1000+ Literary Theory MCQs – Part 9: Michel Foucault: Discourse & Power

1. What does the word “panoptic” mean in the statement: “Michel Foucault’s pervasive image of the state is that of ‘panoptic’”?

1. All-hearing
2. All-mighty
3. All-seeing
4. All-knowing

2. The panopticon was a design for a circular prison conceived by the eighteenth-century utilitarian ________.

1. Jeremy Bentham
2. Anthony Burgess
3. Sigmund Freud
4. Ray Bradbury

3. Who wrote the following? “Discursive practices are not purely and simply modes of manufacture of discourse. They take shape in technical ensembles, in institutions, in behavioural schemes, in types of transmission and dissemination, in pedagogical forms that both impose and maintain them.”

1. Roland Barthes
2. Homi K. Bhabha
3. Michel Foucault
4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

4. Who wrote the essay ‘What Is an Author?’

1. Michel Foucault
2. Claude Lévi-Strauss
3. Roland Barthes
4. Jacques Derrida

5. In which publication does Foucault postulate three factors, taboo, madness and institutional ratification, as constituents of discourse formation?

1. ‘The History of Madness’
2. ‘The Birth of the Clinic’
3. ‘The Order of Discourse’
4. ‘The Archaeology of Knowledge’

6. Michel Foucault’s ‘What Is an Author?’ is a critique of the ________ tradition.

1. Structuralist
2. Phenomenological
3. Postmodernist
4. Psychoanalytic

7. Who was Michel Foucault?

1. A Russian doctor who loved literature
2. A French intellectual historian
3. A Spanish immigrant professor
4. A Swiss banker who knew poetry

8. In The History of Sexuality, what did Michel Foucault find troubling in the received account of sexuality?

1. Its inaccurate information
2. Its repressive delivery
3. Its focus on the female
4. Its graphic delivery

9. In The History of Sexuality, what was used as a blanket term to describe all aspects related to sexuality?

1. Sex
2. Evolution
3. Imagination
4. Procreation

10. According to Foucault, what form of communication had power over social ideals?

1. The newspaper
2. Letters
3. Literature
4. Online resources

11. To what types of topics did Foucault attempt to give historical relevance?

1. Punishment
2. Madness
3. Sex
4. All of these

12. Foucault warned the masses to be wary of _________.

1. Poets as prophets
2. Starving artists
3. Reading as a hobby
4. Words as gospel

13. One of the key terms in Michel Foucault’s work is discourse. This is best described as

1. the power of persuasion in all articulations.
2. conceptual frameworks which enable some mode of thought and deny or severely constrain certain others.
3. the selective language powerful people use.
4. the ability to suggest transcendental levels of meaning in an utterance.

14. Michel Foucault’s earlier “archaeological” study is found in

1. Power/Knowledge
2. Social Theory and Transgression
3. Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
4. The Birth of the Clinic

15. “Panopticism” is the title of a chapter in a well-known book by

1. Roman Jakobson
2. Jacques Lacan
3. Michel Foucault
4. Jacques Derrida

16. “Power circulates in all directions, to and from all social levels, at all times.” Who said this?

1. Michel Foucault
2. Edward Said
3. Jacques Derrida
4. Roland Barthes

17. According to Foucault, sexuality points to discourses about all the following EXCEPT

1. Medicine
2. Anthropology
3. Psychology
4. Criminology

18. Which of the following statements does not describe Michel Foucault’s position?

1. Where there is power, it is possible to find resistance.
2. Power operates through discourse.
3. There is a connection between power and knowledge.
4. In Foucault’s work sexuality is literally written on the body.

19. Foucault believes that the facts of history will protect us from

1. historicism
2. totalitarianism
3. deconstructionism
4. repeating mistakes

20. By which two of the following processes, according to Michel Foucault, does power operate?

1. A and C
2. B and C
3. B and D
4. A and D

21. Who among the following explored the shifting and contested relations of power, knowledge and the human body?

1. Louis Althusser
2. Clifford Geertz
3. Michel Foucault
4. Jacques Lacan

22. “Power circulates in all directions, to and from all social levels, at all times.” Who said this?

1. Michel Foucault
2. Edward Said
3. Jacques Derrida
4. Roland Barthes

23. “Panopticism” is the title of a chapter in a well-known book by

1. Roman Jakobson
2. Jacques Lacan
3. Jacques Derrida
4. Michel Foucault

24. Identify the book not written by Michel Foucault.

1. Discipline and Punish
2. The Genealogy of Knowledge
3. The Order of Things
4. Madness and Civilization

25. “It is about time that criticism and philosophy acknowledged the disappearance or the death of the author.” Which critic is credited with the statement?

1. Jacques Lacan
2. Harold Bloom
3. Michel Foucault
4. Jacques Derrida

26. Which is true, according to Foucault?

1. Society does not impact identity.
2. Entrapping assumptions are necessary.
3. Societal mechanisms are more important than identity.
4. Requirements precede identity.

27. Foucault discussed which of the following as being relevant to gender oppression at the hands of politics?

1. Hermaphrodites
2. Heterosexuals
3. Homosexuals
4. Asexuals

28. “The formation of the disciplinary society is connected with a number of broad historical processes.” Which, according to Foucault, is NOT a part of the process?

1. Economic
2. Mystic
3. Scientific
4. Juridico-political

29. Who used Jeremy Bentham’s concept of the ‘Panopticon’?

1. Virginia Woolf
2. Viktor Shklovsky
3. Michel Foucault
4. Frantz Fanon

30. Whom does Michel Foucault consider the founders of discursivity?

1. Claude Lévi-Strauss and Saussure
2. Hegel and Kant
3. Freud and Marx
4. Saussure and Derrida

31. Foucault’s monograph on the modern prison system is titled __________: The Birth of the Prison.

1. Discipline and Punish
2. Dread and Power
3. Distrust and Punish
4. Dungeon and Dudgeon

32. What does the term episteme signify?

1. History
2. Archive
3. Theology
4. Knowledge

33. Which of the following narrative cycles is referred to in Michel Foucault’s “What Is an Author?”

1. The Canterbury Tales
2. The Thousand and One Nights
3. The Decameron
4. Tuti Nameh

34. Who argues that the author is a function of discourse?

1. Roland Barthes
2. Wolfgang Iser
3. Michel Foucault
4. Edward Said

35. What is/are the factor(s), according to Foucault, that often limit(s) a discourse?

1. Taboo
2. Madness and Sanity
3. Institutional Ratification
4. All of the above

36. What is the term that Foucault introduces in his book The Order of Things which refers to the orderly “unconscious” structures of knowledge in a particular time and place?

1. Heterotopia
2. Episteme
3. Archive
4. Discursive formation

37. Who wrote that panopticism is a one-way power/knowledge relationship between those under surveillance and the watchers who could not be watched?

1. Jeremy Bentham
2. Michel Foucault
3. Erving Goffman
4. None of these

38. In his essay “What Is an Author?”, what position(s) on authorship does Michel Foucault take?

1. The names of authors serve a classificatory function
2. The author is not a source of infinite meaning
3. The author may not always exist
4. All of the above