UGC NET Solved Paper II ; Subject -- English ;December : 2009

Paper – II

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

(ALL THE ANSWERS ARE COLOURED. I HAVE TRIED TO GIVE LOGIC BEHIND ANSWERING THESE QUESTIONS. WITHOUT SYLLOGISTIC FORMAT YOU NEED AN ELFIN TOWER TALL HEAD.)

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

(A) Juvenal (B) Aristophanes (C) Plautus (D) Terence

 Ben Jonson (1572-1637), English dramatist and poet, whose classical learning, gift for satire, and brilliant style is exhibited in his brilliant comedy, Volpone (1606) is modeled upon classical writer Aristophanes

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.

At the conclusion of the Spanish-American War of 1898, the United States annexed the Philippines, which had been a Spanish colony since the 16th century. Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” is addressed to the subject of American colonization of the Philippines.

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

(A) 1922 (B) 1920 (C) 1918 (D) 1912

Harriet Monroe (1860 - 1936) U.S. poet and editor founded Poetry : A Magazine of Verse in 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 Lady of the Lake (1810), The Bridal of Triermain (1813), The Heart of Midlothian (1818), Ivanhoe (1819) are written by Walter Scott. 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

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

In the late 17th century Mary Astell , the women writer in England,  challenged patriarchal structures in their lives and writings. Her A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of Their True and Greatest Interest (1694) was calling for improvements in women’s education. However modern Scholars have pointed out inconsistencies in her views.even though she is epitheted "the first English feminist.",  her tract on feminism is still disputable.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), asserts that intellectual companionship is the ideal of marriage and pleads for equality of education and opportunity between the sexes.

Virginia Woolf, a fervent supporter of women’s rights, considers the difficulties of the woman artist in A Room Of One’s Own (1929). 

French novelist and existentialist writer Simone de Beauvoir’s  Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex, 1953) examines the low status of women in society.

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

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

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

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

In 1930, at 24 years of age, Empson published Seven Types of Ambiguity, 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

The term utilitarianism is more specifically applied to the proposition that the supreme objective of moral action is the achievement of the greatest happiness for the greatest number. John Stuart Mill, who made utilitarianism the subject of one of his philosophical treatises (Utilitarianism,1863), is the ablest champion of the doctrine after Bentham.

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

(C) “Caliban upon Setebos” (D) “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”

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

It is nearly impossible to understand and appreciate John Milton's L'Allegro without also having read its companion piece, Il Penseroso.

26. Match the character with the novel :

1. Caddy 2. Lennie

3. Jake Barnes 4. Tommy Wilhelm

5. The Sound and the Fury 6. Of Mice and Men

7. The Sun Also Rises 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 "Lost Generation" is a term used to refer to the generation, actually an age cohort that came of age during World War I. 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

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), American poet, whose works deal mainly with the individual’s interaction with the outside world, created exquisite, vibrant poems that were often suffused with brilliant color. “The Man with the Blue Guitar” 1937 is one of his 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 , a posthumous publication, appearing in 1818, 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 . Many critics have speculated that Defoe’s story of a beautiful and greedy woman who turns to crime is not a novel in the true sense but a work combining biography and fiction.

Pamela: Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740) by Samuel Richardson was one of the first works of the genre epistolary novel.

Richardson's contemporary Henry Fielding evinced his connection with the earlier satirical spirit in his novel Joseph Andrews (1742), which parodies Richardson's other novel of virtue besieged, Pamela (1740).

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767), the masterpiece of another great British novelist of the century, Laurence Sterne, indulges in the new cult of sentiment, but by reason of its cast of eccentric characters and the skilled weaving of the most extraordinary behavior into the depiction of their personalities, this novel lies outside the usual historical categories.

39. “How can what an Englishman believes be heresy? Itis 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.

The speech constitutes of THE CHAPLAIN in Saint Joan (1923) by Shaw . In Shaw’s hands Joan of Arc becomes a combination of practical mystic, heretical saint, and inspired genius. He treats the voices she hears as being the products of an active imagination. Shaw’s basic theme is that society always acts to choke off moral genius, no matter what the inspiration of that genius is. In dealing with historical subjects, Shaw initiated a natural and humorous treatment of famous figures—an approach that was followed by dramatists who came after Shaw.

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

(A) Archetype (B) The Uncanny

(C) The Absurd (D) The Imaginary

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

Italo Calvino (1923-85), Italian writer. Born in Cuba, of Italian parents, Calvino moved to Italy in his youth. After World War II activity as a partisan in the Italian Resistance, he settled in Turin, where he earned his degree in literature. He was a realistic writer in his first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947; trans. 1956). He then turned to techniques of a genre that became known as magic realism, characteristic of his allegorical novels The Nonexistent Knight & The Cloven Viscount (1952-59; trans. 1962). These and the later works Cosmicomics (1965; trans. 1968); If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979; trans. 1981); and Mr. Palomar (1983; trans. 1985) demonstrate Calvino's unique blend of fantasy, scientific curiosity, and metaphysical speculation.

Gabriel García Márquez, born in 1928, Colombian novelist and short-story writer, known as one of the masters of magic realism, a style that weaves together realism and fantasy. He won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1982.

García Márquez's best-known novels include El coronel no tiene quien le escriba (1958; No One Writes to the Colonel, 1968), about a retired military hero; Cien años de soledad (1967; One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1970), the epic story of a Colombian family, which shows the stylistic influence of American novelist William Faulkner; and El otoño del patriarca (1975; The Autumn of the Patriarch, 1976), concerning political power and corruption. Crónica de una muerte anunciada (1981; Chronicle of a Death Foretold, 1983) is the story of murder in a Latin American town. Collected Stories was published in English translation in 1984. 

( There is doubt in option A & B)

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

Partition has been a literary subject in many of the Indian languages, as well as in English. 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) (this is not to confuse with Conrad’s  The Shadow-Line (1917) which I experienced here in answering unless corrected by my worthy reader) 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. Nearly all transcendentalist doctrines stem from the division of reality into a realm of spirit and a realm of matter.

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. The Transcendental Club published a magazine, The Dial, and some of the club's members participated in an experiment in communal living at Brook Farm, in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, during the 1840s. Major transcendentalist works of the American movement include Emerson's essays “Nature” (1836) and “Self-Reliance” (1841), as well as many of his metaphysical poems, and also Thoreau's Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), which is an account of an individual's attempt to live simply and in harmony with nature.

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 labeled ‘conservative’ – that is, discourses which emphasize values and meanings where the status quo is cherished: and there are discourses which can be labeled ‘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 sets of values. This process allows us to show how language is implicated in our construction of different ‘selves’: different discourses position us in different ways in relation to the world.

<Ref: Communicating gender in context  Chapter: Language and the Construction of Different Selves  By Helga Kotthoff  Page 291>

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) II and III (C) III and IV (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

 Ardhendu De

Reference: Encarta, Wiki, Internet Archive, O.U.P. ,Cazamian, Louis. The Social Novel in England, 1830-1850: Dickens, Disraeli, Mrs. Gaskell, Kingsley. 1903. Translated by Martin Fido. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.