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

2. According to Eagleton, why is E.D. Hirsch able to maintain his view that literary meaning is absolute and resistant to historical change?

3. According to Eagleton, eighteenth-century literature embodied more than social values, it also was an instrument for what?

4. What is the name of the pioneering essay the Russian formalist wrote that is the "beginnings of the transformation which has taken over literary theory in this century"?

5. Eagleton argues that a literary work in Romantic society becomes what rather than rational and mechanical?

Short Essay Questions

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

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

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

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

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

7. What was the romantics relationship to the symbol and why is it significant?

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

9. What is hermeneutics and how is it significant?

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

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

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.

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

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.

(see the answer keys)

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