Literary Criticism – 02 (Practice Questions & detailed answer)

Q6. The psychoanalytic critic Sigmund Freud (1859-1939) / his proponents best believed that —————–.

1) the hidden meanings of a story can never be unlocked

2) a text is ‘a writer’s dreams undisguised’

3) artistic creation plunges the artist deep into a state of neurosis

4) a literary text must be analyzed like a dream

Q7. In a deconstructionist reading of a text ——————.

1) the meaning of a text depends on the close interaction of the text, the reader and social and cultural elements

2) there is no affinity the way a text is read (in a deconstructive way) and other types of reading or interpretive process

3) we have every right to stop finding meaning in a text upon our first reading of it, as our subsequent readings would, in abstract terms, offer the same result

4) the criticism of a text takes the upper hand of the text being read in terms of the essential value it yields

Q8. Which of the following is NOT (best) a concern with contemporary African-American criticism?

1) reading race into all American literature

2) significance of slavery as past historical events and its present day implications

3) social, political, economic, ideological and literary oppression

4) discovering signs of black art in modern American white art

Q9. The American critic John Crowe Ransom (1888-1974) would ——————.

1) explore, in a sense of important critical essays, the distinctive expressions of consciousness in several Western authors, spanning the Renaissance to the modern period.

2) consider the “ethical” approach of the New Humanism and Marxism as ‘false’ and find fault with the teaching of literature in universities by literary historians and scholars

3) assert that all kinds of criticism serve useful purposes and will be even more useful if the critic is explicit enough about his goals

4) in his seminal essay “Marxism and Literature,” (1938) strongly advocate contemporary attempts to connect Marxism and literature

Q10. Which of the following statements as regards the structuralist critic Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) and the American New Critics is TRUE?

1) Jakobson and the New Critics would both oppose ‘vulgar biographism’ and the ‘intentional fallacy’, but would, at the same time, analyze the myth of the poet as a function of cultural history

2) Jakobson tended to frame interpretation within a working sense of imagination and mind, whereas the New Critics subjected the largest and the smallest patterns to linguistic and cultural analysis, without regard for individual craft.

3) Jakobson welcomed the contributions of science to the work of literary studies, while the New Critics were trying to defend “humanistic” values against the spread of scientific “professionalism”

4) Jakobson did not believe in the unity of the human imagination as the New Critics did, and would, contrary to the New Critics, contend that no critic could ever hope to entirely capture the human imagination

Answers

Q6 – Option 4 (Beginning with the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900, Freud lays the foundation for how our minds operate. Hidden from the workings of the conscious mind, the unconscious, he believes, plays a large part in how we act, think, and feel. According to Freud, the best avenue for discovering the content and the activity of the unconscious is through our dreams.)

Q7 – Option 1 (According to a deconstructionist reading of a text, because texts have no external referents, their meanings depend on a close interactions of the text, the reader, and the social and cultural elements both within the reader and the text, as does reading or every interpretive process.)

Q8 – Option 4 (An examination of Wheatley’s life highlights the multiple concerns of contemporary African-American criticism:
i) Marginalization of blacks
ii) Reading race into all American literature
iii) Significance of slavery as past historical events and its present day implications
iv) Social, political, economic, ideological and literary oppression
v) Celebrating that which is black in black art)

Q9 – Option 2 (Ransom’s attempt to define the business of criticism—what it is not and what it should be. He lists a number of false or misleading types of current criticism including the “ethical” approach of the New Humanism and Marxism—but he focuses primarily on the teaching of literature—in universities by literary historians and scholars who stress backgrounds, sources; and influences rather than the poems themselves.)

Q10 – Option 3 (It was not that Jakobson did not believe in the unity of the human imagination, but precisely that he believed in it so much that he thought he was in no danger of departing from it. Jakobson welcomed the contributions of science to the work of literary studies, while the New Critics were trying to defend “humanistic” values against the spread of scientific “professionalism.”)