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This test consists of 5 multiple choice questions, 5 short answer questions, and 10 short essay questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What was Bataille being punished for in "[Dream]"?
(a) Wetting himself.
(b) Seeing his parents naked.
(c) Playing with a hoop.
(d) Staying up too late.

2. How does "The Language of Flowers" end?
(a) With Count Leopold von Sacher-Masoch putting out a priest's eye.
(b) With a girl being sent away to school.
(c) With Sade tossing flower petals into a ditch of manure.
(d) With students strangling a young woman.

3. What do volcanoes serve as, in "The Solar Anus"?
(a) The earth's anus.
(b) God's mouths.
(c) Penises.
(d) Mother earth's breasts.

4. What did Breton call Bataille?
(a) A prophet.
(b) A incremental writing whore.
(c) A dubious genius.
(d) An excremental philosopher.

5. How does Bataille describe his father?
(a) Blind, paralytic and syphilitic.
(b) Frequently ill and mentally unstable.
(c) Financially secure.
(d) Depressed and alcoholic.

Short Answer Questions

1. What was Bataille afraid of as a child?

2. How does Bataille describe the mandrake root?

3. What were Bataille's feelings for Breton?

4. Why did Bataille leave his job in 1942?

5. Whom does Bataille refer to as untouchables in "Psychological Structure of Fascism"?

Short Essay Questions

1. Describe Bataille's experience with psychoanalysis.

2. What does Bataille say about 'freaks' in "The Deviations of Nature"?

3. What is the value of intellectual violence in Bataille's work?

4. What was Bataille's relationship with Andrea Breton?

5. Describe the paradox at the heart of "Materialism".

6. Describe Bataille's schooling.

7. Describe Bataille's birth and family origins.

8. Describe the importance of the 'cephalus' in Bataille's thinking.

9. What does Bataille say about surrealism in "The 'Old Mole' and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme [Superman] and Surrealist"?

10. What distinguished the big toe in "The Big Toe"?

(see the answer keys)

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