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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 Roland Barthes, what kind of literature attempts to conceal the constructed nature of language?

2. The modern history of literary theory has been characterized by a flight from what?

3. What literary movement, according to Eagleton, "brought structuralist and post-structuralist criticism to birth in the first place"?

4. According to Jacques Lacan, what stage does a child first develop an ego?

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

Short Essay Questions

1. What was a "healthy" sign according to Roland Barthes and why is it significant?

2. What are the four areas Eagleton discusses rhetoric should target that would bring about transformation in society?

3. Why does Eagleton reject the idea of a disconnected individual in society?

4. According to Sigmund Freud, what are the two conflicting principles that all people are motivated by and why is it significant?

5. How did Mikhail Bakhtin view language?

6. What does Julia Kristeva define as "semiotic" and why is it significant?

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

8. How does the philosopher Jacques Derrida conceive of language?

9. What is the dominant ideology within academia and what are its major problems?

10. What is Sigmund Freud's Oedipus complex 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 Sigmund Freud's Oedipus complex.

1) Identify and analyze the three stages of human development-- the oral, anal, and phallic stage.

2) Compare and contrast Freud's views on males and females.

Essay Topic 3

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

(see the answer keys)

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