Free Literary Criticism MCQs with Answers

• A. reason can help man understand beauty.
• B. civilization comes through beauty.
• C. language shows humanity's impulse towards order.
• D. poetry has no effect on society.

Explanation: In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley argues that poetry shapes moral imagination, civilization, language, and social life, so he does not claim…

• A. Marxism
• B. Feminism
• C. New Historicism
• D. Psychoanalysis

Explanation: Stephen Greenblatt is chiefly associated with New Historicism, which interprets literary works through their political, social, and…

• A. M. H. Abrams
• B. Stephen Greenblatt
• C. Helen Vendler
• D. Wayne C. Booth

Explanation: Stephen Greenblatt is a leading Shakespearean scholar and a major figure in New Historicist criticism.

• A. Entering the author's mind through his or her literary works
• B. Understanding the author's consciousness
• C. Reproducing the author's thoughts in a critical context
• D. All of the above.Explore Top Audiobooks

Explanation: The Geneva School treats reading as an active reconstruction of the author's consciousness and intentions through the work.

• A. Wolfgang Iser
• B. Jean-Paul Sartre
• C. Emmanuel Lévinas
• D. All of the above.

Explanation: Phenomenology is associated with Iser's account of reading, Sartre's phenomenological existentialism, and Levinas's phenomenological…

• A. It suggests that the suppression of women is part of a historical climate that will naturally fade away.
• B. It suggests that gender roles are conditioned by the possession of money and power.
• C. It suggests that gender has power over class.
• D. It suggests that education, rather than money, is needed for the liberation of women.

Explanation: Woolf links women's restricted opportunities to economic dependence and exclusion from institutional power.

• A. Gender does not reflect an essential truth, but rather is a role people play based on their internalization of socially constructed gender roles.
• B. Gender roles do not exist.
• C. Real gender roles are scripted by excellent writers.
• D. Only individuals who have the capacity to perform have gender.

Explanation: For Butler, gender is not the expression of a fixed natural essence but an identity produced through repeated, socially regulated acts and…

• A. refuses maternal bonds.
• B. is able to separate the "I" from the "Other."
• C. looks into a mirror for the first time.
• D. first engages with speech.

Explanation: In Lacan's mirror stage, the child identifies with an external image and begins to form an ego by distinguishing that image from the self.

• A. Kristeva rejects the idea that neuroses provide insight into the unconscious.
• B. Kristeva suggests that women are not subject to traditional fetishes.
• C. Kristeva offers a more central place for women's issues within psychological development.
• D. Kristeva fundamentally disagrees with the idea of the mirror stage.Explore Top Audiobooks

Explanation: Kristeva develops psychoanalysis by giving greater importance to feminine subjectivity, maternal relations, and women's psychological…

• A. How readers learn to read
• B. How readers imagine visual images in a text
• C. How readers participate in creating the meaning of a text
• D. How readers regard critics

Explanation: Reader-response theory treats meaning as something produced through the interaction between a text and its readers.

• A. Plato
• B. Claude Lévi-Strauss
• C. Julia Kristeva
• D. Walter Benjamin

Explanation: Plato's theory of mimesis places ordinary objects at a distance from ideal Forms, so artistic representation becomes a copy of a copy.

• A. Language includes multiple social dialects and jargons.
• B. Language can include socioideological contradictions from the past.
• C. Language exhibits and is bound up in the social lives and historical context of the people who speak it.
• D. Language is loaded with the intentions of others.

Explanation: Bakhtin sees language as socially and historically situated, shaped by the lives, conflicts, and viewpoints of its speakers.

• A. A theory that abandons the idea of history as an imitation of events
• B. A theory that regards history as a series of narratives
• C. A theory that capitalizes on the interplay between literature and history
• D. All of the above

Explanation: New Historicism rejects a single transparent history, treats historical accounts as narratives, and studies the reciprocal relationship…

• A. Plato's The Republic
• B. T.S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
• C. Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology
• D. Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author"

Explanation: Eliot argues that a writer's work gains meaning through its relationship with the existing literary tradition, not solely through private…

• A. Literary texts should not be read as a projection of the author's psyche.
• B. Literary texts solely reflect an author's intentions.
• C. Literary texts are unlike dreams because they have a system of order and produce meaning.
• D. Literary texts reveal secret elements of an author's unconscious.

Explanation: Psychoanalytic criticism interprets literary works as expressions of hidden desires, conflicts, and unconscious material, often connected…

• A. The Moscow School
• B. The Chicago School
• C. The Frankfurt School
• D. The Geneva School

Explanation: The Geneva School is closely linked with phenomenological criticism, which examines lived experience and the consciousness of the author…

• A. Sigmund Freud
• B. Carl Jung
• C. Michel Foucault
• D. Jacques Derrida

Explanation: Modern trauma theory draws heavily on Freud's analyses of traumatic memory, repetition, repression, and deferred psychological effects.

• A. All linguistic concepts evolve solely out of the responses of people within a specific historical era.
• B. All linguistic and social phenomena are texts, and the object of studying these texts is to reveal the underlying codes that make them meaningful.
• C. All linguistics is in some way related to class struggle.
• D. All linguistics is related to history, and therefore the meaning of linguistics relies exclusively on historical context.

Explanation: Semiotics studies signs as systems and seeks the underlying codes that allow linguistic, cultural, and social texts to produce meaning.

• A. A language about another language
• B. A supernatural language
• C. A language that does not yet constitute a real language
• D. A language used by a particular marginalized group of people within a larger dominant culture

Explanation: A metalanguage is a language used to describe, analyse, or discuss another language, such as the terminology of grammar describing…

• A. He considers it to be vital in order to understand literary texts.
• B. He considers theory to be the only way that literary texts can be interpreted.
• C. He has no misgivings about the practical usability of literary theory.
• D. He feels that literary theory is ultimately too limited in scope to serve as a proper method of interpretation.

Explanation: Christopher Ricks is sceptical of literary theory when it becomes an abstract system detached from the particular qualities of literary…