Home » 1000+ Literary Theory MCQs – Part 13: Marxism II: Frankfurt School, Williams, Eagleton & Jameson

1000+ Literary Theory MCQs – Part 13: Marxism II: Frankfurt School, Williams, Eagleton & Jameson

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← All 25 PartsPart 13 of 25 · Marxism II
Marxism II

Literary Theory · Part 13 of 25 · 1930s–1980s

Marxism II: Frankfurt School, Williams, Eagleton & Jameson

Culture IndustryAuraStructure of FeelingPolitical Unconscious

What is Marxism II? Later Marxist theory turned to culture itself. The Frankfurt School (Adorno and Horkheimer) attacked the “culture industry”, Walter Benjamin wrote on the loss of aura, Raymond Williams developed cultural materialism and the “structure of feeling”, Terry Eagleton wrote Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983), and Fredric Jameson proposed the political unconscious.

This part covers Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School, Raymond Williams, Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson. The questions are drawn from previous UGC NET, SET, PhD entrance and Assistant Professor papers, and every answer comes with a short explanation. Tap an option to check your answer.

Walter BenjaminAdorno, Horkheimer & the Frankfurt SchoolRaymond WilliamsTerry EagletonFredric Jameson

Walter Benjamin

1. Who said, “There is no cultural document that is not at the same time a record of barbarism”?

  1. Julia Kristeva
  2. Walter Benjamin
  3. Michel Foucault
  4. Karl Marx
Walter Benjamin wrote this in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), arguing that cultural treasures carry the history of oppression.

2. Which of these major historical events does Walter Benjamin refer to in his essay “The Storyteller”?

  1. Fall of the Ottoman Empire
  2. Indian Rebellion of 1857
  3. Second World War
  4. First World War
In “The Storyteller” (1936) Benjamin notes that men returned silent from the battlefields of the First World War, poorer in communicable experience.

Adorno, Horkheimer & the Frankfurt School

3. Who authored the book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962)?

  1. Friedrich Engels
  2. Walter Benjamin
  3. Jürgen Habermas
  4. Raymond Williams
Jürgen Habermas, of the second-generation Frankfurt School, traced the rise and decline of the bourgeois public sphere in this 1962 book.

4. Fill in the blank in the title of this chapter from Dialectic of Enlightenment: “The Culture Industry: ____ as Mass Deception”.

  1. Capitalism
  2. Consumerism
  3. Dialectics
  4. Enlightenment
Adorno and Horkheimer’s chapter “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/1947) attacks standardised mass culture.

5. With which theoretical movement can one associate the idea that a work of art should ideally be marked by distancing and estrangement rather than by cohesion and progression?

  1. The Frankfurt School
  2. Post-colonialism
  3. Queer Theory
  4. Post-feminism
Frankfurt School aesthetics, especially Adorno’s, valued fragmented, estranging modernist art that resists the false harmony and coherence of the culture industry.

6. Who is NOT a member of the Frankfurt School?

  1. Theodor Adorno
  2. Jürgen Habermas
  3. Fredric Jameson
  4. Herbert Marcuse
Fredric Jameson is an American Marxist critic influenced by the Frankfurt School; Adorno, Marcuse and Habermas belonged to it.

7. Which of the following books is written by Jürgen Habermas?

  1. The Unfinished Product of Modernity
  2. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
  3. The Conservative Movement in Modernity
  4. The Exclusion of the Other in Modernity
Habermas’s The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985) defends the project of modernity against Nietzsche-inspired critics such as Foucault and Derrida.

8. ‘Eros and Civilization’ is a ‘philosophical inquiry into __________’.

  1. Marx
  2. Darwin
  3. Freud
  4. Capital
Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955) synthesises Freud and Marx to imagine a non-repressive civilisation.

9. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is a work by:

  1. Horkheimer
  2. Adorno
  3. Marcuse
  4. Habermas
Jürgen Habermas published The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1962, tracing the rise and decline of the bourgeois public sphere.

10. The concept of the “sane society” was put forward by:

  1. Erich Fromm
  2. Rachel Carson
  3. Cheryl Glotfelty
  4. Ivan Illich
Erich Fromm, the Frankfurt School psychoanalyst, argued in The Sane Society (1955) that a whole society can be pathological and proposed humanistic communitarian socialism as the sane alternative.

11. The notion of the “public sphere” is associated with:

  1. Fredric Jameson
  2. Jürgen Habermas
  3. Jacques Derrida
  4. Michel Foucault
Jürgen Habermas theorised the bourgeois public sphere of rational-critical debate in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962).

Raymond Williams

12. In a remarkably proleptic insight, a critic wrote the following, anticipating Benedict Anderson’s definition of the nation as “an imagined political community”: “Most novels are in some sense knowable communities. It is part of a traditional method — an underlying stance and approach — that a novelist offers to show people and their relationships in essentially knowable and communicable ways.” Name the critic and the work.

  1. Van Wyck Brooks, The Writer in America
  2. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City
  3. Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper
  4. T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture
The passage opens the chapter ‘Knowable Communities’ in Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (1973), echoing his The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence.

13. Who among the following Marxist critics has reconsidered the classic problem of ‘base and superstructure’ in relation to literature?

  1. Raymond Williams
  2. Edmund Wilson
  3. Lucien Goldmann
  4. Walter Benjamin
Raymond Williams’s essay ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’ (1973) rethinks the model, stressing determination as setting limits and exerting pressures.

14. “Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact.” Which one of the following is the source of this statement?

  1. The Country and the City
  2. The Long Revolution
  3. Resources of Hope
  4. Keywords
Raymond Williams’s 1958 essay ‘Culture is Ordinary’ was collected in Resources of Hope (1989), which reprints his key essays on culture and politics.

15. Select from the following list the theoretical lens which Raymond Williams uses in The Country and the City.

  1. Postmodernism
  2. Liberalism
  3. Postcolonialism
  4. Marxism
The Country and the City (1973) is a Marxist, cultural-materialist study showing how pastoral images of country and city mask relations of property and labour.

16. Raymond Williams first introduced the concept called ‘structure of feeling’ in ________.

  1. Preface to Film
  2. Marxism and Literature
  3. The Long Revolution
  4. The Country and the City
Williams first used ‘structure of feeling’ in Preface to Film (1954, with Michael Orrom) and developed it in The Long Revolution (1961) and Marxism and Literature (1977).

17. Select from the following list the theoretical lens which Raymond Williams uses in The Country and the City.

  1. Liberalism
  2. Marxism
  3. Postcolonialism
  4. Postmodernism
The Country and the City (1973) is a Marxist, cultural-materialist study showing how pastoral images of country and city mask relations of property and labour.

18. The Country and the City is a work by

  1. Lawrence Buell
  2. Cheryll Glotfelty
  3. Raymond Williams
  4. Edward Soja
Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (1973) examines images of rural and urban life in English literature in relation to social history.

19. Who wrote Culture and Society?

  1. Terry Eagleton
  2. F. R. Leavis
  3. Claude Lévi-Strauss
  4. Raymond Williams
Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958) traces the idea of culture in English thought.

20. Raymond Williams’ theory of cultural materialism was influenced by

  1. Foucault
  2. Derrida
  3. Marx
  4. Bakhtin
Raymond Williams developed cultural materialism from Marxist thought, revising the base-superstructure model to treat culture as material production.

21. Name the critic who explains the ‘social’ definition of culture as a description of a particular way of life.

  1. Louis Althusser
  2. Claude Lévi-Strauss
  3. Clifford Geertz
  4. Raymond Williams
In The Long Revolution (1961) Raymond Williams gives three definitions of culture, ideal, documentary and social, the last describing a particular way of life.

22. Who is the author of The Country and the City?

  1. Raymond Williams
  2. Richard Hoggart
  3. E.P. Thompson
  4. Stuart Hall
Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (1973) examines how English literature has represented rural and urban life in relation to changing capitalist social relations.

23. Whom does Terry Eagleton consider ‘the most influential cultural thinker’ of the 20th century?

  1. Alan O’Connor
  2. Raymond Williams
  3. Edward Said
  4. Michel Foucault
Eagleton, Williams’s former student, regarded Raymond Williams as the most influential cultural thinker of his time, the founder of cultural materialism and of British cultural studies.

24. Which of the following books is written by Raymond Williams?

  1. The Political Unconscious
  2. Against Interpretation
  3. Postmodernism
  4. Culture and Society
Raymond Williams wrote Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958); The Political Unconscious and Postmodernism are Jameson’s, Against Interpretation is Sontag’s.
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25. Which of these are true of Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society?

(A) It critiques the idea of high culture.
(B) It overlooks the idea of high culture.
(C) It defines culture as a way of life.
(D) It equates culture with science.
  1. A and C only
  2. A and D only
  3. A and B only
  4. B and D only
Culture and Society (1958) questions the elitist idea of culture as the preserve of a minority and argues that culture is a whole way of life.

26. The concept of “structure of feeling” is associated with:

  1. Karl Marx
  2. Sigmund Freud
  3. Raymond Williams
  4. Carl Jung
Raymond Williams used “structure of feeling” (Preface to Film, 1954; Marxism and Literature, 1977) for the lived, emergent experience of a period.

27. ‘Residual’ and ‘emergent’ are terms introduced by ____.

  1. Raymond Williams
  2. Antonio Gramsci
  3. Louis Althusser
  4. Lucien Goldmann
In Marxism and Literature (1977) Raymond Williams distinguishes dominant, residual and emergent elements within a culture.

28. Raymond Williams says that Jane Austen used ‘modern’ to indicate ____.

  1. contemporary and real
  2. a state of alteration
  3. updating and improving
  4. novel and strange
In “When Was Modernism?” Raymond Williams notes that Jane Austen, in Persuasion, ironically glossed the modern as “a state of alteration, perhaps of improvement”, unlike contemporaries who meant simply updating and improving.

Terry Eagleton

29. According to Terry Eagleton, what kind of students began to enter higher education during the 1960s, breaking down assumptions about literary studies?

  1. Students from supposedly ‘first-world’ countries
  2. Students from supposedly ‘third-world’ countries
  3. Students from supposedly ‘uncultivated’ backgrounds
  4. Students from supposedly ‘cultivated’ backgrounds
Eagleton links the rise of theory to the entry into higher education of students from supposedly ‘uncultivated’ backgrounds, who unsettled the assumptions of traditional literary studies.

30. Complete Eagleton’s remark: ‘Theory was a way of ________ literary works from the ________ of a civilised sensibility.’

  1. emancipating; stranglehold
  2. excluding; oppression
  3. studying; truth
  4. dismissing; idea
Eagleton writes that theory was a way of emancipating literary works from the stranglehold of a ‘civilised sensibility’, opening them to analysis in which anyone could participate.

31. Complete Eagleton’s remark: ‘Properly understood, literary theory is shaped by a ________ impulse rather than an ________ one.’

  1. cultivated; uncultivated
  2. different; indifferent
  3. popular; unpopular
  4. democratic; elitist
Eagleton argues that, properly understood, literary theory is shaped by a democratic rather than an elitist impulse.

32. According to Terry Eagleton, what happens when literary theory becomes ‘turgidly unreadable’?

  1. It is being untrue to the importance of its form.
  2. It is being untrue to its historical roots.
  3. It is being true to its historical roots.
  4. It is being true to the importance of its form.
For Eagleton, when theory lapses into the turgidly unreadable it is being untrue to its own historical roots in a democratic impulse.

33. According to Eagleton, ‘the very meaning of ________, ________ and ________ has undergone deep alteration.’

  1. literature; reading; criticism
  2. power; authority; freedom
  3. film; viewing; education
  4. art; theory; practice
Eagleton observes that with the proliferation of theory since 1917 the very meaning of ‘literature’, ‘reading’ and ‘criticism’ has undergone deep alteration.

34. According to Terry Eagleton, the distinction between fact and fiction in defining literature is often what?

  1. Difficult
  2. Questionable
  3. Complicated
  4. Important
Eagleton rejects defining literature as fiction because the distinction between fact and fiction is itself often a questionable one.

35. Complete Eagleton’s remark: ‘In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the word ________ seems to have been used about both true and fictional events.’

  1. theory
  2. memoir
  3. novel
  4. news
Eagleton notes that in late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century English the word ‘novel’ was used about both true and fictional events, so fact and fiction were not sharply divided.

36. According to Eagleton, how might linguists describe the effect of language in which ‘the texture, rhythm and resonance of words are in excess of their abstractable meaning’?

  1. A disproportion between one signifier for every other signified
  2. A disproportion between two signifiers
  3. A disproportion between two signifieds
  4. A disproportion between signifiers and signifieds
Eagleton says that when the texture, rhythm and resonance of words exceed their abstractable meaning, linguists would call it a disproportion between the signifiers and the signifieds.

37. According to Eagleton, in eighteenth-century England, what was the whole body of valued writing in society, including philosophy, letters, history, poems and essays, considered to be?

  1. Theory
  2. Literature
  3. Canon
  4. Religion
Eagleton notes that in eighteenth-century England ‘literature’ meant the whole body of valued writing in society: philosophy, history, essays and letters as well as poems.

38. According to Eagleton, the criteria for what counted as literature in the eighteenth century were what?

  1. Canonical
  2. Religious
  3. Ideological
  4. Practical
Eagleton argues that the eighteenth-century criteria of what counted as literature were frankly ideological, embodying the values and tastes of a particular social class.

39. According to Eagleton, eighteenth-century literature did more than embody social values; it was also an instrument for what?

  1. Entrenchment and dissemination
  2. Education and oppression
  3. Religion and redemption
  4. Violence and abdication
Eagleton says eighteenth-century literature did more than embody social values: it was a vital instrument for their deeper entrenchment and wider dissemination.

40. During the last decades of the eighteenth century, what kind of connotation did the word ‘prosaic’ begin to acquire?

  1. An unfamiliar connotation
  2. A familiar connotation
  3. A positive connotation
  4. A negative connotation
In the late eighteenth century ‘prosaic’ acquired its negative sense of dull and commonplace, as imaginative writing came to be prized above ordinary prose.

41. According to Eagleton, how is literature in the Romantic period more than ‘idle escapism’?

  1. It is the celebration of totalitarian values enforced in English society.
  2. It is the rejection of creative values celebrated in English society.
  3. It is the acceptance of totalitarian values rejected in English society.
  4. It is the affirmation of creative values expunged from English society.
Eagleton argues that Romantic ‘creative’ writing was not idle escapism but an affirmation of the creative values that industrial capitalist English society was expunging.

42. Identify the author of After Theory.

  1. Jonathan Culler
  2. Raymond Williams
  3. Terry Eagleton
  4. Paul de Man
Terry Eagleton’s After Theory (2003) argues that the golden age of cultural theory has passed and calls for engagement with ethics, death and morality.

Fredric Jameson

43. Fredric Jameson associated postmodern culture with __________ capitalism.

  1. market
  2. multinational
  3. imperialist
  4. monopoly
In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson, following Mandel, links postmodernism to the third, multinational stage of capitalism.

44. Who among the following theorists believes that the proliferation of television images is producing a cultural condition akin to ‘historical amnesia’?

  1. Fredric Jameson
  2. Ihab Hassan
  3. Jean Baudrillard
  4. Daniel Bell
In ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ Jameson argues that the media’s endless flow of images erodes historical memory, producing a kind of historical amnesia.

45. The Political Unconscious has been written by

  1. Alfred Adler
  2. Fredric Jameson
  3. Jacques Lacan
  4. Erich Fromm
Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious (1981) reads narrative as a socially symbolic act, with “Always historicize!” as its slogan.

46. Identify the theorist who described so-called ‘third world’ literature(s) as ‘national allegories’.

  1. Fredric Jameson
  2. Aimé Césaire
  3. Léopold Senghor
  4. Homi Bhabha
Fredric Jameson, in “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism” (1986), claimed all third-world texts are national allegories, a view Aijaz Ahmad famously contested.

47. The complete title of Fredric Jameson’s work on postmodernism is:

  1. Postmodernism and the Logic of High Capitalism
  2. Postmodernism, or, the Logic of Global Capitalism
  3. Postmodernism as the Cultural Logic of Market Capitalism
  4. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Jameson’s essay (1984) and book (1991) are titled Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, following Ernest Mandel’s idea of late capitalism.

48. Who among the following theorists believes that the proliferation of television images is producing a cultural condition akin to ‘historical amnesia’?

  1. Jean Baudrillard
  2. Ihab Hassan
  3. Fredric Jameson
  4. Daniel Bell
In “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” Fredric Jameson argues that media-saturated late capitalism produces a perpetual present and a loss of historical sense, a kind of historical amnesia.

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