Online Quiz: Marxist, Feminist, Ecocritical and Queer Criticism

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1. Marxist criticism, in its diverse forms, grounds its theory and practice on the economic and cultural theory of ____ and his fellow-thinker ____

2 points

Louis Althusser & Jacques Lacan

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer

Frederic Jameson & Walter Benjamin

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels

Clear selection

2. Which of the following works is jointly written by Marx and Engels?

2 points

Prison Notebooks

The German Ideology

The Dialectical Imagination

A Theory of Literary Production

Clear selection

3. Which critics 'explain the literature in any historical era, not as works created in accordance with timeless artistic criteria, but as “products” of the economic and ideological determinants specific to that era'?

2 points

Ecocritics

Queer Critics

Feminist Critics

Marxist Critics

Clear selection

4. Match

4 points

The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy

Prison Notebooks

The Dialectical Imagination

Fredric Jameson

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe

Antonio Gramsci

Martin Jay

Clear selection

5. What do Marxist Critics do?

5 points

Another method used is to relate the context of a work to the social-class status of the author. In such cases an assumption is made (which again is similar to those made by psychoanalytic critics) that the author is unaware of precisely what he or she is saying or revealing in the text.

The method is to explain the nature of a whole literary genre in terms of the social period which 'produced' it.

The practice is the 'politicisation of literary form', that is, the claim that literary forms are themselves determined by political circumstance

They make a division between the 'overt' (manifest or surface) and 'covert' (latent or hidden) content of a literary work (much as psychoanalytic critics do) and then relate the covert subject matter of the literary work to basic - - - themes, such as class struggle, or the progression of society through various historical stages, such as, the transition from feudalism to industrial capitalism.

The practice is to relate the literary work to the social assumptions of the time in which it is 'consumed', a strategy which is used particularly in the later variant of Marxist criticism known as cultural materialism

Examine power relations which obtain in texts and in life, with a view to breaking them down, seeing reading as a political act, and showing the extent of patriarchy.

6. ______ is often used to designate the combined area of gay and lesbian studies, together with the theoretical and critical writings about all modes of variance—such as cross-dressing, bisexuality, and transsexuality— from society’s normative model of sexual identity, orientation, and activities.

2 points

Marxist theory

Queer theory

Ecocriticism

Feminist theory

Clear selection

7. What lesbian/gay critics do ?

5 points

Identify and establish a canon of 'classic' lesbian/gay writers whose work constitutes a distinct tradition.

Identify lesbian/gay episodes in mainstream work and discuss them as such, rather than reading same-sex pairings in non-specific ways, for instance, as symbolising two aspects of the same character.

Set up an extended, metaphorical sense of 'lesbian/gay' so that it connotes a moment of crossing a boundary, or blurring a set of categories.

Expose the 'homophobia' of mainstream literature and criticism, as seen in ignoring or denigrating the homosexual aspects of the work of major canonical figures

Foreground homosexual aspects of mainstream literature which have previously been glossed over, for example the strongly homo-erotic tenderness seen in a good deal of First World War poetry.

Foreground literary genres, previously neglected, which significantly influenced ideals of masculinity or femininity, such as the nineteenth-century adventure stories with a British 'Empire' setting

8. Match

4 points

Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

'Lesbians like this and that: some notes on lesbian criticism for the nineties'

Gay Men's Literature in the Twentieth Century

Inside/ Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories

Judith Butler

Bonnie Zimmerman

Mark Lilly

Diana Fuss

Clear selection

9. Match

3 points

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

The Subjection of Women

Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Mary Wollstonecraft

Margaret Fuller

John Start Mill

Clear selection

10. Match

3 points

A Room of One's Own

The Second Sex

Sexual Politics

Kate Millet

Simone de Beauvoir

Virginia Woolf,

Clear selection

11. Identify 'Certain assumptions and concepts pertaining to Feminist Criticism':

5 points

The basic view is that Western civilization is pervasively patriarchal (ruled by the father)—that is, it is male-centered and -controlled, and is organized and conducted in such a way as to subordinate women to men in all cultural domains: familial, religious, political, economic, social, legal, and artistic.

It is widely held that while one’s sex as a man or woman is determined by anatomy, the prevailing concepts of gender—of the traits that are conceived to constitute what is masculine and what is feminine in temperament and behavior—are largely, if not entirely, social constructs that were generated by the pervasive patriarchal biases of our civilization

The further claim is that this patriarchal (or “masculinist,” or “androcentric”) ideology pervades those writings which have been traditionally considered great literature, and which until recently have been written mainly by men for men

Expose the 'homophobia' of mainstream literature and criticism, as seen in ignoring or denigrating the homosexual aspects of the work of major canonical figures

12. Elaine Showalter named ___________ —that is, a criticism which concerns itself with developing a specifically female framework for dealing with works written by women, in all aspects of their production, motivation, analysis, and interpretation, and in all literary forms, including journals and letters.

2 points

Gynocriticism

Ecocriticism

Marxist Criticism

Lesbian / Gay Criticism

Clear selection

13. What feminist critics do ?

5 points

Rethink the canon, aiming at the rediscovery of texts written by women.

Revalue women's experience.

Examine representations of women in literature by men and women.

Challenge representations of women as 'Other', as 'lack', as part of 'nature'.

Examine power relations which obtain in texts and in life, with a view to breaking them down, seeing reading as a political act, and showing the extent of patriarchy.

Raise the question of whether men and women are 'essentially' different because of biology, or are socially constructed as different.

Explore the question of whether there is a female language, an ecriture feminine, and whether this is also available to men.

14. In the twentieth century the warnings by scientists and conservationists increased; two especially influential books were ________ , drawing attention to the ominous degradation of the environment, and __________ , concerning the devastation inflicted by newly developed chemical pesticides on wildlife, both on land and in water.

4 points

Aldo Leopold’s 'A Sand County Almanac' (1949)

Rachel Carson’s 'Silent Spring' (1962)

Wendell Berry 'The Unsettling of America' (1977)

15. Ecocritics do not share a single theoretical perspective or procedure; instead, their engagements with environmental literature manifest a wide range of traditional, poststructural, and postcolonial points of view and modes of analysis. Within this diversity, however, certain issues and concerns are recurrent. Identify these recurrent concerns from the below list:

5 points

It is claimed that the reigning religions and philosophies of Western civilization are deeply anthropocentric; that is, they are oriented to the interests of human beings, who are viewed as opposed to and superior to nature, and as free to exploit natural resources and animal species for their own purposes.

Prominent in ecocriticism is a critique of binaries such as man/nature or culture/nature, viewed as mutually exclusive oppositions. It is pointed out, instead, that these entities are interconnected, and also mutually constitutive.

Many ecocritics recommend, and themselves exemplify, the extension of “green reading” (that is, analysis of the implications of a text for environmental concerns and toward political action) to all literary genres, including prose fiction and poetry, and also to writings in the natural and social sciences.

A conspicuous feature in ecocriticism is the analysis of the differences in attitudes toward the environment that are attributable to a writer’s race, ethnicity, social class, and gender.

There is a growing interest in the animistic religions of so-called “primitive” cultures, as well as in Hindu, Buddhist, and other religions and civilizations that lack the Western opposition between humanity and nature, and do not assign to human beings dominion over the nonhuman world.

Examine power relations which obtain in texts and in life, with a view to breaking them down, seeing reading as a political act, and showing the extent of patriarchy.

16. What Ecocritics do?

5 points

They re-read major literary works from an ecocentric perspective, with particular attention to the representation of the natural world

They extend the applicability of a range of ecocentric concepts, using them of things other than the natural world -concepts such as growth and energy, balance and imbalance, symbiosis and mutuality, and sustainable or unsustainable uses of energy and resources.

They give special canonical emphasis to writers who foreground nature as a major part of their subject matter, such as the American transcendentalists, the British Romantics, the poetry of John Clare, the work of Thomas Hardy and the Georgian poets of the early twentieth century.

They extend the range of literary-critical practice by placing a new emphasis on relevant 'factual' writing, especially reflective topographical material such as essays, travel writing, memoirs, and regional literature.

They turn away from the 'social constructivism' and 'linguistic determinism' of dominant literary theories (with their emphasis on the linguistic and social constructedness of the external world) and instead emphasise ecocentric values of meticulous observation, collective ethical responsibility, and the claims of the world beyond ourselves.

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