Literary Theory _Difficult

• These notes cover literary theory questions in multiple-choice format.

Module 1

• Cleanth Brooks wrote the essay "Language of Paradox."
• I.A. Richards and William Empson are New Criticism theorists.
• The theory that practiced "close reading" is New Criticism.
• Prague School is associated with Russian Formalism.
• Formalist theory was formulated mainly by Roman Jakobson.
• Liberal Humanism is the theory centered solely on human individuality and actions.
• The Greek word 'theoria', from which theory is originated, means contemplation.
• I.A. Richards penned the influential New Critic treatise titled Principles of Literary Criticism.
• Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist.
• Wimsatt and Beardsley coined the terms ‘intentional fallacy and affective fallacy.'

Module 2

• Claude Levi-Strauss proposed Structuralist Anthropology.
• Aporia is an irresolvable internal contradiction or logical disconnection in a text, argument, or theory.
• Roland Barthes wrote "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative".
• A complex or combination of signifier and signified is termed a Sign.
• The abstract layer of language is termed Langue by Saussure.
• Barthes' famous essay “The Death of the Author” was published in 1966.
• Claude Levi-Strauss interpreted the Oedipus myth using Structuralism.
• Sigmund Freud refers to the unconscious as the 'repository' of suppressed feelings.
• Jacques Derrida is associated with the term Deconstruction.
• Course in General Linguistics was published in 1916.
• Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye were the disciples of Saussure who compiled and published his works.
• Logos means words.
• Superego operates as a moral conscience or ideal ego.
• According to Saussure, Synchronic studies language use at a given point in time.
• Parole is actual speech in Linguistics.
• Derrida coined the term Phallocentrism to identify the privileging of masculine gender.
• Freud's Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1900.
• The Imaginary is the pre-linguistic stage in Lacan's psychoanalytic theory.
• The Real exists between the Imaginary and the Symbolic.
• Lacan compared the structure of the unconscious with the structure of language.
• Id is termed as the primitive and instinctual part of the mind in Freudian psychoanalysis.
• Synchronic is the linear mode of narrative, which is horizontal, according to Saussure.
• Tzvetan Todorov coined the term 'narratology'.
• Saussure is regarded as the ‘Father of Modern Linguistics and Semiotics.’

Module 3

• Communist Manifesto was published in 1848.
• Ideology is alternately called 'false consciousness'.
• Karl Marx authored Das Kapital (1867).
• Antonio Gramsci popularised the term subaltern.
• The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) was established in 1964.
• Stuart Hall wrote the essay "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms."
• New Historicism considers history as a 'co-text'.
• Raymond Williams coined the term 'cultural materialism'.
• Cultural Materialism is used instead of New Historicism in the latter phase.
• Louis Montrose's essay "Shaping Fantasies" studies The Faerie Queene.
• Cultural Materialism proposed “dissident reading”.
• Raymond Williams coined the coinage of 'structures of feeling'.
• Stuart Hall wrote "Encoding /Decoding in the Television Discourse."
• Stephen Grenblatt wrote Shakespeare and the Exorcists.
• Luis Althusser distinguished the concepts ‘state power and state control'.
• Gramsci was an Italian Marxist.
• New Historicism studies the ‘historicity of the text and textuality of the history'.
• Art, education, law, religion, media, lifestyle are considered the superstructure in Marxian philosophy.
• Cultural Materialism suggested a politicized form of history, instead of New Historicism's apolitical reading.
• The book Dialectic of Enlightenment was published in 1947.
• The essay "Political Shakespeare" popularized Cultural Materialism.
• The Frankfurt School was founded in 1923.
• Gramsci penned the essay “The Formation of the Intellectuals”.
• Interpellation is the process by which we encounter a culture's/ideology's values and internalize them.
• Richard Hoggart was the major figure behind the establishment of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.

Module 4

• Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women was published in 1792.
• Elaine Showalter coined the term 'Gynocriticism'.
• The term Lesbian came from Lesbos, homeland to the 6th-century BCE poet Sappho.
• Alice Walker defined womanism as "womanism is to feminism as purple is to lavender".
• Judith Butler talks about ‘gender performativity'.
• Meena Kandasamy is a famous Dalit Feminist.
• Adrienne Rich wrote "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence".
• Beauvoir's The Second Sex was published in 1949.
• Écriture féminine denotes special language for women.
• Sexual Politics points out the offensive-phallocentric nature of four classic English writers.
• Alice Walker coined the term 'womanism'.
• Judith Butler's Gender trouble was published in 1990.
• The Stonewall riots which led to the emergence of Queer theory took place in 1969.
• Black Feminism believed that black women faced segregation on three grounds.
• Lesbian Feminism arose out of dissatisfaction with second-wave feminism.
• Helen Cixous authored "The Laugh of the Medusa".
• Kate Millett was an American feminist thinker.
• Gilbert and Gubar jointly wrote the book The Madwoman in the Attic.
• Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own urged women to get a single room to contemplate.
• Second-wave feminism adopted the motto “The Personal is Political."
• Gynocritique is to construct a female framework for the analysis of women's literature.
• Adrienne Rich introduced the term 'lesbian continuum'.
• Marxist Feminism integrates issues like how women are exploited under capitalism.

Module 5

• Edward Said's Orientalism was published in 1978.
• Alterity is the term many postcolonial critics use as an alternative to otherness.
• Gayatri Spivak wrote Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography.
• Stephen Dedalus is the protagonist of Ulysses.
• Juergen Habermas wrote 'Modernity- an Incomplete Project'.
• Lyotard termed Postmodernism as "incredulity towards metanarratives".
• Brian McHale wrote Post-Modernist Fictions in 1987.
• Lawrence Buell's book The Environmental Imagination studies nature in relation to American Literature.
• Ecofeminism argues feminisation is a way of subjugating women under patriarchy.
• Jean Baudrillard is associated with 'the loss of the real'.
• The term 'hyperreality' appears in postmodernism.
• Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm are prominent members of Ecocriticism.
• Benedict Anderson introduced the term “imagined community”.
• Ecocriticism in the UK is addressed through Green Studies.
• Location of Culture is the book by Homi Bhabha.
• Orientalism is "a way of coming to terms with the orient" based on the orient's special place.
• According to Salman Rushdie, the homeland becomes imaginary.
• Hybridity is often used to point out cross-cultural ‘exchange'.
• Lacan explained uncanny as distinguishing bad/good, pleasure/displeasure.
• Ranajit Guha is part of the Subaltern Studies group.
• Spivak wrote "Can the Subaltern Speak?".
• Chatterjee said very idea of nationalism was Western.