Literary Criticism and Theory Quiz

Grade 12 · English · Quiz

10 questions on the major schools of literary criticism, their key figures, and their analytical methods.

Questions

1. Which critical school argues that the author's intentions are irrelevant to interpretation — a concept called the 'intentional fallacy'?

   1. Feminist criticism
   2. New Criticism
   3. Marxist criticism
   4. Reader-response theory
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   Answer: New Criticism

   New Critics Wimsatt and Beardsley coined 'intentional fallacy' — the mistake of trying to determine a text's meaning from the author's stated intentions rather than the text itself.

2. Marxist literary criticism is primarily concerned with how texts represent gender and sexuality.

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   Answer: False

   Marxist criticism focuses on class, ideology, economic power, and how literature reflects or challenges the interests of dominant classes. Feminist criticism addresses gender.

3. Jacques Derrida's approach to literary theory, which argues that texts have no fixed stable meaning, is called ___.

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   Answer: deconstruction

   Derrida's deconstruction exposes the instabilities, contradictions, and undecidable meanings within texts — challenging the idea that language can ever fully convey a fixed, present meaning.

4. Reader-response criticism focuses on:

   1. The text as an independent object
   2. The author's historical context
   3. How readers create meaning through their encounter with a text
   4. How class ideology shapes literary production
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   Answer: How readers create meaning through their encounter with a text

   Reader-response theorists like Stanley Fish argue that meaning is not in the text but in the interpretive community — different readers with different assumptions produce different meanings.

5. Postcolonial criticism was largely inspired by Edward Said's analysis of how Western texts constructed and justified the domination of 'the Other.'

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   Answer: True

   Said's Orientalism (1978) is the founding text of postcolonial criticism, demonstrating how Western cultural production constructed a distorted image of 'the East' that justified imperial domination.

6. A psychoanalytic reading of Hamlet might argue that Hamlet's delay in killing Claudius reflects:

   1. His lack of military training
   2. An Oedipal desire for his mother that makes killing his father-substitute unconsciously difficult
   3. His rational calculation of political consequences
   4. A Marxist critique of the Danish aristocracy
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   Answer: An Oedipal desire for his mother that makes killing his father-substitute unconsciously difficult

   Ernest Jones' famous psychoanalytic reading of Hamlet argues that Hamlet's delay is caused by Oedipal identification with Claudius — killing him would be killing the part of himself that desires Gertrude.

7. The approach of recovering and re-examining texts by women authors who were excluded from the traditional literary canon is associated with ___ criticism.

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   Answer: feminist

   Feminist critics like Elaine Showalter and Sandra Gilbert worked to recover women writers marginalized by a male-dominated canon and to analyze how those texts were systematically excluded.

8. Which of the following best describes 'close reading' as a method?

   1. Reading a text multiple times to memorize it
   2. Careful, detailed attention to a text's language, structure, imagery, and literary techniques
   3. Reading a text alongside its historical and biographical context
   4. Comparing multiple versions of a text to find errors
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   Answer: Careful, detailed attention to a text's language, structure, imagery, and literary techniques

   Close reading is the foundational skill of literary analysis — it means slowing down and attending to every word, every image, every structural choice, asking why and how.

9. In New Criticism, a poem's meaning can only be fully established by knowing what the poet intended when they wrote it.

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   Answer: False

   New Criticism explicitly rejects the intentional fallacy — the author's intentions are irrelevant to what the text means. The text must be interpreted on its own terms.

10. Which critical term describes the body of works considered essential, authoritative, and most worthy of study in a literary tradition?

    1. Corpus
    2. Canon
    3. Anthology
    4. Oeuvre
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    Answer: Canon

    The literary canon — long dominated by white, European, male authors — has been actively challenged and expanded by feminist, postcolonial, and multicultural critics arguing for whose voices count.

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