What does Judith Butler mean when she suggests that gender is “performed” ?

A. Gender does not reflect an essential truth, but rather is a role people play based on their internalization of socially constructed gender roles.
B. Gender roles do not exist.
C. Real gender roles are scripted by excellent writers.
D. Only individuals who have the capacity to perform have gender.

How does Virginia Woolf’s essay “A Room of One’s Own” contribute to feminist theory ?

A. It suggests that the suppression of women is part of a historical climate that will naturally fade away.
B. It suggests that gender roles are conditioned by the possession of money and power.
C. It suggests that gender has power over class.
D. It suggests that education, rather than money, is needed for the liberation of women.

Reader-response theory is focused on considering which of the following ?

A. How readers learn to read
B. How readers imagine visual images in a text
C. How readers participate in creating the meaning of a text
D. How readers regard critics

How are Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theories distinct from traditional Freudian concepts ?

A. Kristeva rejects the idea that neuroses provide insight into the unconscious.
B. Kristeva suggests that women are not subject to traditional fetishes.
C. Kristeva offers a more central place for women’s issues within psychological development.
D. Kristeva fundamentally disagrees with the idea of the mirror stage.

According to Jacques Lacan, the mirror stage is the point at which a child_________________?

A. Refuses maternal bonds.
B. Is able to separate the “i” from the “other.”
C. Looks into a mirror for the first time.
D. First engages with speech.

What is New Historicism ?

A. A theory that abandons the idea of history as an imitation of events
B. A theory that regards history as a series of narratives
C. A theory that capitalizes on the interplay between literature and history
D. All of the above

Which of the following statements best explains Mikhail Bakhtin’s philosophy of language ?

A. Language includes multiple social dialects and jargons.
B. Language can include socioideological contradictions from the past.
C. Language exhibits and is bound up in the social lives and historical context of the people who speak it.
D. Language is loaded with the intentions of others.

Which theorist is associated with the idea that art is a copy of a copy ?

A. Plato
B. Claude lévi-strauss
C. Julia kristeva
D. Walter benjamin

What fundamental idea does psychoanalytic criticism hold about literary texts ?

A. Literary texts should not be read as a projection of the author’s psyche.
B. Literary texts solely reflect an author’s intentions.
C. Literary texts are unlike dreams because they have a system of order and produce meaning.
D. Literary texts reveal secret elements of an author’s unconscious.

Which of the following texts is the BEST example of the argument that a work’s meaning does not come entirely from the imagination of the author ?

A. Plato’s the republic
B. T.s. eliot’s “tradition and the individual talent”
C. Jacques derrida’s of grammatology
D. Roland barthes’s “the death of the author”