1000+ Literary Theory MCQs – Part 1: Russian Formalism

1. ‘Art as Technique’ is a critical essay published in 1917 by ________.

1. Michael Holquist
2. Viktor Shklovsky
3. Tzvetan Todorov
4. Roman Jakobson

2. Which Russian Formalist published the pioneering essay that Eagleton sees as marking the ‘beginnings of the transformation which has overtaken literary theory in this century’?

1. Alexander Pushkin
2. Viktor Shklovsky
3. Leo Tolstoy
4. Fyodor Dostoevsky

3. According to Viktor Shklovsky, which novel was ‘the most typical novel in world literature’ because it impedes its own story-line so that it hardly gets off the ground?

1. Animal Farm
2. History of the Rebellion
3. Tristram Shandy
4. Don Quixote

4. Viktor Shklovsky’s name is associated with

1. Russian Formalism
2. New Historicism
3. Reader-Response Theory
4. Postmodernism

5. Viktor Shklovsky was a member of:

1. Moscow School
2. New Critical School
3. Prague School
4. Russian Formalism

6. Who is the author of ‘Art as Technique’?

1. Viktor Shklovsky
2. Mikhail Bakhtin
3. Leo Tolstoy
4. Theodor Adorno

7. Formalism as a school of thought was officially suppressed by the Russian government because ________. Complete the sentence with the appropriate clause.

1. the Russian Formalists bitterly critiqued the economic system of the government
2. the Formalist school of thought idealised oligarchy as a mode of governance
3. it focused exclusively on the literariness of language while underplaying social and political contexts
4. none of the above

8. Which person is NOT included in the ranks of the Russian Formalists?

1. Viktor Shklovsky
2. Roman Jakobson
3. Heinrich Wölfflin
4. Boris Tomashevsky

9. When did the Russian Formalists emerge?

1. Before WWII
2. Before the Bolshevik Revolution
3. After WWI
4. During the Russian Revolution

10. Who silenced the Russian Formalists?

1. Bolsheviks
2. Socialists
3. Liberals
4. Stalinists

11. According to Eagleton, the Russian Formalists rejected what kind of doctrines that had influenced literary criticism before them?

1. Quasi-mystical Symbolist doctrines
2. Quasi-mystical fictional doctrines
3. Quasi-mystical religious doctrines
4. Quasi-mystical psychoanalytic doctrines

12. According to Eagleton, the Russian Formalists shifted their attention to the ‘material reality’ of what?

1. The critic
2. The text
3. The facts
4. The fiction

13. Why did the Russian Formalists NOT see a literary work as a vehicle for ideas, a reflection of reality or an incarnation of transcendental truth?

1. Because they saw language as potentially empowering the masses.
2. Because they saw language as a mode of speech for the wealthy.
3. Because they saw language as obtuse, vague and ephemeral.
4. Because they saw language as words and not objects or feelings.

14. Formalism is the application of what to the study of literature?

1. Economics
2. Sociology
3. Linguistics
4. Psychology

15. The Formalists were not out to define literature, but they were out to define what?

1. Literariness
2. Criticism
3. Inventiveness
4. Realism

16. In the formalistic school of criticism art is:

1. entertainment
2. style
3. matter
4. preaching

17. ‘Formal criticism’ relates to the structure of:

1. Content
2. Myths
3. Literary devices
4. Form

18. Which of the following theoretical movements claimed that “the device is the only hero of literature”?

1. Deconstruction
2. New Criticism
3. Phenomenology
4. Russian Formalism

19. Which two terms among the following are associated with formalist criticism?

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

20. There are four models of relating literature to history. Which of the following is associated with formalism?

1. Literary texts are universal and transcend history: the historical context of their production and reception has no bearing on the literary work, which is aesthetically autonomous, having its own laws, being a world unto itself.
2. The historical context of a literary work is integral to a proper understanding of it: the text is produced within a specific historical context but in its literariness it remains separate from that context.
3. Literary works can help us to understand the time in which they are set: realist texts in particular provide imaginative representations of specific historical moments, events or periods.
4. Literary texts are bound up with other discourses and rhetorical structures: they are part of a history that is still in the process of being written.

21. Who among the following is not associated with Russian Formalism?

1. Roman Jakobson
2. Viktor Shklovsky
3. Boris Eichenbaum
4. Georges Poulet

22. The discussions of the OPOJAZ group and the Moscow Linguistic Circle contributed to:

1. Modernism
2. Formalism
3. Marxism
4. Postmodernism

23. Key texts of Russian Formalism were translated into French in Théorie de la littérature (1965) by:

1. Viktor Shklovsky
2. Victor Erlich
3. Tzvetan Todorov
4. Yury Tynyanov

24. Who among the following has been credited by the Russian Formalists with laying the foundation of comparative literature?

1. Alexander Veselovsky
2. Viktor Shklovsky
3. Vladimir Propp
4. Roman Jakobson

25. According to the Russian critic Roman Jakobson, literature represents ‘organized ________ committed on ordinary ________.’

1. protest; speech
2. violence; people
3. religion; writing
4. violence; speech

26. “According to ________, language functions poetically when we transport the words related along the metaphoric or analogous axis on to the contiguous or metonymic axis.” Which option should be selected to fill in the blank?

1. Viktor Shklovsky
2. Roman Ingarden
3. Roman Jakobson
4. Ferdinand de Saussure

27. ‘Markedness’, a state of standing out as non-typical, was a formalist concept categorised by ____.

1. Mikhail Bakhtin
2. Roman Jakobson
3. Boris Eichenbaum
4. Vladimir Propp

28. “The just man justices.” What kind of foregrounding do you find in the above line?

1. Syntactic
2. Semantic
3. Collocation
4. None of the above