," according to Eagleton?

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

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

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What is the relationship between individualism and authoritarian capitalism? Why does Eagleton argue that literary theory's attempt to validate the individual as disconnected from society a myth?

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

What was the relationship between the 1968 student movement in Paris and post-structuralism? What were their similarities and differences?

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