Modern Literary Theory and Criticism MCQs 2026

T. S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" argues that the poet must

1. A reject all past literature entirely ✓
2. B develop a historical sense and submit to the tradition while individual talent modifies it ✓
3. C write only autobiographical verse ✓
4. D ignore language and metre ✓

Eliot's concept of the "objective correlative" refers to

1. A the poet's private diary entries ✓
2. B a literal translation of Greek drama ✓
3. C the author's stated intention in a preface ✓
4. D a set of objects, situations or events that evoke a particular emotion in the reader ✓

In "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Eliot advocates poetic impersonality by comparing the mind of the poet to

1. A a confessional autobiography ✓
2. B a political manifesto ✓
3. C a random word generator ✓
4. D a catalyst or medium in which feelings and experiences combine ✓

New Criticism is best characterized by

1. A biographical study of the author's childhood only ✓
2. B market analysis of book sales ✓
3. C exclusive focus on historical documents outside the poem ✓
4. D close reading of the text as an autonomous verbal structure ✓

Cleanth Brooks's "well-wrought urn" metaphor suggests that a poem

1. A is merely decorative pottery ✓
2. B must preach a moral lesson explicitly ✓
3. C achieves unity in which meaning cannot be paraphrased without loss ✓
4. D should be reduced to a prose summary ✓

Homi Bhabha's concept of hybridity refers to

1. A pure cultural authenticity without mixture ✓
2. B the mixed, in-between cultural identities produced in colonial contact ✓
3. C complete assimilation to the colonizer ✓
4. D the rejection of all translation ✓

Wimsatt and Beardsley's "intentional fallacy" holds that

1. A readers should ignore the text entirely ✓
2. B the author's stated intention is not a reliable standard for judging meaning ✓
3. C only biography determines interpretation ✓
4. D intention always equals final meaning ✓

The "affective fallacy" criticized by Wimsatt and Beardsley confuses

1. A form with metre only ✓
2. B plot with character only ✓
3. C the poem with its psychological effects on the reader ✓
4. D translation with original ✓

I. A. Richards pioneered practical criticism by

1. A studying student responses to poems without author or title ✓
2. B publishing only author biographies ✓
3. C banning ambiguity in poetry ✓
4. D ignoring language as emotive ✓

F. R. Leavis is associated with

1. A Russian Formalist defamiliarization ✓
2. B moral seriousness and the "great tradition" in the English novel ✓
3. C Lacanian mirror stage theory ✓
4. D deconstructive free play only ✓

Structuralism in literary theory treats texts as

1. A purely unique unpatterned utterances ✓
2. B only authorial confession ✓
3. C systems of underlying relations and conventions ✓
4. D exclusively historical documents without form ✓

Ferdinand de Saussure distinguished langue from parole as

1. A written versus oral literature only ✓
2. B epic versus lyric genres ✓
3. C tragedy versus comedy ✓
4. D the language system versus individual speech acts ✓

Roman Jakobson's model of poetic function emphasizes

1. A the message focusing on the message itself (verbal artifice) ✓
2. B only the channel of transmission ✓
3. C only the context of situation ✓
4. D only the addressee's emotions ✓

Claude Lévi-Strauss applied structuralism to myths by seeking

1. A authorial childhood trauma only ✓
2. B market price of folktales ✓
3. C random plot summaries ✓
4. D underlying binary oppositions and recurring patterns ✓

Roland Barthes in "The Death of the Author" argues that

1. A only the author's biography matters ✓
2. B texts have one fixed doctrinal meaning ✓
3. C criticism should ignore language ✓
4. D the birth of the reader comes at the cost of the author's authority ✓

Marxist literary criticism examines literature in relation to

1. A only rhyme schemes ✓
2. B material conditions, class relations and ideology ✓
3. C only authorial handwriting ✓
4. D only printing fonts ✓

Georg Lukács valued the realist novel for

1. A escapist fantasy detached from history ✓
2. B pure language games without society ✓
3. C sentimental individualism only ✓
4. D presenting typical characters in relation to social totality ✓

Antonio Gramsci's concept of hegemony explains how

1. A literature has no ideological dimension ✓
2. B dominant groups secure consent through cultural leadership ✓
3. C all texts are politically neutral ✓
4. D power operates only by brute force ✓

Raymond Williams is a key figure in

1. A New Critical close reading alone ✓
2. B pure psychoanalytic dream analysis ✓
3. C cultural materialism and Marxist cultural studies ✓
4. D formalist metre scansion only ✓

Terry Eagleton's Marxist criticism emphasizes that

1. A literature is a form of ideology embedded in material production ✓
2. B texts float free of history ✓
3. C only beauty matters in art ✓
4. D criticism should avoid politics ✓

Feminist literary criticism challenges

1. A all close reading as such ✓
2. B the existence of women writers only ✓
3. C metrical analysis in poetry ✓
4. D patriarchal assumptions in canon, representation and interpretation ✓

Elaine Showalter's "gynocriticism" focuses on

1. A only male-authored classics ✓
2. B the history and styles of women's writing ✓
3. C only Freudian dream symbols ✓
4. D only deconstructive wordplay ✓

Judith Butler's influence on feminist theory includes the idea that gender is

1. A biologically determined and unchangeable ✓
2. B performative rather than a fixed natural essence ✓
3. C irrelevant to literary texts ✓
4. D identical to biological sex always ✓

Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic examines

1. A only medieval epic heroes ✓
2. B only American frontier humor ✓
3. C how nineteenth-century women writers responded to patriarchal literary tradition ✓
4. D only Restoration comedy plots ✓

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" addresses

1. A metrical patterns in sonnets ✓
2. B Shakespeare's comic subplots only ✓
3. C whether marginalized voices can be represented without epistemic violence ✓
4. D Romantic nature imagery only ✓

Edward Said's Orientalism argues that Western representations of the East are

1. A discursive constructions serving imperial power ✓
2. B objective scientific facts only ✓
3. C free of political interest ✓
4. D identical to Eastern self-descriptions ✓

Postcolonial criticism commonly examines

1. A how colonialism shapes representation, identity and literary form ✓
2. B only Elizabethan sonnet rhyme ✓
3. C only Greek metre in isolation ✓
4. D only printing technology ✓

Frantz Fanon's work is foundational for postcolonial theory because it analyzes

1. A iambic pentameter in blank verse ✓
2. B psychological and political effects of colonial domination ✓
3. C Victorian novel serialisation only ✓
4. D Restoration comedy staging ✓

The concept of "otherness" in postcolonial studies refers to

1. A literary friendship between equals ✓
2. B defining the colonized as alien and inferior to the colonizer's self ✓
3. C purely formal rhyme schemes ✓
4. D authorial grammar alone ✓

Sigmund Freud's influence on literary criticism includes reading texts for

1. A only counting syllables ✓
2. B only authorial income ✓
3. C only library catalogues ✓
4. D unconscious desires, repression and symbolic displacement ✓

Freudian dream-work involves processes such as

1. A iambic substitution only ✓
2. B stanzaic rhyme only ✓
3. C condensation and displacement ✓
4. D pastoral convention only ✓

Jacques Lacan's Mirror Stage describes

1. A the final chapter of a novel ✓
2. B a type of sonnet rhyme ✓
3. C the infant's jubilant yet alienating identification with its reflected image ✓
4. D a Marxist labor theory ✓

Lacan's Symbolic order is associated with

1. A language, law and the Name-of-the-Father structuring subjectivity ✓
2. B pure nature without culture ✓
3. C only visual art without words ✓
4. D metrical scansion alone ✓

Jacques Derrida's deconstruction challenges

1. A only spelling errors ✓
2. B only book binding ✓
3. C the metaphysics of presence and stable binary oppositions ✓
4. D only library shelving ✓

Derrida's différance suggests that meaning is

1. A fully present in one word ✓
2. B deferred and differentiated through endless signification ✓
3. C fixed by authorial intention only ✓
4. D unaffected by context ✓

Deconstructive reading often exposes

1. A internal contradictions or aporias within a text ✓
2. B only historical dates ✓
3. C only rhyme labels ✓
4. D only page numbers ✓

Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence" describes

1. A complete rejection of all reading ✓
2. B how strong poets misread precursors to clear imaginative space ✓
3. C pure imitation without change ✓
4. D indifference to tradition ✓

Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism emphasizes that

1. A the novel should have one monologic voice only ✓
2. B language and the novel are fundamentally social and multi-voiced ✓
3. C meaning is private and incommunicable ✓
4. D form has no social dimension ✓

Bakhtin's carnivalesque is developed in his study of

1. A Wordsworth's nature lyrics only ✓
2. B Pope's heroic couplets only ✓
3. C Rabelais and folk culture's subversive laughter ✓
4. D Spenserian stanza only ✓

Russian Formalists introduced ostranenie (defamiliarization) to describe

1. A realistic copying of daily life only ✓
2. B moral preaching in fiction ✓
3. C art making the familiar strange to renew perception ✓
4. D biographical confession only ✓

Viktor Shklovsky argued that art's function is to

1. A impart the sensation of things as they are perceived, not as they are known ✓
2. B mirror reality without technique ✓
3. C eliminate form entirely ✓
4. D record facts like journalism only ✓

T. S. Eliot's critical modernism aligns with his poetry through

1. A pure frontier realism only ✓
2. B sentimental melodrama only ✓
3. C unpatterned spontaneous prose only ✓
4. D impersonality, tradition and allusive density ✓

The hermeneutic circle in interpretation means

1. A understanding parts through the whole and the whole through parts ✓
2. B ignoring context entirely ✓
3. C reading only one line in isolation ✓
4. D refusing any revision of views ✓

Reader-response criticism associated with Iser and Fish stresses

1. A the reader's active role in constructing textual meaning ✓
2. B that texts have no language ✓
3. C that only authors read ✓
4. D that history is irrelevant always ✓

Bakhtin's heteroglossia refers to

1. A the diversity of social languages within the novel ✓
2. B a single unified authorial style only ✓
3. C pure silence in narrative ✓
4. D absence of social context ✓

Post-structuralism differs from structuralism mainly by

1. A returning to author worship only ✓
2. B ignoring language entirely ✓
3. C questioning stable structures and decentering meaning ✓
4. D affirming fixed binaries ✓

Michel Foucault's discourse theory examines how power operates through

1. A knowledge regimes, institutions and disciplinary practices ✓
2. B only rhyme in poetry ✓
3. C only woodcut illustrations ✓
4. D only author birthdays ✓

Louis Althusser influenced Marxist literary theory through the concept of

1. A ideological state apparatuses shaping subjectivity ✓
2. B purely spontaneous unmediated art ✓
3. C metrical feet in verse only ✓
4. D authorial handwriting analysis ✓

Ecocriticism attends to literature's representation of

1. A only courtly love conventions ✓
2. B only sonnet sequences only ✓
3. C only printing history alone ✓
4. D nature, environment and human-nonhuman relations ✓

New Historicism associated with Stephen Greenblatt reads literary texts alongside

1. A only metre and rhyme ✓
2. B only authorial dreams ✓
3. C only grammar drills ✓
4. D contemporary historical documents and power relations ✓