Unit 9: Post-WWII Literary Theory Mock Tests
Comprehensive topic-wise practice tests covering all major schools of contemporary literary theory with detailed solutions
"The linguistic sign unites not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound-image." - Ferdinand de Saussure
Key Concepts: Signifier/Signified, Syntagm/Paradigm, Cultural Codes, Structural Analysis
1. Identify binary oppositions
2. Reverse hierarchy
3. Displace through undecidability
4. Reveal text's self-subversion
Key Concepts: Différance, Logocentrism, Trace, Supplement
"The unconscious is structured like a language." - Jacques Lacan
Key Concepts: Mirror Stage, Symbolic/Imaginary/Real, The Gaze, Jouissance
Key Terms: Performativity, Phallogocentrism, Heteronormativity
"The Orient was almost a European invention." - Edward Said
Key Concepts: Orientalism, Hybridity, Subaltern, Mimicry
• History as narrative construction
• Power circulates through discourses
• Texts as cultural artifacts
• No separation of literature/history
Key Terms: Self-Fashioning, Thick Description, Cultural Poetics
"A literary work is not an object but a dynamic event." - Wolfgang Iser
Key Concepts: Implied Reader, Horizon of Expectations, Interpretive Communities
1. Dominant-hegemonic reading
2. Negotiated reading
3. Oppositional reading
Key Concepts: Encoding/Decoding, Hegemony, Subculture, Cultural Capital
"Simulation is no longer of a territory but precedes and generates it." - Baudrillard
Key Concepts: Simulacra, Metanarratives, Pastiche, Hyperreality
Key Terms: Posthumanism, Hypertext Theory, Dark Ecology, Anthropocene
