1000+ Literary Theory MCQs – Part 12: Marxism I: Marx, Lukács, Gramsci & Althusser

1. Karl Marx is best described as a German ________.

1. Criminologist
2. Zoologist
3. Philosopher
4. Scientist

2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were the joint founders of the school of ________.

1. Reason
2. Enlightenment
3. Expectations
4. Thought

3. The aim of Marxism was to bring about a ________ society, based on the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.

1. Homeless
2. Classless
3. Thoughtless
4. Lawless

4. The term “reification” was used in Karl Marx’s major work ________, and concerned the way, when capitalist goals and profit and loss are paramount, workers are bereft of their full humanity and are thought of as “hands” or “the labour force”.

1. The Poverty of Philosophy
2. The German Ideology
3. The Communist Manifesto
4. Das Kapital

5. In which of the following senses did Marx and Engels originally use the term “ideology” in The German Ideology?

1. The concepts of base and superstructure that govern the economic relations of society
2. The elaborate structures and institutions that mark bourgeois society
3. Something that mystifies the actual material conditions of society, a sort of false consciousness
4. The fundamental class consciousness of the proletariat which leads to their awakening

6. Select the incorrect statement with regard to Karl Marx’s Capital.

1. Commodities are categorised by the expenditure of a certain amount of labour, which is measured in terms of the expenses incurred in procuring raw materials.
2. Two later volumes of the book were posthumously published by Friedrich Engels.
3. It begins with Marx’s discussion of commodities.
4. Marx could publish only the first volume of Capital, in 1867.

7. According to Marx, a commodity is constituted of ________.

1. exchange value and price
2. use value and price
3. use value and exchange value
4. price and labour

8. One of the early concepts of Marxism is that the base (economic base) influences or determines the:

1. Manifest content
2. Superstructure
3. History
4. Hegemony

9. The German Ideology was a book written by:

1. Marx and Engels
2. Lukács and Brecht
3. Adorno and Derrida
4. Althusser and Gramsci

10. Which of the following statements about Karl Marx is not true?

1. Karl Marx was born in 1818.
2. Karl Marx died in 1883.
3. Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto in 1848.
4. Marx completed writing three volumes of his book Capital during his lifetime.

11. Marx’s doctoral thesis was based on:

1. Political economy
2. Laws and legal rights
3. Philosophical works of Democritus and Epicurus
4. Nation state and nationalism

12. The intellectual who collaborated with Marx was ____.

1. Friedrich Engels
2. Sartre
3. Ruskin
4. J.S. Mill

13. Karl Marx, a German of Jewish descent, lived during which period?

1. From 1808 to 1873
2. From 1828 to 1893
3. From 1838 to 1903
4. From 1818 to 1883

14. Karl Marx is widely regarded as the founder of what?

1. Democracy
2. Communism
3. Hypocrisy
4. Socialism

15. Where was Marx born?

1. Munich, Germany
2. Geneva, Switzerland
3. Trier, Germany
4. Frankfurt, Germany

16. Marx was most attracted to which of Hegel’s philosophies?

1. His philosophy of democracy
2. His philosophy of life
3. His philosophy of politics
4. His philosophy of history

17. How did Engels and Marx become friends?

1. Marx and Engels met at a conference
2. Marx was working on the “Annals” in Paris
3. Marx worked for Engels
4. Engels worked for Marx

18. Marx and Engels were commissioned to write what?

1. The Communist Manifesto
2. The Anarchist Manifesto
3. The Surrealist Manifesto
4. The Cartagena Manifesto

19. Marx and Engels used dialectics. What are dialectics?

1. Argument that brings out the flaws in another’s reasoning
2. The language of philosophers
3. Explanations for one’s beliefs
4. Different versions of the same language

20. Who said that the novel is the form of “transcendental homelessness”?

1. Lucien Goldmann
2. Mikhail Bakhtin
3. Georg Lukács
4. Salman Rushdie

21. What was Gramsci’s term for the cultural consensus supporting capitalism?

1. Monopoly
2. Ideology
3. Discourse
4. Hegemony

22. To which of the following theoretical fields did Antonio Gramsci contribute?

1. Poststructuralist theory
2. Marxist theory
3. New Criticism
4. Neoclassical theory

23. According to the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci:

1. hegemony involves a degree of consent on the part of subject people
2. hegemony is synonymous with domination
3. hegemony involves a degree of coercion on the part of a dominant political entity
4. hegemony is synonymous with subjugation

24. L’Ordine Nuovo (“The New Order”) is the newspaper founded in 1919 by:

1. Matteo Bartoli
2. Antonio Gramsci
3. Benedetto Croce
4. Palmiro Togliatti

25. Antonio Gramsci’s ideas on ____ can be found in the work ____.

1. Morality, Genealogy of Morals
2. Insanity, Madness and Civilization
3. Marxist theory, Prison Notebooks
4. Literary theory, “The Death of the Author”

26. Who among the following is associated with a ‘philosophy of praxis’?

1. Stuart Hall
2. Georg Lukács
3. Raymond Williams
4. Antonio Gramsci

27. The concept of the organic intellectual was introduced by

1. Antonio Gramsci
2. Lucien Goldmann
3. Terry Eagleton
4. Raymond Williams

28. Whose unfinished writings are collected in the volumes titled Prison Notebooks?

1. M.K. Gandhi
2. Karl Marx
3. Antonio Gramsci
4. Louis Althusser

29. Which term denotes the view that, in spite of the connections between culture and economics, art has a degree of independence from economic forces?

1. Écriture
2. Indeterminacy
3. Foregrounding
4. Relative autonomy

30. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” is an essay by

1. Terry Eagleton
2. Louis Althusser
3. Raymond Williams
4. Karl Marx

31. ‘Overdetermination’ is a term that Althusser borrowed from ________.

1. Karl Marx
2. Sigmund Freud
3. Bertolt Brecht
4. Jacques Lacan

32. When was ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ published?

1. 1979
2. 1975
3. 1970
4. 1980

33. Who created the theory of interpellation?

1. Louis Althusser
2. Jacques Bouvois
3. Shane Montgomery
4. Jacob Traventhorn

34. Interpellation studies the effect of ______________ in shaping an individual’s actions.

1. Wealth
2. Poverty
3. Being abused
4. Being pigeonholed

35. Who advocated symptomatic reading of a text?

1. I. A. Richards
2. Terry Eagleton
3. Louis Althusser
4. Lacan

36. Name the modern Marxist philosopher who coined the term “Ideological State Apparatus”.

1. Terry Eagleton
2. Louis Althusser
3. Fredric Jameson
4. Edward Said

37. Name the philosopher who attempted to fuse structuralism with Marxism.

1. Louis Althusser
2. Antonio Gramsci
3. Roland Barthes
4. Terry Eagleton

38. For Marx and Reading Capital are the early works of:

1. Michel Foucault
2. Jacques Lacan
3. Roland Barthes
4. Louis Althusser

39. Who among the following says that “ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence”?

1. Fredric Jameson
2. Herbert Marcuse
3. Louis Althusser
4. Terry Eagleton

40. The term homology means a correspondence between two or more structures. Who among the following developed a theory of relations between literary works and social classes in terms of homologies?

1. Lucien Goldmann
2. Christopher Caudwell
3. Raymond Williams
4. Antonio Gramsci

41. The term homology means a correspondence between two or more structures. Who of the following developed a theory of relations between literary works and social classes in terms of homologies?

1. Raymond Williams
2. Christopher Caudwell
3. Antonio Gramsci
4. Lucien Goldmann

42. In Marxist literary criticism, which term is best defined as an outlook, values, tacit assumptions and half-realised allegiances having a major bearing on what is written by a member of a social class?

1. Expressionism
2. Ideology
3. Diachrony
4. Hermeneutics

43. Who argued in 1905 that literature must become an instrument of the Party and that “literature must become Party literature”?

1. Reis
2. Lenin
3. Tennyson
4. Keats

44. Which two writers were stigmatised as exemplars of “bourgeois decadence”?

1. Aesop and Aeschylus
2. Jane Austen and Stephenie Meyer
3. Proust and Joyce
4. Aristotle and Plato

45. Which group flourished in the 1920s until disbanded by the Party, even though their work was not strictly Marxist in spirit?

1. Russian Formalists
2. German Formalists
3. Irish Formalists
4. Korean Formalists

46. Marxist literary criticism stresses that

1. I and II
2. II and III
3. II and IV
4. I and III

47. “Late capitalism”, by which is meant accelerated technological development and the massive extension of intellectually qualified labour, was first popularised by

1. Terry Eagleton
2. Stanley Fish
3. Raymond Williams
4. Ernst Mandel

48. Find the odd one out among the critics below:

1. Northrop Frye
2. Louis Althusser
3. Raymond Williams
4. Georg Lukács

49. Brechtian epic theatre drew its distinction from the theories of ________.

1. Karl Marx
2. Plato
3. Friedrich Engels
4. Aristotle

50. Which one among the following statements is not true in the context of Marxist criticism?

1. It tries to locate a text in its historical context.
2. It argues that the author is autonomous, independent of history.
3. It makes ideological analysis.
4. It subscribes to dialectical materialism.

51. ____ tries to explain things without assuming the existence of a world, or of forces, beyond the natural world around us and the society we live in.

1. Feminism
2. New Criticism
3. Marxism
4. Ecocriticism

52. Leon Trotsky, Georg Lukács, Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser are all

1. Marxists
2. Russians
3. Novelists
4. Expressionists

53. Read the Assertion (A) and Reason (R) and choose the correct answer.

1. Both (A) and (R) are true and (R) is the correct explanation of (A)
2. Both (A) and (R) are true, but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A)
3. Assertion (A) is true but Reason (R) is false
4. Assertion (A) is false but Reason (R) is true

54. One of the following does not belong to revisionist Marxism:

1. Raymond Williams
2. Terry Eagleton
3. Fredric Jameson
4. Georg Lukács

55. Which one among the following statements is not true in the context of Marxist criticism?

1. It tries to locate a text in its historical context
2. It argues that the author is autonomous, independent of history
3. It makes ideological analysis
4. It subscribes to dialectical materialism