UGC ENGLISH SOLVED PAPER JUNE 2008

Note : This paper contains fifty (50) multiple-choice questions, each question carrying two (2) marks. Attempt all of them.



1. Tennyson's poem about women's rights and women's sphere is :

(A) Maud

(B) In Memoriam

(C) Idylls of the King
(D) The Princess

Read the pom Princess by Tennyson

2. 'Hymn To Adversity' is a poem by :

(A) Thomas Gray
(B) Edward Gibbon
(C) Alexander Pope
(D) William Blake

Read Hymn To Adversity
3.The King James Bible was published in :

(A)1609
(B) 1610
(C)1611
(D) 1612


4.'IL Migilor Fabro' is the expression Eliot used for :

(A) W. B. Yeats
(B) Samuel Beckett
(C) W. H. Auden
(D) Ezra Pound

Eliot calls Ezra Pound IL Migilor Fabro which means the finer craftsman in his dedication of The Waste Land because of his brilliance as an editor.

5. 'The Figure a poem Makes' is an essay by :

(A) Henry James
(B) Sylvia Plath
(C) Robert Frost
(D) Wallace Stevens
Read the Essay The Figure a Poem Makes

6. ''Ripeness is all” occurs in :
(A) King Lear
(B) Hamlet
(C) Macbeth
(D) Julius Caeser


7. A. C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy was published in :

(A) 1903
(B) 1904
(C) 1905
(D) 1906
8. 'Topsy' appears in :

(A) Uncle Tom's Cabin
(B) History of the United States
(C) Walden
(D) Tom Sawyer

Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in 1852, the novel "helped lay the groundwork for the Civil War", according to Will Kaufman. Stowe, a Connecticut-born teacher at the Hartford Female Academy and an active abolitionist, featured the character of Uncle Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whom the stories of other characters revolve. The sentimental novel depicts the reality of slavery while also asserting that Christian love can overcome something as destructive as enslavement of fellow human beings.

9. A poem that captures the essence of a moment in a simple image is :

(A) Lyric
(B) Ballad
(C) Ode
(D) Haiku


10. Which of the following Shakespearean plays are in the correct chronological sequence ?

(A) The Merchant of Venice - Henry IV Part I - Romeo and Juliet - Richard II
(B) Richard II - Henry IV Part I - Romeo and Juliet - The Merchant of Venice
(C) Henry IV Part I - Romeo and Juliet - The Merchant of Venice - Richard II
(D) Romeo and Juliet -Richard II - Henry IV Part I - The Merchant of Venice

Shakespearean Plays a Timeline


11. The word 'nature' in the eighteenth century literature stands for :

(A) Nature of writing
(B) External nature
(C) Human nature
(D) The Universe


12. Who is given credit for first using the term“romantic?

(A) Friedrich Schlegel
(B) Kant
(C) Coleridge
(D) Schiller


13. Gudrun is a character in a novel by :

(A) James Joyce
(B) Virginia Woolf
(C) D. H. Lawrence
(D) E. M. Forster


14. July's People is a novel by :

(A) Margaret Atwood
(B) V. S. Naipul
(C) Wole Soyinka
(D) Nadine Gordimer


15. Heroic Couplet is a pair of :

(A) Rhyming iambic pentameter lines
(B) Unrhyming iambic pentameter lines
(C) Rhyming iambic hexameter
(D) Unrhyming iambic hexameter


16. 'Gestalt' theory of literature considers text as :

(A) a structure of metaphors
(B) a unified whole
(C) an experimentation in form
(D) construction of history


17. Margaret Laurence is a novelist from :

(A) Australia
(B) The U.S.A.
(C) Canada
(D) Britain
18.Sartor Resartus is a text by :

(A)Ruskin
(B) Arnold
(C) Carlyle
(D) Burke


19. Who of the following is not a university wit ?

(A)Webster
(B) Robert Greene
(C) Kyd
(D) Marlowe


20. Bosola is a character in a play by :

(A)Ben Jonson
(B) Webster
(C) Christopher Marlowe
(D) Thomas Middleton


21. 'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven'. This occurs in a poem by :

(A) William Wordsworth
(B) S. T. Coleridge
(C) Byron
(D) Shelley

Read the Poem here: The French Revolution

22. A Dance of the Forest is written by :

(A) Margaret Atwood
(B) Nadine Gordimer
(C) Chinua Achebe
(D) Wole Soyinka


23. The first Canadian poet is :

(A) Charles Sangster
(B) Oliver Goldsmith
(C) Charles Heavysege
(D) Alexander Machlachlan


24. Heroic quatrain is :

(A) a stanza in blank verse
(B) eight line stanza in iambic hexameter
(C) four line stanza in iambic pentameter
(D) six line stanza in iambic pentameter


25. 'Bildungsroman' translated literally means :

(A) Development novel
(B) Psychological novel
(C) Autobiographical novel
(D) Campus novel


26.A book that faithfully renders a young man's confused images of love and rejection is :

(A) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young man
(B) Lucky Jim
(C) Daisy Miller
(D) The brave New World


27. Victorian Age witnessed a clash between :

(A) faith and reason
(B) tradition and modernity
(C) oriental and occidental civilization
(D) romanticism and neo romanticism


28. “For gold in Physique is Cordial/Therefore, he loved gold in special” relates to Chaucer''s

(A) Friar
(B) Monk
(C) Doctor
(D) Pardoner


29. The historical novel began in ;

(A)Restoration Period
(B) Augustan Age
(C) Victorian Period
(D) Romantic Period


30. The term 'Campus novel' is associated with :

(A) Graham Green
(B) Kingsley Amis
(C) Margaret Drabble
 (D) William Golding


31. Which of the following author-book pair is correctly matched ?

(A) Hard Times - George Eliot
(B) Heroes and Hero Worship - Walter Patar
(C) Sourab and Rustom - Matthew Arnold
(D) Ethics of the Dust- Macaulay


32. The title of William Faulkner's The Sound and Fury is derived from a play by :

(A) William Shakespeare
(B) Christopher Marlow
(C) John Webster
(D) Ben Jonson


33. The new humanism school of philosophy and literary criticism was popular in America during :

(A)1920-1940
(B) 1910-1930
(C)1930-1940
(D)1900-1910

New Humanism, critical movement in the United States between 1910 and 1930, based on the literary and social theories of the English poet and critic Matthew Arnold, who sought to recapture the moral quality of past civilizations—the best that has been thought and said—in an age of industrialization, materialism, and relativism.

Reacting against the scientifically oriented philosophies of literary realism and naturalism, New Humanists refused to accept deterministic views of human nature. They argued that: (1) human beings are unique among nature’s creatures; (2) the essence of experience is fundamentally moral and ethical; and (3) the human will, although subject to genetic laws and shaped by the environment, is essentially free. With these points of contention, the New Humanists—Paul Elmer More, Irving Babbitt, Norman Foerster, and Robert Shafer, to name only a few—outlined an entire program and aesthetic to incorporate their beliefs. By the 1930s the New Humanists had come to be regarded as cultural elitists and advocates of social and aesthetic conservatism, and their influence became negligible.

34.Internal rhyme is :

(A) the basic rhythmic structure of a poem
(B) rhyming of two words in alternative lines
(C) rhyming of two or more words in the same line of poetry
(D) all the lines of a poem ending with the same line pattern

35. The macabre element in drama was introduced by :

(A) John Lyly
(B) Marlow
(C)Ben Jonson
(D)John Webster


36. The line “I am no Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be.......” appears in T. S. Eliot's

(A) Gerontion
(B) The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock
(C) Four Quartets
(D) The Waste-Land


37. 'Fancy' deals with :

(A) Fixities and definities
(B) Imagination and Reason
(C) Judgement and Memory
(D) Structure and Superstructure


38. Swift's Modest proposal is written in the form of a :

(A) Project in political economy Social Satire
(B) Political allegory
(C) Social Satire
(D) Old-Testament history


39. The main idea of Pope's The Dunciad was taken from :

(A) Absalom and Achitophel
(B) Mac-Flecknoe
(C) The Medal
(D) An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot


40. Which of the following is not a Browning's work ?

(A) Dramatic Lyrics Men and Women
(B) Dramatic Personae
(C) Men and Women
(D) The Palace of Art


41. The most obvious feature of Johnson's The Lives of the Poets is the equipoise between :

(A) Language and form
(B) Style and content
(C) Biography and criticism
(D) Myth and archetype


42. “The Kelson of creation is love”. The line occurs in Walt Whitman's :

(A) Paumonak
(B) Passage to India
(C) O Captain, My Captain
(D) Song of Myself

43. With whom was Dr. Johnson intimately associated in his personal life ?

(A) Boswell
(B) Dryden
(C) Alexander Pope
(D) Lord Bolingbroke


44. The early religious drama is associated with :

(A) Superstitions and beliefs
(B) Mysteries and histories
(C) Interludes and mysteries
(D) Miracles and morality


45. The Tale of Two Cities has :

(A) a sentimental buffoon with a moral purpose
(B) a courageous lady in pain
(C) an optimist on verge of collapse
(D) a romantic hero with a weakness


46. Sheridan's first play was :

(A) The Rivals
(B) School for Scandal
(C) St. Patrick's Day
(D) A Trip to Scarborough


47. Anti-sentimental comedy is a criticism of :

(A) loss of moral purpose
(B) excess of emotion
(C) excess of reason
(D) loss of human feelings


48. Which of the following novel-novelist pair is correctly matched ?

(A) Bhabani Bhattacharya - All About H. Hatter
(B) Nayantara Sahgal - Cry, the Peacock
(C) Bhagwandas Gidwani - A Bend in the Ganges
(D) Arun Joshi - The Apprentice


49. The Indian English poet who addressed the question ‘of time’ in his poetry is :

(A) Nissim Ezeikel
(B) R. Parthsarathy
(C) A.K. Ramanujan
(D) Gieve Patel


50. Symbolist movement was influenced by :

(A) Poetic theory of Edgar Allan Poe
(B) Stephane Mallarme's Poetry
(C) Prose of Emerson
(D) Ezra Pound's Cantos





 

UGC SOLVED PAPER II December 2008

Note : This paper contains fifty (50) multiple-choice questions, each question carrying two (2) marks. Attempt all of them.

1. The Victorian period refers to the reign of Queen Victoria of England during :

(A) 1830 - 1890

(B) 1837 - 1905

(C) 1837 - 1901
(D) 1850 – 1910


2. The Rambler appeared every :

(A) Tuesday and Saturday
(B) Sunday and Wednesday
(C) Friday and Monday
(D) Thursday and Monday

3. “Tottel's Miscellany” contained :

(A) 30 sonnets
(C) 50 sonnets
(B) 40 sonnets
(D) 60 sonnets


4.’Imagism' is associated with :

(A) T. S. Fliot
(C) E. E. Cummings
(B) D. H. Lawrence
(D) T. E. Hulme


5. The title Things Fall Apart is drawn from a poem by :

(A) W. B. Yeats
(B) Ted Hughes
(C) W. H. Auden
(D) Robert Lowell

 'Things Fall Apart' is one of the most widely read African novels ever published. It is written by one of Nigeria's leading novelists Chinua Achebe, published in 1958.


6. 'Formal Criticism' relates to the structure of :

(A) Literary devices
(B) Myths
(C) Content
(D) Form

7. A 'Foot' in prosody is a basic unit of :

(A) rhyme
(B) length
(C) rhythmic measurement
(D) height


8. Who of the following is known for aphoristic prose style ?

(A) William Hazlitt
(B) Francis Bacon
(C) John Ruskin
(D) G. K. Chesterton

9. The confessions of an English Opium Eater was written by :

(A) William Hazlitt
(B) S. T. Coleridge
(C) Landor
(D) De Quincey


10. Ireland emerges as the most important metaphor in :

(A) Seamus Heaney
(B) Elizabeth Jennigs
(C) Arnold Wesker
(D) Edward Albee

11. Which of the following Shakespearean plays is in the correct chronological order ?

(A) King Lear, Hamlet, Much Ado..., Troilus and Cressida
(B) Much Ado..., Hamlet, King Lear, Troilus and Cressida
(C) Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, Hamlet, Much Ado...
(D) Hamlet, Much Ado..., King Lear, Troilus and Cressida

Much Ado about Nothing - 1600
Hamlet -                             1603
King Lear -                        1608
Troilus and Cressida -        1609


12. The major contribution of the Restoration period is in the field of :

(A) Philosophical writings
(B) Poetry
(C) Drama
(D) Letters


13. The correct chronological order of the following poets is :

(A) Byron, Shelley, Keats, Walter Scott
(B) Shelley, Walter Scott, Keats, Byron
(C) Keats, Byron, Walter Scott, Shelley
(D) Walter Scott, Byron, Shelley, Keats

Walter Scott - 1771-1832,
Byron -           1788-1824,
Shelley -          1792-1822,
Keats -            1795-1821.

14. Where Angels Fear to Tread is a novel by :

(A) Virginia Woolf
(B) E. M. Forster
(C) D. H. Lawrence
(D) James Joyce


15. The plays of Edward Albee deal with :

(A) problems of middle-class
(B) hypocracy of aristocracy
(C) mechanizations of politics
(D) simplicity of lower-class


16. Heptameter consists of :

(A) five metrical feet
(B) six metrical feet
(C) seven metrical feet
(D) eight metrical feet


17. In formalistic school of criticism art is :

(A) entertainment
(B) preaching
(C) matter
(D) style


18. The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner is a novel by :

(A) Alan Sillitoe
(B) Paul Scott
(C) Peter Porter
(D) Muriel Spark


19. 'Rugby Chapel' is a poem by Matthew Arnold in the memory of his :

(A) mother
(B) brother
(C) father
(D) sister


20. The earliest woman novelist of significance in the 18th century is :

(A)Mary Edgeworth
(B) Aphra Behn
(C) Mary Russell
(D) Mrs Gaskell


21. 'Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight' is a line that occurs in :

(A) Dr Faustus
(B) Hamlet
(C) Macbeth
(D) The Spanish Tragedy


22. Pope's 'Essay on Man' can best be read as a poem of :

(A) classical understanding of nature
(B) anti-romantic view of life
(C) sociological estimate of man
(D) philosophical apprehension of life

23. The term 'Victorian' evokes the attitudes of :

(A) philistinism
(B) moral earnestness
(C) licentiousness
(D) transcendentalism

24. Larry slate is a character in :

(A) Desire Under the Elms
(B) The Emperor Jones
(C) The Iceman Cometh
(D) Hairy Ape
The Iceman Cometh is a play by Eugene O'Neill

25. 'Iambus' is a metrical foot consisting of :

(A) two syllables
(B) three syllables
(C) four syllables
(D) one syllable

26. The lines ''Not that he wished is greatness to create / For politicians neither love nor hate,'' occur in :

(A) The Rape of the Lock
(B) Abslam and Achitophel
(C) Mac Flecknoe
(D) Essay on man


27. 11,396 definitions of romanticism were given by :

(A) Friedrich Schlegel
(B) Victor Hugo
(C) Edger Allan Poe
(D) F. L. Lucas


28. The term 'a stream of consciousness' is derived from the writing of :

(A) Mary Sinclair
(B) Dorothy Richardson
(C) William James
(D) Gertrude Stein

29. Sean O' Casey's Juno and the Paycock is :

(A) a romantic comedy
(B) a historical tragedy
(C) a mythical reconstruction
(D) a tragi-comedy

30. The 'Reader-Response Theory' implies that :

(A) there is no one correct meaning of the text
(B) the readers of an age construct the meaning
(C) beliefs determine meaning
(D) a style is the hallmark of the text


31. Which of the following author-book pair is correctly matched ?

(A) Walter Pater - Unto This Last
(B) Browning - The Ring and the Book
(C) M. Arnold - Idylls of the King
(D) Thackray - Bleak House


32. 'Myth Criticism' focuses on :

(A) a study of myths and mythology
(B) archetypes of spiritual experience
(C) recurrence of archetypal patterns
(D) the confluence of different traditions


33. The phrase disassociation of sensibility was first used by :

(A) Philip Sydney
(B) T. S. Eliot
(C) John Dryden
(D) Mathew Arnold


34. An Idyll is usually a poem about a :

(A) picturesque city life
(B) panoramic view of nature
(C) picture of industrial society
(D) picturesque country life


35. 'The Lost Generation' refers to the generation that came to maturity in the :

(A) 1920s
(B) 1930s
(C) 1910s
(D) 1940s

36. The French Revolution had a significant impact on :

(A) Victorian Literature
(B) Romantic Literature
(C) Neo-classic Literature
(D) Modern Literature


37. In which poem does the following line appear ? ''Our birth is but a sleep and aforgetting.'' :

(A) “Michael”
(B) “Immortality Ode”
(C) “Rejection : An Ode”
(D) “Tintern Abbey”

Read the Poem Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

38. Tale of a Tub is about :

(A) Warring political factions
(B) Struggling lower-class people
(C) Controversial philosophical documents
(D)Contemning religious parties

39. Congreve's The way of the world ends with :

(A) a dance party
(B) punishment of Lady Wishfort
(C) sending of Mr Fainall to prison
(D)reconciliation of Petulant Whitwood

40. On seeing whom does Miranda exclaim, “O, father, surely that is a spirit. Lord! How  it looks about ?”

(A) Caliban
(B) Ferdinand
(C) Alonso
(D) Stephano


41. Secular influences on the early English drama were :

(A) political squabbles, religious sermons and social customs
(B) rural politicking, hypocracy of the elite and falsity of aristocracy
(C) village festivals, folk plays and minstrels
(D) middle-class life, moral beliefs and uprising of the subaltans

42. John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress was written while he was :

(A) in prison
(B) on a pilgrimage
(C) on a social mission
(D) in a church

Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim's Progress while he was in Bedford Jail.
43. In Juvenalian satire the speaker is :

(A) a political orator
(B) a propagandist
(C) a social revolutionary
(D) a serious moralist

The speaker who is a serious moralist uses a dignified and public style of utterance to decry modes of vice and error.

44. Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice most clearly shows the influence of :

(A) Fielding Smollett
(B) Richardson
(C) Smollett
(D) Sterne


45.The most important of the ‘evolutionists’ during the Victorian period was :

(A) Erasmus Darwin
(B) Robert Chambers
(C) Charles Darwin
(D) Alfred Russell Wallace

46. A philosophical attitude pervading much of modern literature is :

(A) Absurdism
(B) Dadaism
(C) Imagism
(D) Surrealism


47. The term 'magic realism' was first introduced by :

(A) Hannah Arendt
(B) Franz Roh
(C) Jean Arp
(D) Peter Behrens


48. The Indian English novelist who, for the first time, addressed the question of language and indigenous experience was :

(A) Mulk Raj Anand
(B) R K Narayan
(C) Arun Joshi
(D) Raja Rao


49. G. V. Desani's All About H. Hatterr is written in the :

(A) stream-of- consciousness mode
(B) first person narrative mode
(C) picaresque mode
(D) naturalistic mode


50. The rhyme scheme of the Shakespearean sonnet is :

(A) abab, cdcd, efef, gg
(B) abba, cddc, effe, gg
(C) abab, cdcd, efef, gh
(D) aabb, ccdd, eeff, gg

Read a sonnet by Shakespeare



http://www.classroomthoughts.com/

UGC NET ENGLISH PAPER II SOLVED 2009 JUNE

Note :This paper contains fifty (50) multiple-choice questions, each question carrying two (2) marks. Attempt all the questions.


1.In a 1817 review of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, Francis Jeffrey coined the term 'Lake School of Poets' grouping...

(A) Wordsworth, Coleridge and Crabbe

(B) Wordsworth, Coleridge and Byron

(C) Wordsworth, Coleridge and Hazlitt
(D) Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey

The Lake Poets are a group of English poets who all lived in the Lake District of England at the turn of the nineteenth century. They are considered part of the Romantic Movement. The three main figures of what has become known as the Lakes School are William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey.

2.'I am the enemy you killed, my friend/I knew you in this dark...' The above lines are taken from...

(A) “The Soldier”
(B) “Dulce et Decorum Est”
(C) “To His Dead Body”
(D) “Strange Meeting”

Read the poem Strange Meeting by Wilfred Oven.


3. Below are two sets of texts one of which has inspired the other. Match the text with its inspiration :

(i) Coral Island                                   (ii) The Odyssey
(iii) The Mahabharat                           (iv) Jane Eyre
(v) The Great Indian Novel                 (vi) Wide Sargasso Sea
(vii) Omeroos                                     (viii) Lord of the Flies

(A) (i) - (v), (ii) - (vii), (iii) - (viii), (iv) - (vi)
(B) (iv) - (vii), (iii) – (vi), (i) - (viii), (ii) - (v)
(C) (iii) - (v), (iv) - (vi), (i) - (vii), (ii) - (viii)
(D) (i) - (viii), (ii) - (vii), (iii) - (v), (iv) - (vi)

Jean Rhys' late, literary masterpiece "Wide Sargasso Sea" was inspired by Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and is set in the lush, beguiling landscape of Jamaica in the 1830s. Born into an oppressive, colonialist society, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent sensuality and beauty. After their marriage the rumours begin, poisoning her husband against her. Caught between his demands and her own precarious sense of belonging, Antoinette is driven towards madness.

An enduringly popular classic of children’s fiction, The Coral Island tells the story of three boys stranded on a seemingly idyllic desert island. Thoughtful Ralph, clever, brave Jack and mischievous Peterkin soon find, however, that their new home has more than a few surprises in store! Wayne Forester’s energetic reading brings this classic adventure vividly to life. The Coral Island inspired a whole genre of adventure literature, influencing Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

The Great Indian Novel, as author Dr. Shashi Tharoor has mentioned, takes its title not from the author's estimate of its contents but in deference to its primary source of inspiration, the ancient epic the Mahabharata. In Sanskrit, Maha means great and Bharata means India.

Omeros is a 1990 epic poem by Nobel Prize-winning author Derek Walcott The epic is set on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. Although its name is Omeros (Homer in Greek) it has just a minor touch of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The narrative of Omeros is multilayered. Walcott focuses on no single character; rather, many critics have taken the "hero" of Omeros to be the island of St. Lucia itself. The narrative draws heavily on the legacy of the Homeric epics; Book One even opens with an invocation of the Greek poet, who is likened to the blind character, Seven Seas. However, while many characters within the epic derive their appellations from Homeric characters, this is the only absolute correlation; the themes are Homeric in inspiration, but the story does not imitatively follow the plot of either the Iliad or the Odyssey.

4. “His life was gentle and the elements
So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world, 'This was a man !'”
Who is the speaker, and about whom is this spoken ?

(A) Enobarbus on Antony
(B) Brutus on Caesar
(C) Cleopatra on Antony
(D) Marc Antony on Brutus

Julius Caesar Act V. Scene V


Marc ANTONY


This was the noblest Roman of them all:

All the conspirators save only he

Did that they did in envy of great Caesar;

He only, in a general honest thought

And common good to all, made one of them.

His life was gentle, and the elements

So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up

And say to all the world 'This was a man!'


5. “When my love swears that she is made of truth/I do believe her, though I know she lies”. The author of these lines is...

(A) Philip Sidney
(B) Edmund Spenser
(C) Christopher Marlowe
(D) William Shakespeare

Read Sonnet 138 by Shakespeare

6. The poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge was notably influenced by...

(A) The Napoleonic Wars
(B) The Glorious Revolution
(C) The French Revolution
(D) Poor Laws

7. “Great wits are sure to madness near allied And thin partitions do their bounds divide”. The above lines appear in...

(A) Mac Flecknoe
(B) Absalom and Achitophel
(C) Essay on man
(D) Alexander’s Feast

8. Who among the following developed the term strategic essentialism ?

(A) Edward Said
(B) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
(C) Homi Bhabha
(D) Aijaz Ahmed

Strategic essentialism, a major concept in postcolonial theory was introduced by the Indian literary critic and theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. It refers to a strategy that nationalities, ethnic groups or minority groups can use to present themselves. While strong differences may exist between members of these groups, and amongst themselves they engage in continuous debates, it is sometimes advantageous for them to temporarily 'essentialize' themselves and bring forward their group identity in a simplified way to achieve certain goals.

9. David Malouf's An Imaginary Life is a retelling of the story of :

(A) Aristotle
(B) Juvenal
(C) Ovid
(D) Horace

10. Jabberwocky is a character in....

(A) The Importance of Being Earnest
(B) Fra Lippo Lippi
(C) Through the Looking Glass
(D) Goblin Market



11. Which of the following statements is the most accurate regarding Edward Said's thesis in Orientalism ?

(i) The Europeans used the East dialectically to describe their self-image as irrational and primitive.
(ii) The Oriental people used the West dialectically to define their self-image as irrational and primitive.
(iii) The Europeans used the East oppositionally to define their self-image as rational and modern.
(iv) The Oriental people used the West oppositionally to define their self-image as rational and modern.

(A) (iii)
(B) (iv)
(C) (i) and (iv)
(D) (ii) and (iii)

12.Assertion (AST) : Literary and historical periodization often has nothing to do with the lifetime of writers. Thus we see two writers born in the same year belonging to two separate periods.

Reasoning/ (R) : Thomas Carlyle and John Keats were born in 1795. In standard literary histories, Example: Keats is a Romantic and Carlyle, a Victorian.

(A) (AST) and (R) are correct
(B) (AST) is correct; (R) is incorrect
(C) (AST) and (R) are incorrect
(D) (R) does not follow from (AST)

13. Everyman is...

(A) a medieval play based on an episode from the Bible
(B) a medieval morality play
(C) a Tudor interlude
(D) a miracle play

14. Which of the following sets would you call the poets of the Movement ?

(A) Elizabeth Jennings, Philip Larkin, John Wain
(B) W.H. Auden, Cecil Day Lewis, Stephen Spender
(C) T.S. Eliot, Richard Aldington, Ezra Pound
(D) Alan Brownjohn, C.H. Sisson, Anthony Thwaite

15.Doris Lessing’s interest in __________ is widely recognized :

(A) Hinduism
(B) Sufism
(C)Zen
(D)Judaism

16. Periphrasis, which is a roundabout way of speech/writing, is also known as...

(A) synecdoche
(B) allusion
(C) understatement
(D) circumlocution

17. Arrange the following in chronological order...

(I) The death of Shakespeare
(ii) Accession of James I to the English throne
(iii) Caxton and the printing press
(iv) The Norman Conquest of England

(A) (iv) (iii) (ii) (i)
(B) (iii) (iv) (ii) (i)
(C) (iii) (iv) (I) (ii)
(D) (iv) (iii) (I) (ii)

Norman conquest 1066
Caxton and the printing press 1476
Accession of James I to the English throne 1603
The death of Shakespeare 1616

18. The Muse of History is a classic postcolonial essay by :

(A) Ngugi wa Thiongo
(B) Chinua Achebe
(C) Wilson Harris
(D) Derek Walcott

19. “Do I contradict myself ? Very well then, I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” The above lines are from...

(A) Walt Whitman
(B) Edgar Allan Poe
(C) Ralph Waldo Emerson
(D) John Greenleaf Whittier

Read Song of Myself by Walt Whitman.
20. Verses on the Death of Dr Swift was written by...

(A) Jonathan Swift
(B) Alexander Pope
(C) Samuel Johnson
(D) James Boswell

21. Match the following elegies with the persons for whom they were written:

(i) Lycidas                        (ii)Arthur Hugh Clough
(iii)Adonais                       (iv) A.H. Hallam
(v) In Memoriam              (vi) Edward King
(vii) Thyrsis                      (viii) Keats

(A) (i) - (vi); (iii) - (iv); (vii) - (ii); (v) - (vi)
(B) (iii) - (viii); (i) - (iv); (iii) - (ii);(v) - (ii)
(C) (i) - (vi); (iii) - (viii); (v) - (iv); (vii) - (ii)
(D) (v) - (vi); (i) - (viii); (iii) - (ii); (vii) – (iv)

"Lycidas" is a poem by John Milton, written in 1637 as a pastoral elegy, dedicated to the memory of Edward King, a college mate of Milton's at Cambridge who drowned when his ship sank in the Irish Sea off the coast of Wales in August 1637.

“Adonaïs”: A pastoral elegy on the Death of John Keats written by Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1821, and widely regarded as one of Shelley's best and most well-known works

“In Memoriam” is a poem by the English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, completed in 1849. It is a requiem for the poet's Cambridge friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died suddenly of a cerebral haemorrhage in Vienna in 1833.

Thyrsis is the title of a poem written by Matthew Arnold in December 1865 to commemorate his friend, the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, who had died in November 1861 aged only 42.

22. Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison is a series of reflections on:

(A) Jazz music
(B) Disability sports
(C) Whiteness and the literary imagination
(D) Black American folklore

23. “He's not the brightest man in the world” is an example of:

(A) Chiasmus
(B) Hyperbole
(C) Litotes
(D) Simile

24. The term 'horizon of expectations' is associated with...

(A) Wolfgang Iser
(B) Stanley Fish
(C) Harold Bloom
(D) H.R. Jauss

25. The following writers have something in common : What is it ?

Mary Seacole                     J.A. Froude
Mary Kingsley                   Anthony Trollope

(I) They are all victorians
(ii) They are all writers of children's fiction
(iii) They are all members of one literary guild
(iv) They are all travel writers

(A) (i) and (ii)
(B) (iii) and (iv)
(C) ii) and (iv)
D) (i) and (iv)

26. The immediate source of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is...

(A) A French narrative
(B) A Dutch narrative
(C) A German narrative
(D) None of the above

Faustus is a timeless myth pointing directly at the universal truth inherent to our misguided and blasphemous penchant for an ultimate sort of knowledge and power. The idea of an individual selling his or her soul to the devil for knowledge is an old motif in Christian folklore, one that had become attached to the historical persona of Johannes Faustus, a disreputable astrologer who lived in Germany sometime in the early 1500s. The immediate source of Marlowe's play seems to be the anonymous German work Historia von D. Iohan Fausten of 1587, which was translated into English in 1592, and from which Marlowe lifted the bulk of the plot for his drama.

27. Who among the following were associated with the Irish Dramatic Movement ?

(A) Lady Gregory, W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge
(B) Jonathan Swift, R.B. Sheridan, G.B. Shaw
(C) W.B. Yeats, J.M. Synge, G.B. Shaw
(D) W.B. Yeats, Patrick J. Kavanagh, Seamus Heaney

28. The term diaspora was originally applied to the following ethnic group :

(A) Jews
(B) Muslims
(C) Hindus
(D) French Canadians

29. Who among the following is NOT a 'University Wit' ?

(A) Christopher Marlowe
(B) George Peele
(C) Robert Greene
(D) Ben Jonson

30. When a person has a wooden leg, we are apt to say, 'He has a wooden leg'. Now this wooden leg is...

(i) literal
(ii) metaphorical
(iii) ambiguous
(iv) neither literal nor metaphorical
(A) (i) and (ii) are correct
(B) (i) is correct
(C) (ii) is correct
(D) (iii) and (iv) are correct

Phrase: Wooden leg- It comes from the time of the old sailors and pirates where an infamous one had a wooden leg and could drink his rum like no other. Hence the term, wooden leg, is still used for someone who drinks a lot.

31. Prosody studies:

(A) Line endings
(B) Meanings of words
(C) Patterns of prose
(D) Metrics

Prosody is the study of poetic metre and of the art of versification, including rhyme, stanzaic forms, and the quantity and stress of syllables.

32. Which of the following is a major Jacobean play?
(A) Everyman
(B) Gorboduc
(C) Romeo and Juliet
(D) The Duchess of Malfi

33. Understanding Poetry used to be a classic textbook that encapsulates the principles of ...

(A) New Historicism
(B) New Aristotelianism
(C) New Criticism
(D) The New Left

Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks and Robert \Pennwarren

34. What century is variously called The Age of Enlightenment, The Age of Sensibility, The Augustan Age and The Age of Prose and Reason?

(A) sixteenth century
(B) seventeenth century
(C) eighteenth century
(D) nineteenth century

35. What is common to the following poems ?

Wordsworth's 'The Recluse'
Shelley's 'The Triumph of Life'
Byron's 'Don Juan'
Keats' 'Hyperion'

(A) They are all elegies
(B) They are all unfinished poems
(C) They are all divided into cantos
(D) They are women-centred poems

36. Who among the following called the novel ‘the bright book of life’ ?

(A) D.H. Lawrence
(B) James Joyce
(C) Virginia Woolf
(D) Aldous Huxley

37. “Ripeness is all'' is a line from...

(A) Hamlet
(B) King Lear
(C) Othello
(D) Macbeth

38. U.R. Ananthamurthy's Samskara was translated by...

(A) Himself
(B) Girish Karnad
(C) H.S. Shivaprakash
(D) A.K. Ramanujan

39. Abel Whittle is a character in:

(A) The Return of the Native
(B) The Mayor of Casterbridge
(C) Far from the Madding Crowd
(D) Tess of the D'Urbervilles

40. In which eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender does Spenser praise Queen Elizabeth I ?

(A)January
(B) April
(C) August
(D)November

41. Which of the following is NOT the opening of the well-known Romantic poem?

(A) My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/ My sense
(B) Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
(C) Margaret, are you grieving/Over Golden grove unleaving?
(D) The world is too much with us

Read the Poem by Hopkins..


42.Politics and the English Language is an essay by :

(A) F.R. Leavis
(B) Terry Eagleton
(C) George Orwell
(D) Raymond Williams

43. 'The mind-forged manacles' is phrase from :

(A) ''London''
(B) ''Eternity''
(C) “A Poison Tree”
(D) “I Asked a Thief”

Read the poem "London" by William Blake.

44. “He is not fully recognized at home; he is not recognized at all abroad. Yet I firmly believe that the poetical performance of __________ is, after that of Shakespeare and Milton, undoubtedly most considerable in our language.” To whom does Matthew Arnold refer in the above statement ?

(A) Edmund Spenser
(B) John Keats
(C) William Wordsworth
(D) S.T. Coleridge

45. The Globe Theatre opened in :

(A) 1585
(B) 1593
(C) 1599
(D) 1603


Read the following passage carefully, and select the right answers from the alternatives given below in the questions 46 to 50 :

      We need to begin by casting doubt on the legitimacy of the notion of literature. The mere fact that the word exists, or that an academic institution has been built around it, does not mean that the thing itself is self-evident.

       Reasons perfectly empirical ones, to begin with are not hard to find. The full history of the word literature and its equivalents in all languages and all eras has yet to be written, but even a perfunctory look at the question makes it clear that the term has not been around forever. In the European languages, the word literature in its current sense is quite recent: it dates back just barely to the nineteenth century. Might we be dealing with a historical phenomenon rather than an 'eternal' one? Moreover, many languages (many African languages, for example) have no generic term covering all literary productions. To these initial observations we may add the fragmentation characteristic of literature today. Who dares specify what literature is and what is not, given the irreducible variety of the writing that tends to be attached to it, from vastly different perspectives?

       The argument is not conclusive: a notion may legitimately exist even if there is no specific term in the lexicon for it. But we have been led to cast the first shadow of doubt over the 'naturalness' of literature. A theoretical examination of the problem proves no more reassuring. Where do we come by the conviction that there is indeed such a thing as literature? From experience, we study 'literary' works in school, then in college; we find the 'literary' type of book in specialized stores; we are in the habit of referring to 'literary' authors in everyday conversation. An entity called 'literature' functions at the level of intersubjective and social relations; this much seems beyond question. Fine. But what have we proved? That in the broader system of a given society or culture, an identifiable element exists that is known by the label literature. Have we thereby demonstrated that all the particular products that take on the function of 'literature' possess common characteristics, which we can identify with legitimac? Not at all.

46. This passage casts doubt on:

(A) the assumption called literature.
(B) the idea of literature.
(C) the institution of literature.
(D) the notion of literature.


47. Literature is unsustainable because :...

(A) we are unclear as to what it means.
(B) we are unsure as to its message.
(C) we are not persuaded that the claims made for it are allowable and acceptable.
(D) we cannot prove that its definitions are the right and the only possible ones.


48. How does the writer argue that the existence of literature is hardly self-evident?

(i) by citing reasons for its non-existence.
(ii) by citing reasons for interrogating its legitimacy.
(iii) by citing reasons and proving by argument that its legitimacy can be interrogated.
(iv) by citing reasons to show that the label does not match the thing we know to be literature.

(A) (i)
(B) (i) and (ii)
(C) (iii)
(D) (iii) and (iv)

49. “Might we be dealing with a historical phenomenon rather than an 'eternal' one”? What makes this a
       reasonable question to consider in this context?

(A) A historical phenomenon lends itself to better empirical verification than an 'eternal' one.
(B) A historical phenomenon has more legitimacy than an 'eternal' one.
(C) A historical phenomenon can be debated and possibly settled while an 'eternal' one must be taken
       on trust or not at all.
(D) historical phenomenon is well above disputation while an 'eternal' one is not.



50.What does ‘the fragmentation characteristic of literature today' suggest to the writer ?

(A) the fragmentation of modern consciousness.
(B) the divided perceptions of literature by its readers.
(C) the lack of specificity of literature.
(D) the blur that frustrates further investigation into this concept.


http://www.classroomthoughts.com/

UGC NET English Solved Paper II. Dec 2009

Note : This paper contains fifty (50) objective type questions, each question carrying two (2) marks. Attempt all the questions.

1. A classical influence on Ben Jonson’s Volpone is

                             (A) Juvenal

(B) Aristophanes

(C) Plautus
(D) Terence



2. Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” is addressed to

(A) The American imperial mission in the Philippines.
(B) The Belgian colonial expansion in the Congo.
(C) The British Imperial presence in Nigeria.
(D) The British colonial entry into Afghanistan.

3. Poetry : A Magazine of Verse was founded by Harriet Monroe in

(A) 1922
(B) 1920
(C) 1918
 (D) 1912

4. Who among the following was Geoffrey Chaucer’s contemporary?

(A) Thomas Chatterton
(B) John Gower
(C) Thomas Shadwell
(D) John Gay

5. Which of the following is NOT written by Walter Scott?

(A) Ivanhoe
(B) Lady of the Lake
(C) Heart of Midlothian
(D) The English Mail Coach
(The English Mailcoach (1849) is written by Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859).)

6. “Provincializing Europe” is a concept propounded by

(A) Edward Said
(B) Paul Gilroy
(C) Abdul R. Gurnah
(D) Dipesh Chakravarty

(First published in 2000, Dipesh Chakrabarty's influential Provincializing Europe addresses the mythical figure of Europe that is often taken to be the original site of modernity in many histories of capitalist transition in non-Western countries. This imaginary Europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, is built into the social sciences. The very idea of historicizing carries with it some peculiarly European assumptions about disenchanted space, secular time, and sovereignty. Measured against such mythical standards, capitalist transition in the third world has often seemed either incomplete or lacking. Provincializing Europe proposes that every case of transition to capitalism is a case of translation as well--a translation of existing worlds and their thought--categories into the categories and self-understandings of capitalist modernity. Now featuring a new preface in which Chakrabarty responds to his critics, this book globalizes European thought by exploring how it may be renewed both for and from the margins.)

7. The earliest tract on feminism is

(A) Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex
(B) Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own
(C) Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(D) Mary Astell’s A Serious Proposal to the Ladies

(A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792), written by the 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. In it, Wollstonecraft responds to those educational and political theorists of the 18th century who did not believe women should have an education. She argues that women ought to have an education commensurate with their position in society, claiming that women are essential to the nation because they educate its children and because they could be "companions" to their husbands, rather than mere wives. Instead of viewing women as ornaments to society or property to be traded in marriage, Wollstonecraft maintains that they are human beings deserving of the same fundamental rights as men.)

8. Match the imaginary location with its creator:

1. Emily Bronte
2. Thomas Hardy
3. Lowood Parsonage
4. Charles Dickens
5. Wessex
6. Egdon Heath
7. Coketown
8. Charlotte Bronte

(A) 1-7 2-5 4-6 3-8 (B) 1-6 2-5 3-8 4-7

(C) 1-5 2-6 3-8 4-7 (D) 2-5 1-7 3-4 6-8

(Author set Novels  in
Thomas Hardy Wessex
Emily Bronte Egdon Heath
Charles Dickens Coketown
Charlotte Bronte Lowood Parsonage)

9. Which Chaucerian text parodies Dante’s The Divine Comedy?

(A) The Canterbury Tales
(B) The Book of the Duchess
(C) The House of Fame
(D) Legend of Good Women

(The House of Fame is over 2,000 lines long in three books and takes the form of a dream vision composed in octosyllabic couplets. The poem is regarded as the first of Chaucer's Italian-influenced period and there are echoes of the works of Ovid, Virgil's Aeneid and particularly Dante's Divine Comedy. The three part structure and the reference to various personalities suggest to some that the poem was meant as a parody of the Divine Comedy.)

10. Essays of Elia was published in

(A) 1800
(B) 1823
(C) 1827
 (D) 1850


11. Which of the following is an example of homosexual fiction?

(A) The Well of Loneliness
(B) Maurice
(C) Orlando
(D) The Ballad of the Reading Gaol

(Maurice is a novel by E. M. Forster. A tale of homosexual love in early 20th century England, it follows Maurice Hall from his schooldays, through university and beyond. It was written from 1913 onwards. Although it was shown to selected friends, such as Christopher Isherwood, it was only published in 1971 after Forster's death.)

12. W.B. Yeat’s “Easter 1916” is

(A) a response to a major political uprising
(B) a reminiscence of his visit to a nursery school
(C) a love poem for Maud Gonne
(D) an ode to his native country

13. William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity is

(A) A structuralist study of narrative
(B) A piece of psychoanalytic criticism
(C) A study of the media
(D) An analysis of poetic ambivalence

(Empson published Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), an influential text which analyzes in detail the meanings and effects of English poetry.)



14. Who among the following is associated with the ideology of Utilitarianism?

(A) J.A. Froude
(B) Charles Kingsley
(C) J.S. Mill
(D) Cardinal Newman

15. The ‘Condition of England’ literature refers to

(A) The literature written by the labour class.
(B) The literature of England extolling living conditions.
(C) The literature of England depicting the vulnerability of labour classes.
(D) The literature of England depicting the imperial projects abroad.

The term the “Condition-of-England novels” refers largely to industrial novels, social novels, or social problem novels, published in Victorian England during and after the period of the Hungry Forties. this type of novels deals with the contemporary social and political issues related to deteriorating social scenario after the Industrial Revolution in England in the early 19th century.

16. Philip Sidney wrote An Apology for Poetry in immediate response to

(A) Plato’s Republic
(B) Aristotle’s Poetics
(C) Stephen Gosson’s The School of Abuse
(D) Jeremy Collier’s Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage.

Stephen Gosson (1554-1624). —Poet, actor, and satirist wrote The School of Abuse (1579), directed against "poets, pipers, players, jesters, and such-like Caterpillars of a Commonwealth." Dedicated to Sir P. Sidney, it was not well received by him, and is believed to have evoked his Apologie for Poetrie (1595).

17. Silence ! The Court is in Session is a _________ play translated into English.
(A) Gujarati
(B) Bengali
(C) Marathi
(D) Kannada


18. Arrange the following in ascending order in terms of size :

1. epic
2. epigram
3. stanza
4. sonnet

(A) 1 2 3 4
(B) 2 1 3 4
(C) 2 3 4 1
(D) 1 3 4 2

19. “Fail I alone in words and deeds? /
      Why, all men strive and who succeeds?” These lines are from

(A) “Rabbi Ben Ezra”
(B) “Fra Lippo Lippi”
(C) “Caliban upon Setebos”
(D) “The Last Ride Together”

Read the Poem The Last Ride Together


20. Dr. Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes” expresses
(A) Epicureanism
(B) Humanism
(C) Stoicism
(D) Cynicism



21. “A trivial comedy for serious people” was the subtitle for

(A) Everyman in His Humour
(B) Blythe Spirit
(C) The Way of the World
(D) The Importance of Being Earnest.



22. Which famous elegy closes with the following lines?

“In the deserts of the heart/Let the healing fountain start,/In the prison of his days,/
Teach the free man how to praise.”

(A) In Memoriam
(B) Thyrsis
(C) “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”
(D) “Verses on the Death of T.S. Eliot”

Read the Poem In Memory of W.B Yeats


23. The Temple is a collection of poems by
(A) Thomas Carew
(B) Robert Herrick
(C) George Herbert
(D) Richard Crashaw

24. Ben Jonson’s comedies are
(A) Volpone, Bartholomew Fair, The Shoemaker’s Holiday
(B) Volpone, The Alchemist, Epicoene
(C) Volpone, The Alchemist, The Knight of the Burning Pestle
(D) Volpone, Epicoene, The Shoemaker’s Holiday

The Shoemakers' Holiday, or the Gentle Craft is an Elizabethan play written by Thomas Dekker. While The Knight of the Burning Pestle is a play by Francis Beaumont.

25. What is ‘L’ Allegro’s’ companion piece called ?

(A) Lamia
(B) Hyperion
(C) Il Penseroso
(D) Thyrsis

26. Match the character with the novel :

1. Caddy                          5. The Sound and the Fury

2. Lennie                          6. Of Mice and Men

3. Jake Barnes                  7. The Sun Also Rises

4. Tommy Wilhelm            8. Seize the Day

Codes :

(A) 1-5 2-6 3-7 4-8
(B) 2-7 1-8 3-5 4-6
(C) 3-5 4-6 2-8 1-7
(D) 4-5 3-8 2-7 1-8

Caddy-- The Sound and the Fury

Lennie---- Of Mice and Men

Jake Barnes--- The Sun Also Rises

Tommy Wilhelm--- Seize the Day


27. Who among the following writers belonged to the American Beat Movement ?

(A) Allen Ginsberg

(B) Mark Beard

(C) Isaac McCaslih

(D) Charles Beard


28. “The Lost Generation” is a name applied to the disillusioned intellectuals and aesthetes of the years following the First World War. Who called them “The Lost Generation” ?

(A) H.L. Mencken

(B) Willa Cather

(C) Jack London

(D) Gertrude Stein

The term was popularized by Ernest Hemingway who used it as one of two contrasting epigraphs for his novel, "The Sun Also Rises." In that volume Hemingway credits the phrase to Gertrude Stein, who was then his mentor and patron.

29. Hyperbole is

1. an extravagant exaggeration

2. a racist slur

3. a metrical skill

4. a figure of speech

(A) 1 is correct
(B) 1 and 4 are correct
(C) 1 and 3 are correct
(D) 3 is correct

30. “Imagined Communities” is a concept propounded by

(A) Benedict Anderson

(B) Homi Bhabha

(C) Aijaz Ahmed

(D) Partha Chatterjee


31. The New Historicists include

(A) Greenblatt, Showalter, Montrose

(B) Greenblatt, Sinfield, Butler

(C) Greenblatt, Montrose, Goldberg

(D) Williams, Greenblatt, Belsey

Stephen Greenblatt ,Jonathan Goldberg, Stephen Orgel, Lisa Jardine, and Louis Montrose are the notable New Historicists.


32. Wallace Stevens’ “The Man with the Blue Guitar” may be linked to the work of the following artist :

(A) Modigliani

(B) Chagall

(C) Picasso

(D) Cezanne

“The Man with the Blue Guitar” 1937 is one of Stevens’ best composition series. The poem series is related to Picasso’s painting of the same title.


33. The author of Gender Trouble is

(A) Elaine Showalter

(B) Helene Cixous

(C) Michele Barrett

(D) Judith Butler


34. The structural analysis of signs was practised by

(A) Michel Foucault

(B) Jacques Lacan

(C) Julia Kristeva

(D) Roland Barthes


35. Which of the following is a spoof of a Gothic novel ?

(A) Frankenstein

(B) Northanger Abbey

(C) Castle of Otranto

(D) Mysteries of Udolfo

Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey is a satire on the contemporary craze for Gothic novels and their characteristic themes of horror, picturesque ruins, medievalism, terrible secrets, and the supernatural. Northanger Abbey recounts the career of the heroine Catherine Morland.

36. The “madwoman in the attic” is a specific reference to

(A) The narrator of “Goblin Market”

(B) Augusta Egg’s 1858 narrative painting

(C) The Heroine of The Yellow Wallpaper

(D) Bertha Mason of Jane Eyre


37. Assertion (A) : Dr Johnson’s The Lives of the Poets carries critical and biographical studies of poets he admired. It does not, however, carry a life of William Wordsworth.

 Reason (R) : Dr. Johnson singled out poets whom he not only admired but also adored. This explains his omission of Wordsworth.

(A) (A) is wrong but (R) is correct.

(B) (A) is true but (R) is false.

(C) (A) and (R) are true.

(D) Neither (A) nor (R) is true.

Johnson's last major work, The Lives of the English Poets, was begun in 1778, when he was nearly 70 years old, and completed—in ten volumes—in 1781. It comprises short biographies and critical appraisals of 52 poets, most of whom lived during the eighteenth century. It is arranged, approximately, by date of death. On the other hand, Wordsworth’s Lifetime (1770-1850) does not focus Johnson’s critical era.

38. What is the correct chronological sequence of the following?

(A) Moll Flanders, Pamela, Joseph Andrews, Tristram Shandy

(B) Joseph Andrews, Tristram Shandy, Pamela, Moll Flanders

(C) Tristram Shandy, Moll Flanders, Pamela, Joseph Andrews

(D) Pamela, Moll Flanders, Joseph Andrews, Tristram Shandy

Moll Flanders : Daniel Defoe published Moll Flanders in 1722 .


Pamela: Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740) by Samuel Richardson


Richardson's Joseph Andrews (1742),


The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767)


39. “How can what an Englishman believes be heresy? It is a contradiction in terms.” This means

1. An Englishman does not know what heresy is.

2. An Englishman has no beliefs.

3. And, therefore, there is no question of his heresy.

4. And, therefore, there cannot be any question of his acting his beliefs.

(A) 1 and 4 are correct
(B) 2 and 1 are correct
(C) 1 and 3 are correct
(D) 2 and 4 are correct

Saint Joan ~ Scene IV

written by George Bernard Shaw

WARWICK. I am a soldier, not a churchman. As a pilgrim I saw something of the Mahometans. They were not so ill-bred as I had been led to believe. In some respects their conduct compared favorably with ours.

CAUCHON [displeased] I have noticed this before. Men go to the East to convert the infidels. And the infidels pervert them. The Crusader comes back more than half a Saracen. Not to mention that all Englishmen are born heretics.

THE CHAPLAIN. Englishmen heretics!!! [Appealing to Warwick] My lord: must we endure this? His lordship is beside himself. How can what an Englishman believes be heresy? It is a contradiction in terms.

CAUCHON. I absolve you, Messire de Stogumber, on the ground of invincible ignorance. The thick air of your country does not breed theologians.

WARWICK. You would not say so if you heard us quarrelling about religion, my lord! I am sorry you think I must be either a heretic or a blockhead because, as a travelled man, I know that the followers of Mahomet profess great respect for our Lord, and are more ready to forgive St Peter for being a fisherman than your lordship is to forgive Mahomet for being a camel driver. But at least we can proceed in this matter without bigotry.

CAUCHON. When men call the zeal of the Christian Church bigotry I know what to think.

WARWICK. They are only east and west views of the same thing.

CAUCHON [bitterly ironical] Only east and west! Only!!

WARWICK. Oh, my Lord Bishop, I am not gainsaying you. You will carry The Church with you, but you have to carry the nobles also. To my mind there is a stronger case against The Maid than the one you have so forcibly put. Frankly, I am not afraid of this girl becoming another Mahomet, and superseding The Church by a great heresy. I think you exaggerate that risk. But have you noticed that in these letters of hers, she proposes to all the kings of Europe, as she has already pressed on Charles, a transaction which would wreck the whole social structure of Christendom?

CAUCHON. Wreck The Church. I tell you so.

40. Which of the following is an essentially Freudian concept?

(A) Archetype

(B) The Uncanny

(C) The Absurd

(D) The Imaginary

The Uncanny (“the opposite of what is familiar") is a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange or uncomfortably familiar. Because the uncanny is familiar, yet strange, it often creates cognitive dissonance within the experiencing subject due to the paradoxical nature of being attracted to, yet repulsed by an object at the same time. This cognitive dissonance often leads to an outright rejection of the object, as one would rather reject than rationalize.

41. He wrote an essay called “Conrad’s Darkness” where he praises the earlier writer for offering him a vision of the world’s “half-made societies’. Identify the writer.

(A) Chinua Achebe
(B) V.S. Naipaul
(C) Salman Rushdie
(D) Ngugi wa Thiongo


42. “Magic Realism” is closely associated with

(A) Italo Calvino

(B) Gabriel Garcia Marquez

(C) Anita Desai

(D) Rohinton Mistry

(A and B are possible)



43. Who among the following combines anthropology, history and fiction?

(A) Kamala Markandya

(B) Mulk Raj Anand

(C) Upmanyu Chatterjee

(D) Amitav Ghosh


44. Which of the following is NOT a Partition novel?

(A) Train to Pakistan

(B) Sunlight on a Broken Column

(C) The Shadow Lines

(D) In Custody

Khushwant Singh’s English novel Train to Pakistan (1956) is one of the earliest novels to evoke the horrors of the violence that accompanied partition.


Attia Hosain's 'Sun Light on A Broken Column' also deals with partition politics.


Amitav Ghosh's novel The Shadaw Lines (1988) portrays the pre independence and post independence partition politics in ironic terms.


While Anita Desai's In Custody is the story of a college lecturer seeking to meet the great poet who has been his hero since childhood. It was made into a motion picture in 1993.


45. Which of the following options is correct?

(i) Transcendentalism was a philosophical and literary movement.

(ii) It flourished in the Southern States of America in the 19th century.

(iii) It was a reaction against 18th century rationalism and the skeptical philosophy of Locke.

(iv) Among the major texts of Transcendentalist thought are the essays of Emerson, Thoreau’s Walden and the writings of Margaret Fuller.

(A) (i) and (iv) are correct. (B) (ii) and (iii) are correct.

(C) (iii) and (iv) are correct. (D) (iv) is correct.

Transcendentalism, in philosophy and literature, belief in a higher reality than that found in sense experience or in a higher kind of knowledge than that achieved by human reason.

In its most specific usage, transcendentalism refers to a literary and philosophical movement that developed in the U.S. in the first half of the 19th century. While the movement was, in part, a reaction to certain 18th-century rationalist doctrines, it was strongly influenced by Deism, which, although rationalist, was opposed to Calvinist orthodoxy. Transcendentalism also involved a rejection of the strict Puritan religious attitudes that were the heritage of New England, where the movement originated. In addition, it opposed the strict ritualism and dogmatic theology of all established religious institutions.

American transcendentalism began with the formation (1836) of the Transcendental Club in Boston. Among the leaders of the movement were the essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, the feminist and social reformer Margaret Fuller, the preacher Theodore Parker, the educator Bronson Alcott, the philosopher William Ellery Channing, and the author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau.

Read the following passage carefully, and select the right answers from the alternatives given


below in the question 46 to 50 :

It would be more accurate to say that discourse, rather than language, plays a crucial part in structuring our experience. The whole idea of ‘language’ is something of a fiction : what we normally refer to as ‘language’ can more realistically be seen as heterogeneous  collection of discourses. Each of us has access to a range of discourses, and it is these different discourses which give us access to, or enable us to perform, different ‘selves’. A discourse can be conceptualized as a ‘system of statements which cohere around common meanings and values’. So, for example, in contemporary Britain there are discourses which can be labelled ‘conservative’ – that is, discourses which emphasize values and meanings where the status quo is cherished : and there are discourses which can be labelled ‘patriarchal’ – that is, discourses which emphasize meanings and values which assume the superiority of males. Dominant discourses such as these appear ‘natural’ : they are powerful precisely because they are able to make invisible the fact that they are just one among many

different discourses.

Theorizing language in this way is still new in linguistics (to the extent that many linguists would not regard analysis in terms of discourses as being part of linguistics). One of the advantages of talking about discourses rather than about language is that the concept ‘discourse’ acknowledges the value-laden nature of language. There is no neutral discourse : whenever we speak we have to choose between different systems of meaning, different setsof values. This process allows us to show how language is implicated in our construction ofdifferent ‘selves’ : different discourses position us in different ways in relation to the world.

Questions :

46. Which of the following is True in the light of this passage?

(A) Language is inaccurate.

(B) Discourse is accurate.

(C) Language comprises discourse.

(D) Discourse comprises language.


47. What words/phrases suggest the plurality of discourse in this passage?

I. different selves

II. range

III. system of statements

IV. heterogeneous collection

(A) II and IV

(B) (B) II and III

(C) (C) III and IV

(D) (D) I


48. Having called language “something of a fiction”, how does the author suggest its

opposite ? By using the phrase

(A) conceptualized as a system

(B) more accurate to say

(C) range of discourses

(D) more realistically be seen


49. Which among the following statements is NOT true ?

(A) Conservative discourses plead for the status quo.

(B) Patriarchal discourses privilege male values.

(C) Dominant discourses are natural.

(D) Dominant discourses seem natural.


50. What does this passage plead for ?

(A) Theorizing language in a new way.

(B) Theorizing language in terms of discourses.

(C) Studying language as discourse.

(D) Studying discourse as language.

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UGC NET English Solved Paper II JUNE:2010

 

1. The epithet “a comic epic in prose” is best applied to

(A) Richardson’s Pamela

(B) Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey
(C) Fielding’s Tom Jones
(D) Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe


2. Muriel Spark has written a dystopian novel called

(A) Memento Mori

(B) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

(C) Robinson

(D) The Ballad of Peckham Rye

3. Samuel Butler’s Erewhon is an example of

(A) Feminist Literature
(B) Utopian Literature
(C) War Literature
(D) Famine Literature


4. The line “moments of unageing intellect” occurs in Yeats’s

(A) Byzantium
(B) Among School Children
(C) Sailing to Byzantium
(D) The Circus Animals’ Desertion


5. In his 1817 review of Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Francis Jeffrey grouped the following poets together as the ‘Lake School of Poets’:

(A) Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge
(B) Wordsworth, Byron and Coleridge
(C) Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge
(D) Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey


6. Which of the following novels is not by Patrick White?

(A) The Vivisector
(B) The Tree of Man
(C) Voss
(D) Oscar and Lucienda


7. The famous line “……. where ignorant armies clash by night” is taken from a poem by

(A) Wilfred Owen
(B) W.H. Auden
(C) Siegfried Sassoon
(D) Matthew Arnold


8. Which among the following novels is not written by Margaret Atwood?

(A) Surfacing
(B) The Blind Assassin
(C) The Handmaid’s Tale
(D) The Stone Angel


9. The term ‘theatre of cruelty’ was coined by

(A) Robert Brustein
(B) Antonin Artaud
(C) Augusto Boal
(D) Luigi Pirandello


10. The verse form of Byron’s Childe Harold was influenced by

(A) Milton
(B) Spenser
(C) Shakespeare
(D) Pope


11. Tennyson’s Ulysses is

(I) a poem expressing the need for going forward and braving the struggles of life
(II) a dramatic monologue
(III) a morbid poem
(IV) a poem making extensive use of satire

The right combination for the above statement, according to the code, is

(A) I & IV
(B) II and III
(C) III and IV
(D) I and II


12. Which post-war British poet was involved in a disastrous marriage with Sylvia Plath?

(A) Philip Larkin
(B) Ted Hughes
(C) Stevie Smith
(D) Geoffrey Hill


13. Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowles is in part

(I) a puzzle
(II) a debate
(III) a threnody
(IV) a beast fable

The correct combination for the above statement, according to the code, is

(A) I, II & IV
(B) II, III & IV
(C) I & IV
(D) II & IV


14. Who among the following wrote a book with the title The Age of Reason ?

(A) William Godwin
(B) Edmund Burke
(C) Thomas Paine
(D) Edward Gibbon


15. The Restoration comedy has been criticized mainly for its

(A) excessive wit and humour
(B) bitter satire and cynicism
(C) indecency and permissiveness
(D) superficial reflection of society


16. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses is an essay by

(A) Terry Eagleton
(B) Karl Marx
(C) Raymond Williams
(D) Louis Althusser


17. Sexual possessiveness is a theme of Shakespeare’s

(A) Coriolanus
(B) Julius Caesar
(C) Henry IV Part – I
(D) A Midsummer Night’s Dream


18. The term ‘Cultural Materialism’ is associated with

(A) Stephen Greenblatt
(B) Raymond Williams
(C) Matthew Arnold
(D) Richard Hoggart


19. Which of the following author book pair is correctly matched ?

(A) Muriel Spark – Under the Net
(B) William – Girls of Golding Slender Means
(C) Angus Wilson – Lucky Jim
(D) Doris Lessing – The Grass is Singing


20. Who among the following is a Canadian critic?

(A) I.A. Richards
(B) F.R. Leavis
(C) Cleanth Brooks
(D) Northrop Frye


21. Sethe is a character in

(A) The Colour Purple
(B) The Women of Brewster Place
(C) Beloved
(D) Lucy


22. Imagined Communities is a book by

(A) Aijaz Ahmad
(B) Edward Said
(C) Perry Anderson
(D) Benedict Anderson


23. Who among the following is a Cavalier poet?

(A) Henry Vaughan
(B) Richard Crashaw
(C) John Suckling
(D) Anne Finch


24. Which play of Wilde has the subtitle, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People ?

(A) A Woman of No Importance
(B) Lady Windermere’s Fan
(C) The Importance of Being Earnest
(D) An Ideal Husband


25. Which of the following plays is not written by Wole Soyinka ?

(A) The Lion and the Jewel
(B) The Dance of the Forests
(C) Master Harold and the Boys
(D) Kongi’s Harvest

26. Which of the following plays by William Wycherley is in part an adaptation of Moliere’s The Misanthrope ?

(A) The Plain Dealer
(B) The Country Wife
(C) Love in a Wood
(D) The Gentleman Dancing Master


27. ‘Inversion’ is the change in the word order for creating rhetorical effect, e.g. this book I like. Another term for inversion is

(A) Hypallage
(B) Hubris
(C) Haiku
(D) Hyperbaton


28. The phrase ‘the willing suspension of disbelief ’ occurs in

(A) Biographia Literaria
(B) Preface to Lyrical Ballads
(C) In Defence of Poetry
(D) Poetics


29. The religious movement ‘Methodism’ in the 18th century England was founded by

(A) John Tillotson
(B) Bishop Butler
(C) Bernard Mandeville
(D) John Welsey


30. My First Acquaintance with Poets, an unforgettable account of meeting with literary heroes, is written by

(A) Charles Lamb
(B) Thomas de Quincey
(C) Leigh Hunt
(D) William Hazlitt

31. The figure of the Warrior Virgin in Spenser’s Faerie Queene is represented by the character

(A) Britomart
(B) Gloriana
(C) Cynthia
(D) Duessa


32. The book Speech Acts is written by

(A) John Austin
(B) John Searle
(C) Jacques Derrida
(D) Ferdinand de Saussure


33. Which among the following is not a sonnet sequence ?

(A) Philip Sydney – Astrophel and Stella
(B) Samuel Daniel – Delia
(C) Derek Walcott – Omeroos
(D) D.G. Rossetti – The House of Life


34. ‘Incunabula’ refers to

(A) books censured by the Roman Emperor
(B) books published before the year 1501
(C) books containing an account of myths and rituals
(D) books wrongly attributed to an author


35. The most notable achievement in Jacobean prose was

(A) Bacon’s Essays
(B) King James’ translation of the Bible
(C) Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy
(D) None of the above


36. The Court of Chancery is a setting in Dickens’

(A) Little Dorrit
(B) Hard Times
(C) Dombey and Son
(D) Bleak House


37. Which romantic poet coined the famous phrase ‘spots of time’?

(A) John Keats
(B) William Wordsworth
(C) S.T. Coleridge
(D) Lord Byron


38. The statement ‘I think, therefore, I am’ is by

(A) Schopenhauer
(B) Plato
(C) Descartes
(D) Sartre


39. Verse that has no set theme – no regular meter, rhyme or stanzaic pattern is

(I) open form
(II) flexible form
(III) free verse
(IV) blank verse

The correct combination for the statement, according to the code, is

(A) I, II and III are correct
(B) III and IV are correct
(C) II, III and IV are correct
(D) I and III are correct


40. Which is the correct sequence of publication of Pinter’s plays?

(A) The Room, One for the Road, No Man’s Land, The Homecoming
(B) The Homecoming, No Man’s Land, The Room, One for the Road
(C) The Room, The Homecoming, No Man’s Land, One for the Road
(D) One for the Road, The Room, The Home coming, No Man’s Land


41. Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language was published in the year

(A) 1710
(B) 1755
(C) 1739
(D) 1759


42. The literary prize, Booker of Bookers, was awarded to

(A) J.M. Coetzee
(B) Nadine Gordimer
(C) Martin Amis
(D) Salman Rushdie


43. In Keats’ poetic career, the most productive year was

(A) 1816
(B) 1817
(C) 1820
(D) 1819


44. Pope’s The Rape of the Lock was published in 1712 in

(A) three cantos
(B) four cantos
(C) five cantos
(D) two cantos


45. Stephen Dedalus is a fictional character associated with

I. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
II. Sons and Lovers
III. Ulysses
IV. The Heart of Darkness

The correct combination for the above statement according to the code is

(A) I &; II
(B) I, II &; III
(C) III &; IV
(D) I &; III


46. In Moby Dick Captain Ahab falls for his

(A) ignorance
(B) pride
(C) courage
(D) drunkenness


47. The first complete printed English Bible was produced by

(A) William Tyndale
(B) William Caxton
(C) Miles Coverdale
(D) Roger Ascham


48. Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton is sub-titled

(A) The Two Nations
(B) A Tale of Manchester Life
(C) A Story of Provincial Life
(D) The Factory Girl


49. Some of the Jacobean playwrights were prolific. One of them claimed to have written 200 plays. The playwright is

(A) John Ford
(B) Thomas Dekker
(C) Philip Massinger
(D) Thomas Heywood


50. The concept of “Star-equilibrium” in connection with man-woman relationship appears in

(A) Women in Love
(B) Maurice
(C) Mrs. Dalloway
(D) The Old Wives’ Tales

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