The history of literary criticism spans from classical antiquity to contemporary post-modern thought, tracking how thinkers have defined the function, value, and mechanics of literature. From Plato’s moral skepticism and Aristotle’s foundational taxonomy of tragedy to Philip Sidney’s Renaissance defense of poetry and Samuel Johnson’s neoclassical judgments, critical thought evolved through shifts in aesthetic philosophy. The 20th century accelerated this evolution with structuralism, deconstruction, and psychoanalytic approaches championed by figures like T.S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, and Jacques Derrida. Studying these key critics provides essential insight into the intellectual frameworks that shape how texts are read, evaluated, and understood across global academic traditions.
1. Who is traditionally regarded as the first Western literary critic, known for evaluating poets like Aeschylus and Euripides in his comedy 'The Frogs'?
Correct Answer: c) Aristophanes
Explanation:
Aristophanes engaged in early literary criticism and evaluation of Greek dramatists in his satirical play 'The Frogs' (405 BC).
2. Which ancient philosopher famously banished poets from his ideal republic on the grounds that poetry is twice removed from truth and appeals to the emotional rather than rational part of the soul?
Correct Answer: b) Plato
Explanation:
In 'The Republic', Plato critiqued poetry through his theory of mimesis (imitation), arguing that art presents an illusion of truth and corrupts morals.
3. In 'Poetics', which Greek philosopher defended poetry against Plato's charges by defining tragedy as an imitation of an action that brings about catharsis (purgation of pity and fear)?
Correct Answer: a) Aristotle
Explanation:
Aristotle's 'Poetics' is foundational to Western literary criticism, establishing concepts like hamartia, peripeteia, anagnorisis, and catharsis.
4. Whose 'Ars Poetica' (Art of Poetry) established the classical maxim that literature should aim 'to instruct and to delight' (aut prodesse volunt aut delectare)?
Correct Answer: b) Horace
Explanation:
Horace's 'Ars Poetica' exerted immense influence on Renaissance and neoclassical literary theory, emphasizing decorum, unity, and dual purposes of instruction and pleasure.
5. Which ancient treatise, attributed to Longinus, introduced the concept of the 'Sublime' as that which elevates style and inspires awe?
Correct Answer: a) On the Sublime
Explanation:
'On the Sublime' (Peri Hypsous) focuses on greatness of thought, noble diction, and passionate composition that transports the reader.
6. Who wrote 'An Essay of Dramatic Poesy' (1668), defending English drama and establishing the tradition of modern English literary criticism?
Correct Answer: b) John Dryden
Explanation:
John Dryden is often called the 'Father of English Criticism'; his 'Essay of Dramatic Poesy' uses a conversational debate format to examine classical vs. modern drama.
7. Which Elizabethan poet and courtier wrote 'An Apology for Poetry' (also known as 'The Defence of Poesy', c. 1595) to counter puritanical attacks on art?
Correct Answer: b) Sir Philip Sidney
Explanation:
Sir Philip Sidney argued that poetry superiorly combines philosophy's abstract precepts with history's concrete examples to morally improve mankind.
8. Who compiled the monumental 'Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets' (1779-1781), establishing 18th-century neoclassical critical judgments?
Correct Answer: b) Samuel Johnson
Explanation:
Dr. Samuel Johnson's biographical and critical evaluations in 'Lives of the Poets' cemented his status as the premier critic of the English Augustan age.
9. In 'Biographia Literaria' (1817), which Romantic critic distinguished between 'Imagination' (the shaping, unifying power) and 'Fancy' (a mechanical mode of memory)?
Correct Answer: b) Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Explanation:
Coleridge's distinction between primary imagination, secondary imagination, and fancy revolutionized Romantic aesthetic theory.
10. Who wrote the 1800 'Preface to Lyrical Ballads', defining poetry as 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility'?
Correct Answer: a) William Wordsworth
Explanation:
Wordsworth's Preface is a core manifesto of English Romanticism, advocating for the language really used by men and democratic subject matter.
11. Which Victorian critic defined poetry as 'a criticism of life' under the conditions fixed for such a criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty?
Correct Answer: b) Matthew Arnold
Explanation:
Matthew Arnold's cultural and literary essays ('Culture and Anarchy', 'The Study of Poetry') championed high seriousness and the 'touchstone method'.
12. What is Matthew Arnold's 'touchstone method' in literary criticism?
Correct Answer: b) Using short, classic passages from acknowledged masters like Homer, Dante, or Shakespeare to test the real power and value of other poetry
Explanation:
Arnold suggested holding up brief, exemplary passages of great masters as touchstones to evaluate the genuine substance and style of other poets.
13. Who was the leading figure of English Aestheticism, famous for the phrase 'art for art's sake' and the conclusion to 'Studies in the History of the Renaissance' (1873)?
Correct Answer: b) Walter Pater
Explanation:
Walter Pater urged readers to burn always with a hard, gem-like flame, prioritizing intense aesthetic experiences above moral instruction.
14. Which modernist critic wrote 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' (1919), introducing the concepts of the 'objective correlative' and the 'impersonal theory of poetry'?
Correct Answer: b) T. S. Eliot
Explanation:
T. S. Eliot redefined modern criticism by arguing that poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from personality within historical tradition.
15. Who coined the phrase 'Make it new!' and spearheaded the Imagist and modernist literary revolutions?
Correct Answer: b) Ezra Pound
Explanation:
Ezra Pound's critical essays and mentorship of modernists shaped the precise imagery, economic language, and avant-garde techniques of 20th-century poetry.
16. Which school of American criticism, prominent from the 1930s to the 1950s, focused on close reading, irony, paradox, and the intrinsic unity of the text, excluding biography?
Correct Answer: a) New Criticism
Explanation:
New Critics like Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, and W. K. Wimsatt treated literary texts as autonomous 'well wrought urns'.
17. Who wrote 'The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry' (1947), a foundational text for American New Criticism?
Correct Answer: b) Cleanth Brooks
Explanation:
Cleanth Brooks defended the complexity of poetry, arguing against the 'heresy of paraphrase' and highlighting irony and paradox.
18. Which Russian Formalist critic introduced the concept of 'defamiliarization' (ostranenie) in his 1917 essay 'Art as Device'?
Correct Answer: b) Viktor Shklovsky
Explanation:
Shklovsky argued that the purpose of art is to strip away habitual perception, making familiar things strange so we experience them anew.
19. Which Soviet/Russian theorist developed the concepts of 'dialogism', 'polyphony', and 'carnivalization' in novels like those of Dostoevsky?
Correct Answer: b) Mikhail Bakhtin
Explanation:
Mikhail Bakhtin's literary philosophy emphasized that language is inherently social, multivocal (polyphonic), and dialogic.
20. Who founded structuralist narratology and attempted to map a 'grammar' of narrative plots, analyzing 'functions' in fairy tales in 'Morphology of the Folktale' (1928)?
Correct Answer: b) Vladimir Propp
Explanation:
Vladimir Propp analyzed Russian folktales to isolate 31 invariant narrative functions and recurring character roles.
21. Which French cultural theorist famously announced 'The Death of the Author' in a 1967 essay, shifting critical focus toward the reader and textuality?
Correct Answer: b) Roland Barthes
Explanation:
Roland Barthes argued that the author's control over meaning dissolves upon publication, allowing the multiple meanings of the text to be actualized by the reader.
22. Who developed the philosophical method of 'deconstruction' in 1967 with works like 'Of Grammatology', exposing the instability of binary oppositions?
Correct Answer: b) Jacques Derrida
Explanation:
Jacques Derrida's deconstruction showed how texts inevitably undermine their own foundational premises through internal contradictions and différance.
23. Which psychoanalytic critic re-read Sigmund Freud through structuralist linguistics, asserting that 'the unconscious is structured like a language'?
Correct Answer: b) Jacques Lacan
Explanation:
Jacques Lacan revolutionized psychoanalytic criticism by mapping Freud's concepts onto Saussurean linguistics (signifier and signified).
24. Who wrote 'The Madwoman in the Attic' (1979), a landmark feminist text examining 19th-century literature by women through the anxiety of authorship?
Correct Answer: b) Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
Explanation:
Gilbert and Gubar explored how Victorian women writers grappled with patriarchal literary confinement and split female personas.
25. Which feminist critic coined the term 'gynocriticism' in 'A Literature of Their Own' (1977) to describe the study of women as writers rather than women as depicted by men?
Correct Answer: b) Elaine Showalter
Explanation:
Elaine Showalter divided feminist criticism into 'feminist critique' (women as readers) and 'gynocriticism' (women as producers of textual meaning).
26. Who authored the foundational postcolonial study 'Orientalism' (1978), analyzing how Western academic and literary discourses constructed the 'Orient' as exotic and inferior?
Correct Answer: b) Edward Said
Explanation:
Edward Said's 'Orientalism' inaugurated postcolonial studies by exposing the collusion between Western knowledge production and imperial power.
27. Which postcolonial theorist introduced the concepts of 'mimicry', 'hybridity', and the 'Third Space' in 'The Location of Culture' (1994)?
Correct Answer: b) Homi K. Bhabha
Explanation:
Homi K. Bhabha utilized psychoanalytic and post-structuralist tools to analyze ambivalence, colonial mimicry, and cultural hybridity.
28. Who wrote the influential essay 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' (1988), addressing the silencing and marginalization of subaltern women under imperialism and historiography?
Correct Answer: b) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Explanation:
Gayatri Spivak's deconstructive-Marxist feminist essay challenged Western academic assumptions about speaking for marginalized subaltern subjects.
29. Which Marxist literary critic wrote 'Marxism and Form' (1971) and 'The Political Unconscious' (1981), famously declaring 'Always historicize!'?
Correct Answer: b) Fredric Jameson
Explanation:
Fredric Jameson is a premier Marxist postmodern critic who integrated structuralism, psychoanalysis, and political economy into literary interpretation.
30. Who authored 'Culture and Society' (1958) and 'The Country and the City' (1973), developing 'cultural materialism' in British literary studies?
Correct Answer: b) Raymond Williams
Explanation:
Raymond Williams founded cultural studies and cultural materialism by examining how literature and culture reflect changing socio-economic structures.
31. Which movement in American criticism during the 1980s, associated with Stephen Greenblatt, emphasized that texts are embedded in networks of power, social practices, and history?
Correct Answer: b) New Historicism
Explanation:
New Historicism (and its British counterpart, cultural materialism) explores the circulation of social energy, power, and subversion in Renaissance and other texts.
32. Who pioneered 'Reader-Response Criticism' with works like 'Is There a Text in this Class?' (1980), arguing that interpretive communities shape meaning?
Correct Answer: b) Stanley Fish
Explanation:
Stanley Fish argued that meaning is not intrinsic to the text, but is constructed by the shared conventions of 'interpretive communities'.
33. Which German aesthetician, associated with the Constance School, developed 'Reception Theory' (Rezeptionsästhetik), focusing on the 'horizon of expectations'?
Correct Answer: b) Hans-Robert Jauss
Explanation:
Hans-Robert Jauss introduced the 'horizon of expectations' to explain how a literary work's reception changes across different historical eras.
34. Who wrote 'The Implied Reader' (1974) and 'The Act of Reading' (1978), exploring the 'gaps' (Unbestimmtheitsstellen) that readers fill in narrative texts?
Correct Answer: a) Wolfgang Iser
Explanation:
Wolfgang Iser focused on the phenomenological interaction between text and reader, emphasizing indeterminacy and blanks in the narrative structure.
35. Which critic wrote 'The Rhetoric of Fiction' (1961), popularizing terms like the 'implied author' and the 'unreliable narrator'?
Correct Answer: b) Wayne C. Booth
Explanation:
Wayne C. Booth's 'The Rhetoric of Fiction' revived interest in authorial technique, moral values, and narrative reliability.
36. Who classified characters in 'Aspects of the Novel' (1927) into 'flat' and 'round'?
Correct Answer: b) E. M. Forster
Explanation:
E. M. Forster's 'Aspects of the Novel' provided enduring practical definitions for flat characters (caricatures built around a single idea) and round characters (complex, evolving).
37. Which French structuralist developed narratology in 'Figures III' and 'Narrative Discourse' (1972), categorizing 'order', 'duration', 'frequency', 'mood', and 'voice'?
Correct Answer: b) Gérard Genette
Explanation:
Gérard Genette's taxonomy of narrative discourse remains the cornerstone of modern structuralist narratology.
38. Who wrote 'Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature' (1946) while exiled in Turkey during WWII?
Correct Answer: a) Erich Auerbach
Explanation:
Erich Auerbach's 'Mimesis' traced how everyday reality and human life have been represented across Western literature from Homer to Virginia Woolf.
39. Which Frankfurt School philosopher and critic co-authored 'Dialectic of Enlightenment' (1944) and coined the term 'culture industry'?
Correct Answer: b) Theodor Adorno
Explanation:
Theodor Adorno critiqued mass-produced art under capitalism as the 'culture industry', arguing it promotes conformity and pacification.
40. Who wrote the seminal essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (1936), introducing the concept of artistic 'aura'?
Correct Answer: b) Walter Benjamin
Explanation:
Walter Benjamin argued that mechanical reproduction destroys the unique 'aura' of original artworks, shifting art from ritual to political exhibition.
41. Which Hungarian Marxist critic championed 19th-century realism (Balzac, Tolstoy) and criticized modernist literature for its alienation and fragmentation?
Correct Answer: b) Georg Lukács
Explanation:
Georg Lukács defended socialist realism and critical realism, arguing that great literature captures the totality of social historical forces.
42. Who formulated the concept of 'hegemony' to explain how ruling classes maintain power through cultural and ideological consent rather than mere force?
Correct Answer: b) Antonio Gramsci
Explanation:
Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci's 'Prison Notebooks' introduced cultural hegemony, heavily influencing cultural studies and Marxist literary criticism.
43. Which French Marxist philosopher introduced the concepts of 'Ideological State Apparatuses' (ISAs) and 'interpellation' in literary and cultural analysis?
Correct Answer: b) Louis Althusser
Explanation:
Louis Althusser argued that literature and ideology 'interpellate' (summon) individuals into subjects, shaping our perception of reality.
44. Who wrote 'Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste' (1979), analyzing how cultural capital and class taste operate in society?
Correct Answer: b) Pierre Bourdieu
Explanation:
Pierre Bourdieu introduced 'cultural capital', 'habitus', and 'field', showing how aesthetic tastes mirror socioeconomic hierarchies.
45. Which French theorist wrote 'Discipline and Punish' and 'The History of Sexuality', examining power as diffuse, disciplinary, and productive rather than merely repressive?
Correct Answer: b) Michel Foucault
Explanation:
Michel Foucault's work on power/knowledge, discourse, and surveillance radically altered literary criticism and historical analysis.
46. Who defined postmodernism as 'incredulity toward metanarratives' in 'The Postmodern Condition' (1979)?
Correct Answer: b) Jean-François Lyotard
Explanation:
Jean-François Lyotard diagnosed the postmodern breakdown of grand unifying historical and philosophical theories (metanarratives).
47. Which theorist developed the concepts of 'simulacra' and 'simulation', arguing that contemporary culture replaces reality with hyperreal signs?
Correct Answer: b) Jean Baudrillard
Explanation:
Jean Baudrillard argued that media and consumer culture create a 'hyperreality' where representations precede and replace actual reality.
48. Who wrote 'The Society of the Spectacle' (1967), critiquing how modern capitalist society reduces genuine life and social relations to mediated images?
Correct Answer: b) Guy Debord
Explanation:
Guy Debord, a leader of the Situationist International, analyzed how commodities and spectacles dominate social life.
49. Which foundational ecocritic wrote 'The Environmental Imagination' (1995) and helped establish the academic study of literature and the environment?
Correct Answer: b) Lawrence Buell
Explanation:
Lawrence Buell's scholarship on Thoreau and environmental narrative helped launch modern ecocriticism.
50. Who coined the term 'ecocriticism' in his 1978 essay 'Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism'?
Correct Answer: b) William Rueckert
Explanation:
William Rueckert first applied ecological concepts to literary criticism in 1978.
51. Which critic wrote 'Epistemology of the Closet' (1990), establishing foundational frameworks for queer literary theory?
Correct Answer: b) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Explanation:
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argued that Western culture is fundamentally structured by the dynamic of the closet and secrecy.
52. Who authored 'Gender Trouble' (1990), introducing the concept of gender performativity?
Correct Answer: b) Judith Butler
Explanation:
Judith Butler's 'Gender Trouble' argued that gender is not a fixed internal essence, but a performance constituted through stylized repetition.
53. Who coined the term 'Practical Criticism' through his 1929 book where he evaluated student responses to anonymous poems?
Correct Answer: b) I. A. Richards
Explanation:
I. A. Richards pioneered close reading by having students analyze poems stripped of authorial and historical metadata.
54. Which student of I. A. Richards wrote 'Seven Types of Ambiguity' (1930)?
Correct Answer: b) William Empson
Explanation:
William Empson explored how poetic language achieves rich complexity through various forms of ambiguity.
55. Which 18th-century Scottish philosopher and critic wrote 'A Dissertation on the Passions' and 'Of the Standard of Taste' (1757), laying empirical foundations for aesthetic judgment?
Correct Answer: b) David Hume
Explanation:
David Hume's essay 'Of the Standard of Taste' argued that while sentiments vary, experienced critics develop refined taste based on delicacy, practice, and comparison.
56. Who wrote 'A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful' (1757), separating the sublime (terror/vastness) from the beautiful (smoothness/delicacy)?
Correct Answer: b) Edmund Burke
Explanation:
Edmund Burke's empirical aesthetics of the sublime heavily influenced Romantic literature and art.
57. Which German philosopher formalized the aesthetic categories of the Sublime and the Beautiful in 'Critique of Judgment' (1790)?
Correct Answer: b) Immanuel Kant
Explanation:
Immanuel Kant's third critique explored aesthetic judgment, purposiveness without purpose, and the overwhelming nature of the mathematical and dynamical sublime.
58. Who wrote 'Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature' (1809–1811), introducing German Romantic criticism to England and popularizing Shakespearean appreciation?
Correct Answer: b) August Wilhelm Schlegel
Explanation:
August Wilhelm Schlegel's lectures were translated and widely read across Europe, shaping Romantic interpretations of Shakespeare and Calderón.
59. Which American poet and critic wrote 'The Philosophy of Composition' (1846) and pioneered formalist aesthetic analysis and the detective story?
Correct Answer: b) Edgar Allan Poe
Explanation:
Poe argued that poems and stories should be written backward from a single pre-determined effect, emphasizing formal unity and brevity.
60. Who wrote 'The Function of Criticism at the Present Time' (1864), arguing that criticism must maintain 'disinterestedness' and create a current of fresh ideas?
Correct Answer: b) Matthew Arnold
Explanation:
Arnold defined criticism as 'a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world'.
61. Which French critic wrote 'The Origin of French Painting' and 'Philosophy of Art', championing environmental, racial, and historical determinism in literary history?
Correct Answer: b) Hippolyte Taine
Explanation:
Hippolyte Taine famously claimed that literature can be explained by 'race, milieu, and moment'.
62. Who was the towering figure of 19th-century French literary journalism, author of 'Causeries du lundi', known for biographical and impressionistic criticism?
Correct Answer: b) Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve
Explanation:
Sainte-Beuve's biographical method focused intensely on the author's personality, a practice later attacked by Marcel Proust and New Critics.
63. Which French novelist wrote 'Contre Sainte-Beuve' (Against Sainte-Beuve), arguing that an author's true self is found in their work, not their biographical personality?
Correct Answer: b) Marcel Proust
Explanation:
Marcel Proust's essays laid theoretical groundwork for separating the empirical author from the creative persona embedded in art.
64. Who wrote 'The Sacred Wood' (1920) and 'Selected Essays', establishing modernist critical dogmas like 'disassociation of sensibility'?
Correct Answer: b) T. S. Eliot
Explanation:
Eliot diagnosed a 'dissociation of sensibility' in English poetry after the 17th century, where thought and feeling became split.
65. Which critic wrote 'The Common Reader' (1925) and championed stream-of-consciousness and experimental modern fiction against Edwardian realism?
Correct Answer: b) Virginia Woolf
Explanation:
Virginia Woolf's critical essays critiqued materialist Edwardian novelists (Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy) for focusing on externals rather than the luminous halo of consciousness.
66. Who wrote 'Aspects of English Poetry' and co-founded the Scrutiny movement with F. R. Leavis?
Correct Answer: b) Queenie Dorothy Leavis
Explanation:
Q. D. Leavis published 'Fiction and the Reading Public' (1932), analyzing mass culture and literary standards alongside her husband F. R. Leavis.
67. Which American critic wrote 'The Liberal Imagination' (1950), defending complexity, irony, and the nuances of literature against rigid ideological dogmatism?
Correct Answer: b) Lionel Trilling
Explanation:
Lionel Trilling was a leading New York Intellectual who explored the moral life and cultural contradictions in literature.
68. Who founded the 'Chicago School' of criticism (Neo-Aristotelianism) and edited 'Critics and Criticism' (1952)?
Correct Answer: b) R. S. Crane
Explanation:
R. S. Crane and the Chicago Critics revived pluralistic Aristotelian formal analysis, focusing on how different genres achieve their specific rhetorical ends.
69. Which Canadian critic wrote 'The Anatomy of Criticism' (1957), creating a sweeping archetypal and mythic taxonomy of Western literature?
Correct Answer: b) Northrop Frye
Explanation:
Northrop Frye's 'Anatomy of Criticism' combined myth, archetype, and structural genre theory into a comprehensive system.
70. Who wrote 'The Hero with a Thousand Faces' (1949), mapping the monomyth of the hero's journey, deeply influencing literary myth criticism?
Correct Answer: b) Joseph Campbell
Explanation:
Joseph Campbell drew on Jungian archetypes and comparative mythology to outline the universal narrative structure of the hero's journey.
71. Which psychoanalytic thinker introduced the concepts of the collective unconscious and archetypes, heavily shaping myth criticism?
Correct Answer: b) Carl Jung
Explanation:
Carl Jung posited that shared psychic structures (archetypes) populate dreams, myths, and literature across all human cultures.
72. Who authored 'The Second Sex' (1949), famously declaring 'One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman'?
Correct Answer: b) Simone de Beauvoir
Explanation:
Simone de Beauvoir's existentialist feminist masterpiece established the social construction of gender and 'the Other'.
73. Which critic wrote 'Sexual Politics' (1970), analyzing patriarchal ideologies in male modernist authors like D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer?
Correct Answer: b) Kate Millett
Explanation:
Kate Millett's 'Sexual Politics' launched second-wave feminist literary criticism by exposing systemic power dynamics in literature.
74. Who wrote 'The Female Eunuch' (1970), critiquing how patriarchal culture suppresses female sexuality and autonomy?
Correct Answer: b) Germaine Greer
Explanation:
Germaine Greer's international bestseller critiqued conventional marriage and nuclear family structures from a feminist perspective.
75. Which French feminist theorist wrote 'The Laugh of the Medusa' (1975) and championed 'écriture féminine' (women's writing)?
Correct Answer: b) Hélène Cixous
Explanation:
Hélène Cixous urged women to write through the body, breaking patriarchal syntactic constraints ('écriture féminine').
76. Who wrote 'This Sex Which Is Not One' (1977) and critiqued phallocentrism in Western philosophy and psychoanalysis?
Correct Answer: b) Luce Irigaray
Explanation:
Luce Irigaray analyzed how psychoanalytic and philosophical traditions reduce female desire and anatomy to a negative mirror of the male.
77. Which psychoanalytic feminist and semiotician introduced the concepts of the 'semiotic' (chora) and the 'symbolic' in poetic language?
Correct Answer: b) Julia Kristeva
Explanation:
Julia Kristeva explored how avant-garde literature disrupts symbolic order by tapping into pre-oedipal rhythmic drives (the semiotic).
78. Who wrote 'Black Skin, White Masks' (1952) and 'The Wretched of the Earth' (1961), providing foundational anti-colonial frameworks for postcolonial criticism?
Correct Answer: b) Frantz Fanon
Explanation:
Frantz Fanon's psychiatric and political analyses of racism, colonial subjugation, and decolonization shaped postcolonial and cultural studies.
79. Which Kenyan novelist and theorist wrote 'Decolonising the Mind' (1986), advocating for African writers to write in native indigenous languages?
Correct Answer: b) Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Explanation:
Ngũgĩ argued that language carries culture and worldview, prompting his shift from English to Gikuyu.
80. Who wrote 'The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures' (1989) with Ashcroft and Tiffin?
Correct Answer: b) Bill Ashcroft
Explanation:
The trio co-authored 'The Empire Writes Back', codifying postcolonial literary theory, subversion of imperial language, and 'abrogation'.
81. Which Caribbean intellectual wrote 'The Location of Culture' and pioneered studies on diaspora, exile, and postcolonial displacement?
Correct Answer: b) Stuart Hall
Explanation:
Stuart Hall founded British cultural studies at Birmingham, analyzing representation, identity, ethnicity, and media encoding/decoding.
82. Who wrote 'The Practice of Everyday Life' (1980), exploring how ordinary people agency-wise subvert dominant institutional spaces and texts?
Correct Answer: b) Michel de Certeau
Explanation:
Michel de Certeau analyzed tactics used by consumers to subvert the strategies of powerful institutions.
83. Which French Marxist literary critic wrote 'Towards a Sociology of the Novel' (1964), developing genetic structuralism?
Correct Answer: b) Lucien Goldmann
Explanation:
Lucien Goldmann connected the structures of literary works to the worldview of specific social classes.
84. Who authored 'A Theory of Literary Production' (1966), examining how literature works on and exposes ideology rather than merely reflecting it?
Correct Answer: b) Pierre Macherey
Explanation:
Pierre Macherey argued that texts have 'silences' and unconscious gaps where ideology breaks down and reveals itself.
85. Which British Marxist critic wrote 'Literary Theory: An Introduction' (1983), one of the most widely read introductions to critical schools?
Correct Answer: b) Terry Eagleton
Explanation:
Terry Eagleton's engaging overview charted the rise and fall of English studies and major critical theories from a leftist perspective.
86. Who wrote 'The Gutenberg Galaxy' (1962) and 'Understanding Media' (1964), coining 'The medium is the message'?
Correct Answer: b) Marshall McLuhan
Explanation:
Marshall McLuhan's media ecology theories transformed how critics analyze print culture, electronic media, and the sensorium.
87. Which American literary critic coined the term 'The Anxiety of Influence' (1973), analyzing how poets struggle against precursor giants?
Correct Answer: b) Harold Bloom
Explanation:
Harold Bloom formulated a psychoanalytic theory of poetic misreading (clinamen, tesserakt, etc.) where later poets battle the influence of masters.
88. Who wrote 'The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition' (1953), categorizing critical theories into mimetic, pragmatic, expressive, and objective orientations?
Correct Answer: b) M. H. Abrams
Explanation:
M. H. Abrams's four-part framework (universe, audience, artist, work) remains a fundamental model for classifying critical theories in literary history.
89. Who co-authored 'Theory of Literature' (1949), establishing a systematic, rigorous distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic approaches to literary study?
Correct Answer: a) René Wellek and Austin Warren
Explanation:
Wellek and Warren's 'Theory of Literature' provided an authoritative defense of formal and intrinsic literary analysis against purely biographical or historical methods.
90. What is the primary thesis behind Wimsatt and Beardsley's 'intentional fallacy'?
Correct Answer: a) An author's stated intentions should never be used as a standard to judge the success or meaning of a literary work.
Explanation:
Wimsatt and Beardsley argued that once a work is published, it belongs to the public domain and stands on its own verbal integrity.
91. What does Wimsatt and Beardsley's 'affective fallacy' warn critics against?
Correct Answer: a) Judging a poem by its emotional effect or psychological response evoked in the reader
Explanation:
The affective fallacy confuses what a poem is with what it does, reducing objective criticism to subjective emotional reports.
92. Which French thinker wrote 'Writing Degree Zero' (1953) and 'Mythologies' (1957), decoding bourgeois cultural myths in everyday signs?
Correct Answer: b) Roland Barthes
Explanation:
Roland Barthes applied Ferdinand de Saussure's semiology to demystify mass culture, wrestling, advertising, and modern mythologies.
93. Who developed semiotics (semiology) as the science of signs, distinguishing between the signifier (sound-image) and the signified (concept)?
Correct Answer: b) Ferdinand de Saussure
Explanation:
Ferdinand de Saussure's 'Course in General Linguistics' revolutionized literary theory by establishing structural linguistics and sign systems.
94. Which American philosopher co-founded pragmatism and developed a triadic semiotic model (sign, object, interpretant)?
Correct Answer: b) Charles Sanders Peirce
Explanation:
Charles Sanders Peirce established semiotics independently of Saussure, focusing on icons, indices, and symbols in interpretive loops.
95. Who wrote 'The Poetics of Space' (1958), a phenomenological study of domestic architecture, rooms, drawers, and nests in literature?
Correct Answer: a) Gaston Bachelard
Explanation:
Gaston Bachelard's topoanalysis explored how intimate spaces shape human imagination and reverie in literary texts.
96. Which phenomenological philosopher wrote 'Being and Nothingness' and 'What is Literature?' (1947), arguing that literature is a committed act of freedom?
Correct Answer: b) Jean-Paul Sartre
Explanation:
Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist criticism demanded that literature engage with social injustice and demand readerly freedom.
97. Who wrote 'The Philosophy of Literary Form' (1941), introducing 'symbolic action' and dramatistic criticism?
Correct Answer: a) Kenneth Burke
Explanation:
Kenneth Burke viewed literature as 'equipment for living', analyzing human motivation through the pentad (act, scene, agent, agency, purpose).
98. Which American formalist critic and poet wrote 'In Defense of Reason' (1943), championing moral rigor, classicism, and rational evaluation of poetry?
Correct Answer: b) Yvor Winters
Explanation:
Yvor Winters defended rationalism and moral evaluation in poetry, often clashing with New Critics over emotionalism.
99. Who wrote 'The Well-Tempered Critic' and pioneered American stylistics and textual bibliography?
Correct Answer: a) Fredson Bowers
Explanation:
Fredson Bowers was a leader in analytical bibliography, establishing rigorous standards for textual editing.
100. Which Swiss literary historian wrote 'Principles of Literary History' (1910), outlining polar shifts in artistic styles (e.g., classic to baroque)?
Correct Answer: b) Oskar Walzel
Explanation:
Oskar Walzel applied art history concepts to literature to study changing stylistic epochs.
101. Who wrote 'Time and Narrative' and 'The Rule of Metaphor', shaping hermeneutics and narrative theory?
Correct Answer: b) Paul Ricoeur
Explanation:
Paul Ricoeur bridged phenomenology, hermeneutics, and narratology, exploring how narrative configures human time and identity.
102. Which German philosopher wrote 'Truth and Method' (1960), establishing modern philosophical hermeneutics and the 'fusion of horizons'?
Correct Answer: b) Hans-Georg Gadamer
Explanation:
Hans-Georg Gadamer argued that understanding is an ongoing historical dialogue where our horizon fuses with the text's horizon.
103. Who wrote 'The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere' (1962), contributing major sociological foundations to literary and cultural critique?
Correct Answer: b) Jürgen Habermas
Explanation:
Jürgen Habermas traced how the 18th-century literary public sphere enabled critical rational debate before being commodified by mass media.
