MCQs- Postmodernism
Q.1 Who is most closely associated with the concept of “incredulity toward metanarratives”?
1. Michel Foucault
2. Jean-François Lyotard
3. Jacques Derrida
4. Roland Barthes
Answer: 2
Explanation: In
The Postmodern Condition (1979), Lyotard defines the postmodern as incredulity
toward metanarratives — the grand, totalising stories (Progress, Enlightenment,
Marxism, etc.) that once legitimated knowledge and history.
Q.2 Which work is written by Jean-François Lyotard?
1. The Order of Things
2. The Postmodern Condition
3. Of Grammatology
4. Simulacra and Simulation
Answer: 2
Explanation:
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) is Lyotard’s most
influential book; the other titles belong to Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard
respectively.
Q.3 Who wrote Simulacra and Simulation?
1. Jean Baudrillard
2. Jacques Derrida
3. Fredric Jameson
4. Roland Barthes
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Baudrillard’s 1981 book analyses how signs and simulations have replaced
reality, producing what he calls hyperreality.
Q.4 The concept of “hyperreality” is particularly associated with:
1. Jean Baudrillard
2. Terry Eagleton
3. Jacques Lacan
4. Louis Althusser
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Baudrillard argues that in the postmodern age simulations become more real than
reality itself; the map precedes the territory.
Q.5 Who wrote Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism?
1. Fredric Jameson
2. Jean Baudrillard
3. Jean-François Lyotard
4. Ihab Hassan
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Jameson’s 1991 study links postmodern culture (pastiche, depthlessness, the
waning of affect) directly to the economic stage of late (multinational)
capitalism.
Q.6 Fredric Jameson views postmodernism primarily as:
1. A return to classicism
2. The cultural logic of late
capitalism
3. A form of romanticism
4. A rejection of popular culture
Answer: 2
Explanation:
For Jameson, postmodernism is not merely an aesthetic style but the cultural
expression of a new stage of capitalism.
Q.7 Which of the following is a major characteristic of postmodern literature?
1. Absolute certainty
2. Fragmentation
3. Strict realism
4. Unified meaning
Answer: 2
Explanation:
Postmodern texts characteristically break linear narrative, multiply voices and
perspectives, and refuse closure or totalising meaning.
Q.8 Metafiction is fiction that:
1. Rejects fiction completely
2. Draws attention to its own fictional
nature
3. Imitates only classical literature
4. Avoids narrative techniques
Answer: 2
Explanation:
Metafiction self-consciously exposes its own artificiality, reminding the
reader that it is a constructed text rather than a transparent window on
reality.
Q.9 Who is particularly associated with the term “metafiction”?
1. Patricia Waugh
2. Elaine Showalter
3. Julia Kristeva
4. Hélène Cixous
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Patricia Waugh’s Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction
(1984) remains the standard critical study of the form.
Q.10 Which novelist is strongly associated with postmodern fiction?
1. Thomas Pynchon
2. Alexander Pope
3. William Wordsworth
4. Samuel Richardson
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Pynchon’s novels (The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow) exemplify postmodern
techniques: paranoia, entropy, intertextuality and radical uncertainty.
Q.11 Which of the following is a major feature of postmodernism?
1. Grand narratives
2. Absolute truth
3. Plurality of meanings
4. Fixed identity
Answer: 3
Explanation:
Postmodern thought rejects single, stable meanings and celebrates the
proliferation of interpretations, voices and identities.
Q.12 Pastiche in postmodern literature means:
1. A complete rejection of earlier
styles
2. Imitation or mixing of existing
styles
3. A type of biography
4. A strict historical narrative
Answer: 2
Explanation:
Pastiche is the neutral or blank imitation and combination of earlier styles,
forms or genres, without the satirical edge of parody.
Q.13 Which term refers to the mixing of different genres or styles?
1. Hybridity
2. Catharsis
3. Mimesis
4. Defamiliarization
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Hybridity (or genre hybridity) describes the deliberate blending of high and
low forms, literary and popular discourses, that characterises much postmodern
writing.
Q.14 The term “intertextuality” was coined by:
1. Julia Kristeva
2. Elaine Showalter
3. Simone de Beauvoir
4. Judith Butler
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Kristeva introduced the term in the late 1960s, drawing on Bakhtin, to describe
the way every text is a mosaic of quotations from other texts.
Q.15 Intertextuality refers to:
1. The isolation of a text
2. The relationship of one text with
other texts
3. The rejection of language
4. The biography of an author
Answer: 2
Explanation: No
text exists in isolation; meaning arises from the network of relations a text
establishes with prior and contemporary texts.
Q.16 Who famously declared “The Death of the Author”?
1. Roland Barthes
2. Michel Foucault
3. Jacques Derrida
4. Jean Baudrillard
Answer: 1
Explanation: In
his 1967 essay Barthes argues that the author’s intention should not control
meaning; the text is a tissue of quotations activated by the reader.
Q.17 Who wrote “What Is an Author?”?
1. Michel Foucault
2. Roland Barthes
3. Jean Baudrillard
4. Ihab Hassan
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Foucault’s 1969 lecture examines the “author-function” — the institutional and
discursive role that the name of the author performs.
Q.18 The “author-function” is associated with:
1. Michel Foucault
2. Roland Barthes
3. Jacques Lacan
4. Paul de Man
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Foucault shows that the author is not a simple origin of meaning but a function
that classifies, limits and authenticates discourse.
Q.19 Who is most closely associated with deconstruction?
1. Jacques Derrida
2. Jean Baudrillard
3. Fredric Jameson
4. Lyotard
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Derrida developed deconstruction as a method of reading that exposes the
internal contradictions and hierarchical oppositions within texts.
Q.20 Which work is associated with Jacques Derrida?
1. Of Grammatology
2. The Postmodern Condition
3. Simulacra and Simulation
4. The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism
Answer: 1
Explanation: Of
Grammatology (1967) is Derrida’s foundational critique of Western logocentrism
and the privileging of speech over writing.
Q.21 The concept of différance is associated with:
1. Derrida
2. Foucault
3. Barthes
4. Lyotard
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Différance (with an ‘a’) names the endless deferral and difference that
constitute meaning; no sign ever fully coincides with itself.
Q.22 Who is associated with the concepts of power/knowledge and discourse?
1. Michel Foucault
2. Jacques Derrida
3. Roland Barthes
4. Jean Baudrillard
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Foucault argues that power and knowledge are mutually constitutive; discourses
produce the objects and subjects they claim merely to describe.
Q.23 According to Foucault, knowledge is closely related to:
1. Power
2. Nature only
3. Religion only
4. Aesthetic beauty
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Knowledge is never neutral; it is always implicated in relations of power that
shape what can be said and thought.
Q.24 Which Foucault work examines systems of knowledge?
1. The Order of Things
2. The Postmodern Condition
3. The Anxiety of Influence
4. The Well-Wrought Urn
Answer: 1
Explanation:
The Order of Things (1966) analyses successive historical “epistemes” — the
underlying rules that organise knowledge in different periods.
Q.25 Postmodernism generally questions:
1. Absolute truth and universal
explanations
2. Multiple perspectives
3. Cultural diversity
4. Fragmentation
Answer: 1
Explanation:
The postmodern stance is sceptical of any claim to final, universal, or
foundational truth.
Q.26 Which of the following is NOT generally associated with postmodernism?
1. Fragmentation
2. Irony
3. Plurality
4. Absolute certainty
Answer: 4
Explanation:
Absolute certainty is a hallmark of the very Enlightenment or modernist
projects that postmodernism critiques.
Q.27 Parody in postmodern literature often involves:
1. Imitating and transforming existing
forms
2. Rejecting all previous literature
3. Writing without language
4. Avoiding humour
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Postmodern parody reworks earlier texts or genres, often with critical or
playful intent, rather than simply discarding them.
Q.28 Which critic distinguishes modernism and postmodernism through a list of contrasting features in The Dismemberment of Orpheus?
1. Ihab Hassan
2. Fredric Jameson
3. Terry Eagleton
4. Christopher Norris
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Hassan’s book and later essays famously tabulate binary pairs
(hierarchy/anarchy, design/chance, presence/absence, etc.) to map the shift
from modernism to postmodernism.
Q.29 Who wrote The Dismemberment of Orpheus?
1. Ihab Hassan
2. Jean Baudrillard
3. Lyotard
4. Foucault
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Hassan’s 1971 study of the avant-garde is one of the earliest sustained
attempts to theorise postmodern literature.
Q.30 Which of the following is associated with Ihab Hassan?
1. Indeterminacy
2. Catharsis
3. Objective correlative
4. Negative capability
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Hassan lists “indeterminacy” (along with immanence, fragmentation, etc.) among
the defining tendencies of postmodernism.
Q.31 “Grand narratives” are also called:
1. Metanarratives
2. Microtexts
3. Discourses
4. Paratexts
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Lyotard uses the terms interchangeably for the large-scale legitimating stories
of modernity.
Q.32 Which novelist wrote The Crying of Lot 49?
1. Thomas Pynchon
2. Don DeLillo
3. John Barth
4. Kurt Vonnegut
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Pynchon’s 1966 novella is a classic of American postmodernism, organised around
conspiracy, entropy and the search for meaning that may not exist.
Q.33 Who wrote White Noise?
1. Don DeLillo
2. Thomas Pynchon
3. John Fowles
4. Salman Rushdie
Answer: 1
Explanation:
DeLillo’s 1985 novel explores media saturation, simulation, the fear of death
and the blending of high and low culture.
Q.34 Who wrote The French Lieutenant’s Woman?
1. John Fowles
2. John Barth
3. Thomas Pynchon
4. Don DeLillo
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Fowles’s 1969 novel is a key example of historiographic metafiction, offering
multiple endings and a self-conscious Victorian narrator.
Q.35 Which novel by John Barth is commonly associated with metafiction and postmodernism?
1. Lost in the Funhouse
2. Sons and Lovers
3. A Passage to India
4. The Rainbow
Answer: 1
Explanation:
The 1968 collection (especially the title story) is a landmark of American
metafiction, constantly drawing attention to its own narrative devices.
Q.36 Which writer is associated with the postmodern novel Midnight’s Children?
1. Salman Rushdie
2. V. S. Naipaul
3. Amitav Ghosh
4. R. K. Narayan
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Rushdie’s 1981 novel blends magical realism, national allegory and
self-reflexive narrative in a distinctly postmodern mode.
Q.37 Midnight’s Children is notable for its use of:
1. Magical realism and historiographic
play
2. Pure realism
3. Classical epic form only
4. Naturalism
Answer: 1
Explanation:
The novel rewrites the history of modern India through a narrator whose life is
fantastically intertwined with the nation’s, while constantly questioning the
reliability of both memory and history.
Q.38 The term “historiographic metafiction” is associated with:
1. Linda Hutcheon
2. Elaine Showalter
3. Julia Kristeva
4. Gayatri Spivak
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Hutcheon coined the term to describe novels that are both intensely
self-reflexive and yet also grounded in historical events and personages.
Q.39 Who wrote A Poetics of Postmodernism?
1. Linda Hutcheon
2. Patricia Waugh
3. Ihab Hassan
4. Fredric Jameson
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Hutcheon’s 1988 book is a major theoretical statement on postmodern fiction,
especially historiographic metafiction.
Q.40 Historiographic metafiction combines:
1. History and self-conscious fiction
2. Poetry and drama only
3. Myth and biography only
4. Science and mathematics
Answer: 1
Explanation: It
simultaneously asserts and problematises the status of historical knowledge,
showing history itself as a form of narrative construction.
Q.41 Which statement best describes postmodernism?
1. It accepts one universal truth.
2. It emphasizes plurality,
fragmentation, irony and uncertainty.
3. It completely rejects popular
culture.
4. It strictly follows traditional
literary forms.
Answer: 2
Explanation:
Postmodernism is characterised by scepticism toward fixed truths, delight in
plurality and irony, and the blurring of boundaries between high and popular
culture.
Q.42 Which one of the following pairs is NOT correctly matched?
1. Lyotard — Metanarrative
2. Baudrillard — Hyperreality
3. Foucault — Power/Knowledge
4. Jameson — Différance
Answer: 4
Explanation:
Différance belongs to Derrida; Jameson is associated with the cultural logic of
late capitalism and pastiche.
Q.43 Which of the following best explains Lyotard’s “incredulity toward metanarratives”?
1. Rejection of all forms of
storytelling
2. Rejection of universal explanations
of history and knowledge
3. Acceptance of traditional religious
narratives
4. Preference for realistic fiction
Answer: 2
Explanation:
Lyotard is not against stories as such, but against the large, legitimating
narratives that claim universal validity.
Q.44 A novelist presents several contradictory versions of the same historical event and refuses to identify one version as the absolute truth. This technique is most consistent with:
1. Classicism
2. Modernism
3. Postmodernism
4. New Criticism
Answer: 3
Explanation:
The refusal of a single authoritative version of history is a hallmark of
postmodern historiographic metafiction.
Q.45 A novel suddenly reminds the reader that it is a constructed fictional work. Which postmodern technique is being used?
1. Metafiction
2. Catharsis
3. Mimesis
4. Objective correlative
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Metafiction breaks the illusion of realism by exposing the text’s own
artificial status.
Q.46 Consider the following statements:
A.
Postmodernism questions the idea of a single, stable meaning.
B.
Postmodernism frequently employs irony and parody.
C.
Postmodernism necessarily rejects all forms of narrative.
Which of the
above is/are correct?
1. A only
2. A and B only
3. B and C only
4. A, B and C
Answer: 2
Explanation:
Postmodernism multiplies narratives rather than abolishing them; statement C is
false.
Q.47 Which sequence correctly represents the concepts and thinkers?
1. Lyotard—metanarrative;
Baudrillard—hyperreality; Derrida—différance
2. Lyotard—hyperreality;
Baudrillard—différance; Derrida—metanarrative
3. Derrida—hyperreality;
Foucault—différance; Lyotard—pastiche
4. Baudrillard—metanarrative;
Lyotard—différance; Derrida—hyperreality
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Each thinker is correctly paired with the concept for which he is most famous.
Q.48 Match the following:
Thinker |
Concept
A. Lyotard | i.
Hyperreality
B. Baudrillard
| ii. Metanarratives
C. Derrida |
iii. Différance
D. Foucault |
iv. Power/Knowledge
1. A-ii, B-i, C-iii, D-iv
2. A-i, B-ii, C-iv, D-iii
3. A-iii, B-iv, C-i, D-ii
4. A-iv, B-iii, C-ii, D-i
Answer: 1
Explanation:
The correct matching is Lyotard–metanarratives, Baudrillard–hyperreality,
Derrida–différance, Foucault–power/knowledge.
Q.49 Which statement most accurately distinguishes modernism from postmodernism?
1. Modernism celebrates certainty,
while postmodernism rejects literature.
2. Modernism often searches for order
amid fragmentation, whereas postmodernism frequently embraces fragmentation and
questions stable order.
3. Modernism uses prose, whereas
postmodernism uses poetry.
4. Modernism is historical, whereas
postmodernism is never concerned with history.
Answer: 2
Explanation:
Modernist works (Eliot, Joyce, Woolf) typically seek or lament a lost order;
postmodern works tend to accept, play with, or celebrate fragmentation itself.
Q.50 Which of the following combinations contains only postmodern/poststructuralist-associated concepts?
1. Hyperreality, metanarrative,
différance
2. Objective correlative, organic
unity, touchstone
3. Negative capability, fancy,
imagination
4. Catharsis, decorum, mimesis
Answer: 1
Explanation:
The concepts in option 1 are central to Baudrillard, Lyotard and Derrida; the
others belong to earlier critical traditions.
Q.51 According to Fredric Jameson, pastiche differs from parody in that pastiche is:
1. Always politically subversive
2. A blank or neutral imitation without
satirical intent
3. Restricted to high culture only
4. Identical to classical mimesis
Answer: 2
Explanation:
Jameson calls pastiche “blank parody” — stylistic imitation that has lost the
critical distance and satirical force of traditional parody.
Q.52 Baudrillard’s successive stages of the image (or orders of simulacra) culminate in a stage where the image:
1. Faithfully reflects a basic reality
2. Masks and denatures a basic reality
3. Masks the absence of a basic reality
4. Bears no relation to any reality
whatsoever (pure simulacrum)
Answer: 4
Explanation: In
the fourth order the image is a pure simulacrum that no longer stands in any
relation to a real referent.
Q.53 Which of the following is a characteristic feature listed by Ihab Hassan in his modernist/postmodernist schema?
1. Hierarchy / Anarchy
2. Design / Chance
3. Presence / Absence
4. All of the above
Answer: 4
Explanation:
Hassan’s famous tables pair modernist and postmodernist tendencies across
numerous axes, including hierarchy/anarchy, design/chance and presence/absence.
Q.54 Linda Hutcheon’s concept of “complicitous critique” refers to the way postmodern texts:
1. Completely escape ideology
2. Simultaneously participate in and
critique the systems they represent
3. Reject all historical reference
4. Aim only at formal purity
Answer: 2
Explanation:
Hutcheon argues that postmodern art is never purely outside the culture it
criticises; it is both implicated in and critical of the very systems it
represents.
MCQs- Postmodernism
Q.1 Who is most closely associated with the concept of “incredulity toward metanarratives”?
1. Michel Foucault
2. Jean-François Lyotard
3. Jacques Derrida
4. Roland Barthes
Answer: 2
Explanation: In
The Postmodern Condition (1979), Lyotard defines the postmodern as incredulity
toward metanarratives — the grand, totalising stories (Progress, Enlightenment,
Marxism, etc.) that once legitimated knowledge and history.
Q.2 Which work is written by Jean-François Lyotard?
1. The Order of Things
2. The Postmodern Condition
3. Of Grammatology
4. Simulacra and Simulation
Answer: 2
Explanation:
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1979) is Lyotard’s most
influential book; the other titles belong to Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard
respectively.
Q.3 Who wrote Simulacra and Simulation?
1. Jean Baudrillard
2. Jacques Derrida
3. Fredric Jameson
4. Roland Barthes
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Baudrillard’s 1981 book analyses how signs and simulations have replaced
reality, producing what he calls hyperreality.
Q.4 The concept of “hyperreality” is particularly associated with:
1. Jean Baudrillard
2. Terry Eagleton
3. Jacques Lacan
4. Louis Althusser
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Baudrillard argues that in the postmodern age simulations become more real than
reality itself; the map precedes the territory.
Q.5 Who wrote Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism?
1. Fredric Jameson
2. Jean Baudrillard
3. Jean-François Lyotard
4. Ihab Hassan
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Jameson’s 1991 study links postmodern culture (pastiche, depthlessness, the
waning of affect) directly to the economic stage of late (multinational)
capitalism.
Q.6 Fredric Jameson views postmodernism primarily as:
1. A return to classicism
2. The cultural logic of late
capitalism
3. A form of romanticism
4. A rejection of popular culture
Answer: 2
Explanation:
For Jameson, postmodernism is not merely an aesthetic style but the cultural
expression of a new stage of capitalism.
Q.7 Which of the following is a major characteristic of postmodern literature?
1. Absolute certainty
2. Fragmentation
3. Strict realism
4. Unified meaning
Answer: 2
Explanation:
Postmodern texts characteristically break linear narrative, multiply voices and
perspectives, and refuse closure or totalising meaning.
Q.8 Metafiction is fiction that:
1. Rejects fiction completely
2. Draws attention to its own fictional
nature
3. Imitates only classical literature
4. Avoids narrative techniques
Answer: 2
Explanation:
Metafiction self-consciously exposes its own artificiality, reminding the
reader that it is a constructed text rather than a transparent window on
reality.
Q.9 Who is particularly associated with the term “metafiction”?
1. Patricia Waugh
2. Elaine Showalter
3. Julia Kristeva
4. Hélène Cixous
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Patricia Waugh’s Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction
(1984) remains the standard critical study of the form.
Q.10 Which novelist is strongly associated with postmodern fiction?
1. Thomas Pynchon
2. Alexander Pope
3. William Wordsworth
4. Samuel Richardson
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Pynchon’s novels (The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow) exemplify postmodern
techniques: paranoia, entropy, intertextuality and radical uncertainty.
Q.11 Which of the following is a major feature of postmodernism?
1. Grand narratives
2. Absolute truth
3. Plurality of meanings
4. Fixed identity
Answer: 3
Explanation:
Postmodern thought rejects single, stable meanings and celebrates the
proliferation of interpretations, voices and identities.
Q.12 Pastiche in postmodern literature means:
1. A complete rejection of earlier
styles
2. Imitation or mixing of existing
styles
3. A type of biography
4. A strict historical narrative
Answer: 2
Explanation:
Pastiche is the neutral or blank imitation and combination of earlier styles,
forms or genres, without the satirical edge of parody.
Q.13 Which term refers to the mixing of different genres or styles?
1. Hybridity
2. Catharsis
3. Mimesis
4. Defamiliarization
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Hybridity (or genre hybridity) describes the deliberate blending of high and
low forms, literary and popular discourses, that characterises much postmodern
writing.
Q.14 The term “intertextuality” was coined by:
1. Julia Kristeva
2. Elaine Showalter
3. Simone de Beauvoir
4. Judith Butler
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Kristeva introduced the term in the late 1960s, drawing on Bakhtin, to describe
the way every text is a mosaic of quotations from other texts.
Q.15 Intertextuality refers to:
1. The isolation of a text
2. The relationship of one text with
other texts
3. The rejection of language
4. The biography of an author
Answer: 2
Explanation: No
text exists in isolation; meaning arises from the network of relations a text
establishes with prior and contemporary texts.
Q.16 Who famously declared “The Death of the Author”?
1. Roland Barthes
2. Michel Foucault
3. Jacques Derrida
4. Jean Baudrillard
Answer: 1
Explanation: In
his 1967 essay Barthes argues that the author’s intention should not control
meaning; the text is a tissue of quotations activated by the reader.
Q.17 Who wrote “What Is an Author?”?
1. Michel Foucault
2. Roland Barthes
3. Jean Baudrillard
4. Ihab Hassan
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Foucault’s 1969 lecture examines the “author-function” — the institutional and
discursive role that the name of the author performs.
Q.18 The “author-function” is associated with:
1. Michel Foucault
2. Roland Barthes
3. Jacques Lacan
4. Paul de Man
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Foucault shows that the author is not a simple origin of meaning but a function
that classifies, limits and authenticates discourse.
Q.19 Who is most closely associated with deconstruction?
1. Jacques Derrida
2. Jean Baudrillard
3. Fredric Jameson
4. Lyotard
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Derrida developed deconstruction as a method of reading that exposes the
internal contradictions and hierarchical oppositions within texts.
Q.20 Which work is associated with Jacques Derrida?
1. Of Grammatology
2. The Postmodern Condition
3. Simulacra and Simulation
4. The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism
Answer: 1
Explanation: Of
Grammatology (1967) is Derrida’s foundational critique of Western logocentrism
and the privileging of speech over writing.
Q.21 The concept of différance is associated with:
1. Derrida
2. Foucault
3. Barthes
4. Lyotard
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Différance (with an ‘a’) names the endless deferral and difference that
constitute meaning; no sign ever fully coincides with itself.
Q.22 Who is associated with the concepts of power/knowledge and discourse?
1. Michel Foucault
2. Jacques Derrida
3. Roland Barthes
4. Jean Baudrillard
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Foucault argues that power and knowledge are mutually constitutive; discourses
produce the objects and subjects they claim merely to describe.
Q.23 According to Foucault, knowledge is closely related to:
1. Power
2. Nature only
3. Religion only
4. Aesthetic beauty
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Knowledge is never neutral; it is always implicated in relations of power that
shape what can be said and thought.
Q.24 Which Foucault work examines systems of knowledge?
1. The Order of Things
2. The Postmodern Condition
3. The Anxiety of Influence
4. The Well-Wrought Urn
Answer: 1
Explanation:
The Order of Things (1966) analyses successive historical “epistemes” — the
underlying rules that organise knowledge in different periods.
Q.25 Postmodernism generally questions:
1. Absolute truth and universal
explanations
2. Multiple perspectives
3. Cultural diversity
4. Fragmentation
Answer: 1
Explanation:
The postmodern stance is sceptical of any claim to final, universal, or
foundational truth.
Q.26 Which of the following is NOT generally associated with postmodernism?
1. Fragmentation
2. Irony
3. Plurality
4. Absolute certainty
Answer: 4
Explanation:
Absolute certainty is a hallmark of the very Enlightenment or modernist
projects that postmodernism critiques.
Q.27 Parody in postmodern literature often involves:
1. Imitating and transforming existing
forms
2. Rejecting all previous literature
3. Writing without language
4. Avoiding humour
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Postmodern parody reworks earlier texts or genres, often with critical or
playful intent, rather than simply discarding them.
Q.28 Which critic distinguishes modernism and postmodernism through a list of contrasting features in The Dismemberment of Orpheus?
1. Ihab Hassan
2. Fredric Jameson
3. Terry Eagleton
4. Christopher Norris
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Hassan’s book and later essays famously tabulate binary pairs
(hierarchy/anarchy, design/chance, presence/absence, etc.) to map the shift
from modernism to postmodernism.
Q.29 Who wrote The Dismemberment of Orpheus?
1. Ihab Hassan
2. Jean Baudrillard
3. Lyotard
4. Foucault
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Hassan’s 1971 study of the avant-garde is one of the earliest sustained
attempts to theorise postmodern literature.
Q.30 Which of the following is associated with Ihab Hassan?
1. Indeterminacy
2. Catharsis
3. Objective correlative
4. Negative capability
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Hassan lists “indeterminacy” (along with immanence, fragmentation, etc.) among
the defining tendencies of postmodernism.
Q.31 “Grand narratives” are also called:
1. Metanarratives
2. Microtexts
3. Discourses
4. Paratexts
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Lyotard uses the terms interchangeably for the large-scale legitimating stories
of modernity.
Q.32 Which novelist wrote The Crying of Lot 49?
1. Thomas Pynchon
2. Don DeLillo
3. John Barth
4. Kurt Vonnegut
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Pynchon’s 1966 novella is a classic of American postmodernism, organised around
conspiracy, entropy and the search for meaning that may not exist.
Q.33 Who wrote White Noise?
1. Don DeLillo
2. Thomas Pynchon
3. John Fowles
4. Salman Rushdie
Answer: 1
Explanation:
DeLillo’s 1985 novel explores media saturation, simulation, the fear of death
and the blending of high and low culture.
Q.34 Who wrote The French Lieutenant’s Woman?
1. John Fowles
2. John Barth
3. Thomas Pynchon
4. Don DeLillo
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Fowles’s 1969 novel is a key example of historiographic metafiction, offering
multiple endings and a self-conscious Victorian narrator.
Q.35 Which novel by John Barth is commonly associated with metafiction and postmodernism?
1. Lost in the Funhouse
2. Sons and Lovers
3. A Passage to India
4. The Rainbow
Answer: 1
Explanation:
The 1968 collection (especially the title story) is a landmark of American
metafiction, constantly drawing attention to its own narrative devices.
Q.36 Which writer is associated with the postmodern novel Midnight’s Children?
1. Salman Rushdie
2. V. S. Naipaul
3. Amitav Ghosh
4. R. K. Narayan
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Rushdie’s 1981 novel blends magical realism, national allegory and
self-reflexive narrative in a distinctly postmodern mode.
Q.37 Midnight’s Children is notable for its use of:
1. Magical realism and historiographic
play
2. Pure realism
3. Classical epic form only
4. Naturalism
Answer: 1
Explanation:
The novel rewrites the history of modern India through a narrator whose life is
fantastically intertwined with the nation’s, while constantly questioning the
reliability of both memory and history.
Q.38 The term “historiographic metafiction” is associated with:
1. Linda Hutcheon
2. Elaine Showalter
3. Julia Kristeva
4. Gayatri Spivak
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Hutcheon coined the term to describe novels that are both intensely
self-reflexive and yet also grounded in historical events and personages.
Q.39 Who wrote A Poetics of Postmodernism?
1. Linda Hutcheon
2. Patricia Waugh
3. Ihab Hassan
4. Fredric Jameson
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Hutcheon’s 1988 book is a major theoretical statement on postmodern fiction,
especially historiographic metafiction.
Q.40 Historiographic metafiction combines:
1. History and self-conscious fiction
2. Poetry and drama only
3. Myth and biography only
4. Science and mathematics
Answer: 1
Explanation: It
simultaneously asserts and problematises the status of historical knowledge,
showing history itself as a form of narrative construction.
Q.41 Which statement best describes postmodernism?
1. It accepts one universal truth.
2. It emphasizes plurality,
fragmentation, irony and uncertainty.
3. It completely rejects popular
culture.
4. It strictly follows traditional
literary forms.
Answer: 2
Explanation:
Postmodernism is characterised by scepticism toward fixed truths, delight in
plurality and irony, and the blurring of boundaries between high and popular
culture.
Q.42 Which one of the following pairs is NOT correctly matched?
1. Lyotard — Metanarrative
2. Baudrillard — Hyperreality
3. Foucault — Power/Knowledge
4. Jameson — Différance
Answer: 4
Explanation:
Différance belongs to Derrida; Jameson is associated with the cultural logic of
late capitalism and pastiche.
Q.43 Which of the following best explains Lyotard’s “incredulity toward metanarratives”?
1. Rejection of all forms of
storytelling
2. Rejection of universal explanations
of history and knowledge
3. Acceptance of traditional religious
narratives
4. Preference for realistic fiction
Answer: 2
Explanation:
Lyotard is not against stories as such, but against the large, legitimating
narratives that claim universal validity.
Q.44 A novelist presents several contradictory versions of the same historical event and refuses to identify one version as the absolute truth. This technique is most consistent with:
1. Classicism
2. Modernism
3. Postmodernism
4. New Criticism
Answer: 3
Explanation:
The refusal of a single authoritative version of history is a hallmark of
postmodern historiographic metafiction.
Q.45 A novel suddenly reminds the reader that it is a constructed fictional work. Which postmodern technique is being used?
1. Metafiction
2. Catharsis
3. Mimesis
4. Objective correlative
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Metafiction breaks the illusion of realism by exposing the text’s own
artificial status.
Q.46 Consider the following statements:
A.
Postmodernism questions the idea of a single, stable meaning.
B.
Postmodernism frequently employs irony and parody.
C.
Postmodernism necessarily rejects all forms of narrative.
Which of the
above is/are correct?
1. A only
2. A and B only
3. B and C only
4. A, B and C
Answer: 2
Explanation:
Postmodernism multiplies narratives rather than abolishing them; statement C is
false.
Q.47 Which sequence correctly represents the concepts and thinkers?
1. Lyotard—metanarrative;
Baudrillard—hyperreality; Derrida—différance
2. Lyotard—hyperreality;
Baudrillard—différance; Derrida—metanarrative
3. Derrida—hyperreality;
Foucault—différance; Lyotard—pastiche
4. Baudrillard—metanarrative;
Lyotard—différance; Derrida—hyperreality
Answer: 1
Explanation:
Each thinker is correctly paired with the concept for which he is most famous.
Q.48 Match the following:
Thinker |
Concept
A. Lyotard | i.
Hyperreality
B. Baudrillard
| ii. Metanarratives
C. Derrida |
iii. Différance
D. Foucault |
iv. Power/Knowledge
1. A-ii, B-i, C-iii, D-iv
2. A-i, B-ii, C-iv, D-iii
3. A-iii, B-iv, C-i, D-ii
4. A-iv, B-iii, C-ii, D-i
Answer: 1
Explanation:
The correct matching is Lyotard–metanarratives, Baudrillard–hyperreality,
Derrida–différance, Foucault–power/knowledge.
Q.49 Which statement most accurately distinguishes modernism from postmodernism?
1. Modernism celebrates certainty,
while postmodernism rejects literature.
2. Modernism often searches for order
amid fragmentation, whereas postmodernism frequently embraces fragmentation and
questions stable order.
3. Modernism uses prose, whereas
postmodernism uses poetry.
4. Modernism is historical, whereas
postmodernism is never concerned with history.
Answer: 2
Explanation:
Modernist works (Eliot, Joyce, Woolf) typically seek or lament a lost order;
postmodern works tend to accept, play with, or celebrate fragmentation itself.
Q.50 Which of the following combinations contains only postmodern/poststructuralist-associated concepts?
1. Hyperreality, metanarrative,
différance
2. Objective correlative, organic
unity, touchstone
3. Negative capability, fancy,
imagination
4. Catharsis, decorum, mimesis
Answer: 1
Explanation:
The concepts in option 1 are central to Baudrillard, Lyotard and Derrida; the
others belong to earlier critical traditions.
Q.51 According to Fredric Jameson, pastiche differs from parody in that pastiche is:
1. Always politically subversive
2. A blank or neutral imitation without
satirical intent
3. Restricted to high culture only
4. Identical to classical mimesis
Answer: 2
Explanation:
Jameson calls pastiche “blank parody” — stylistic imitation that has lost the
critical distance and satirical force of traditional parody.
Q.52 Baudrillard’s successive stages of the image (or orders of simulacra) culminate in a stage where the image:
1. Faithfully reflects a basic reality
2. Masks and denatures a basic reality
3. Masks the absence of a basic reality
4. Bears no relation to any reality
whatsoever (pure simulacrum)
Answer: 4
Explanation: In
the fourth order the image is a pure simulacrum that no longer stands in any
relation to a real referent.
Q.53 Which of the following is a characteristic feature listed by Ihab Hassan in his modernist/postmodernist schema?
1. Hierarchy / Anarchy
2. Design / Chance
3. Presence / Absence
4. All of the above
Answer: 4
Explanation:
Hassan’s famous tables pair modernist and postmodernist tendencies across
numerous axes, including hierarchy/anarchy, design/chance and presence/absence.
Q.54 Linda Hutcheon’s concept of “complicitous critique” refers to the way postmodern texts:
1. Completely escape ideology
2. Simultaneously participate in and
critique the systems they represent
3. Reject all historical reference
4. Aim only at formal purity
Answer: 2
Explanation:
Hutcheon argues that postmodern art is never purely outside the culture it
criticises; it is both implicated in and critical of the very systems it
represents.