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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. How does Bataille describe his thinking in "Popular Front in the Street"?
(a) He said he had a paradoxical fascist tendency.
(b) He said he had an indomitable democratic streak.
(c) He said he could not escape from the logic of fascism.
(d) He said he worshiped the masses.

2. What was Bataille afraid of as a child?
(a) Snakes.
(b) The Rain.
(c) Rats.
(d) Spiders.

3. What paradoxical action does Bataille describe in "Materialism"?
(a) The attempt to rid one's thoughts of spiritualism.
(b) The attempt to translate sex into language.
(c) The desire to stop using language for natural functions.
(d) The attempt to free the eye from aesthetics.

4. Whom did the Popular Front join with?
(a) Communists and Socialists.
(b) Bureaucrats and Communists.
(c) Democrats and Socialist Democrats.
(d) Fascists and totalitarians.

5. Where did "[Dream]" originate?
(a) In Bataille's marriage.
(b) In Bataille's childhood obsession with eyes.
(c) In Bataille's imagination.
(d) In Bataille's psychoanalysis.

6. What form does Bataille take after being a boy in "[Dream]"?
(a) An American gentleman.
(b) A priest.
(c) A girl.
(d) A butcher.

7. When did Bataille and his mother abandon his father?
(a) When the mother took a job in Paris.
(b) When the father went insane.
(c) When the Germans arrived in 1915.
(d) When the father was imprisoned.

8. Why did Bataille leave his job in 1942?
(a) He died.
(b) He was fired.
(c) He was ill.
(d) He fled the Germans.

9. How does Bataille describe the mandrake root?
(a) Obscene.
(b) Human.
(c) Noisy.
(d) Holy.

10. Where did Bataille work until 1942?
(a) The National Gallery in London.
(b) Ecole des Beaux Artes.
(c) El Prado in Spain.
(d) Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.

11. What does Bataille say coitus is associated with, in "The Solar Anus"?
(a) Prayer.
(b) Business.
(c) Comedy.
(d) Crime.

12. Whom does Bataille refer to as untouchables in "Psychological Structure of Fascism"?
(a) The sovereign.
(b) The workers.
(c) The rich.
(d) The impoverished.

13. When did Bataille deny his faith?
(a) 1911.
(b) 1913.
(c) 1920.
(d) 1919.

14. Why was it a mistake for Bataille to use his intellectual violence on Breton?
(a) Breton's friends excommunicated Bataille from the surrealist circles.
(b) Breton might have promoted it.
(c) Breton ruined Bataille in revenge.
(d) Bataille lost friends over the gratuitous attack.

15. What kind of eye does Victor Hugo describe in a poem Bataille cites?
(a) An eye of surveillance.
(b) An eye of longing.
(c) An eye of judgment.
(d) An eye of conscience.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does standing upright do for man in "The Big Toe"?

2. When did George Bataille die?

3. How do philosophers use natural forms, in "The Language of Flowers"?

4. What effect do flowers have on love, in "The Language of Flowers"?

5. What is the benefit Bataille sees to having more than one meaning in his work?

(see the answer keys)

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