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

SECTION – II

Note : This section contains fifteen (15) questions, each to be answered in about thirty (30) words. Each question carries five (5) marks. (5 × 15 = 75 marks)

6. What is the function of the general prologue of The Canterbury Tales.

 A band of pilgrims who assemble at the Tabard Inn outside London for the journey to Canterbury Cathedral is briefly described in the General Prologue . Ranging in status from a Knight to a humble Plowman, they are a microcosm of 14th-century English society. In framing the story line the prologue introduce us of the general scheme of story telling also.

7. Comment on the rejection of Falstaff.

In Henry IV, Part I, we see the young prince Hal (Henry V) indulging in wild pranks with Falstaff, being rebuked by his father (Henry IV), promising to reform, and making his promise good by slaying Hotspur, the leader of the rebels, in single combat. Prince Hal appears less in Henry IV, Part II until near the end, when his reconciliation with his dying father and his rejection of Falstaff point the way to his successful career as king.

8. Analyse the significance of the Invocation in Paradise Lost Book I.

In the first 26 lines of the poem, Milton follows the convention in epic poems of invoking the Muses, the Greek goddesses that inspired poets, musicians, and philosophers, and he explains his purpose in writing the poem. Here a pious address is made to the Muse and theme of the poem is states  .

9. Define the heroic couplet with examples.

The heroic couplet, two rhyming iambic pentameter lines, is also called a closed couplet because the meaning and the grammatical structure are complete within two lines. John Dryden and Alexander Pope employed this form with great effect, as for example, in Pope's Essay on Criticism (Part I, 68-69):

First fo/llow Na/ture, and/ your judg/ment frame

By her/ just stan/dard, which/ is still /the same.

10. Comment on De Quincey’s essay “On the knocking at the gate in Macbeth.”

De Quincey’s essay “On the knocking at the gate in Macbeth” is a venture for more psychological interpretation than had previously been applied to Shakespeare. Thomas de Quincey argues that an audience must feel a "sympathy of comprehension" for Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in order for the play to be effective. He does not intend nor expect the audience to applaud them for their murderous actions but rather to try to understand the feelings of the characters. The knocking at the gate is a call to the audience to come back to reality, back from the depths of evil in Macbeth's hellish world. The knocking has a jarring effect on the audience, summoning them back into the everyday world, so they can become keenly aware of the gravity and horror of the actions of Macbeth and his wife.

11. Why is the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood so called ?

In 1848 D.G.Rossetti along with the English artists Hunt, Ford Maddox Brown and the painter Millais formed the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood to replace the academic style of painting by a return of simplicity, truthful and the spirit of devotion and these came to be attributes of the Italian artists and  painters before the time of Raphael (1483-1520).

12. Comment on the ‘Woman Question’ in the Victorian Age.

 The Woman Question relates the role and function of the women folk in its enlighten spirit of the Victorian era. It include Issues of women's suffrage, reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, property rights, legal rights, and medical rights, and marriage, dominated cultural discussions in newspapers and intellectual circles. However, All efforts to secure the franchise for women were effectively opposed. Prominent among the antifeminists of the period were the reigning monarch Queen Victoria and the British prime ministers William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli.

13. What is Joycean Epiphany ?

Epiphany (Greek epiphaneia, “appearance”), the christian term means a spiritual manifestation of sudden showing forth. Joyce uses this term as a moment of revelation, when the very truth or essence of something is suddenly glimpsed. Art attempts to capture and preserve such fleeting moments. 

14. “O body swayed to music,
O brightening glace,
How can we know the dancer
from the dance ?”

Critically comment on the above lines by W.B. Yeats.

The original draft of the poem finished at the end of stanza VII but on reflection, Yeats felt that it was too pessimistic. Stanza VIII provides us with a passable refuse from this pessimism a suggestion that perhaps unity of being is obtainable. Yeats provides us with two metaphors-: i) a chestnut tree. He shows that the tree is made up of many separate components -: "Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?" but in doing this he recognizes that the essence of the tree is its unity-: "Great-rooted blossomer" Similarly Yeats recognizes that it is impossible to speculate the dancer from the dance as one without the other would not exist.

 Read: Among School Children.

15. What feminist concerns inform The Golden Notebook ?

Lessing’s best-known novel, The Golden Notebook (1962), makes connections similar to those of Children of Violence while also questioning the value and authority of fiction itself. In this technically innovative novel, the narrative of the main plot—an account of the friendship of two women—is interrupted by excerpts from the notebooks of the main character. These excerpts record her experiences in Africa, her affiliations with the communist movement, her attempt at an autobiographical novel, and her daily activities. The Golden Notebook became a classic of feminist literature because of its experimental style and its explorations of self, creativity, and female identity.

16. What significance would you attach to the birds of prey in Ted Hughes’ poetry ?

Hughes's poetry is physical and sometimes savage in tone. Many of his works emphasize the subconscious. Hughes’s first significant collection was The Hawk in the Rain (1957), which established his style of rugged naturalism and animal imagery.

17. What does Dr. Johnson say about Shakespeare’s use of the Unities ?

Shakespeare had no regard to distinction of time or place, but gives to one age or nation, without scruple, the customs, institutions, and opinions of another, at the expense not only of likelihood, but of possibility. Samuel Johnson  applied the unities to drama when judging it in his Prefaces to Shakespeare. However, Johnson was well aware that Aristotle had only recommended the unity of action, and knew that rules must serve drama, not vice versa.

18. What is formalism? Answer with the help of examples.

A text-based critical method known as formalism was developed by Victor Shklovsky, Vladimir Propp, and other Russian critics early in the 20th century. It involved detailed inquiry into plot structure, narrative perspective, symbolic imagery, and other literary techniques. But after the mid-1930s, leaders of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its subsequent satellites in Eastern Europe demanded that literature and criticism directly serve their political objectives. Political leaders in those countries suppressed formalist criticism, calling it reactionary. Even such internationally influential opponents of extreme formalism as the Russian Mikhail Bakhtin and the Hungarian Georg Lukács would often find themselves under attack.

19. Write a note on Imagism.

Imagism, poetic movement that flourished in the U.S. and England between 1909 and 1917. The movement was led by the American poets Ezra Pound and, later, Amy Lowell. Other imagist poets were the English writers D. H. Lawrence and Richard Aldington and the American poets John Gould Fletcher and Hilda Doolittle. These poets issued manifestos and wrote poems and essays embodying their theories. They placed primary reliance on the use of precise, sharp images as a means of poetic expression and stressed precision in the choice of words, freedom in the choice of subject matter and form, and the use of colloquial language. Most of the imagist poets wrote in free verse, using such devices as assonance and alliteration rather than formal metrical schemes to give structure to their poetry. Notable collections of imagist poetry are Des Imagistes: An Anthology (1914), compiled by Pound, and the three anthologies compiled by Amy Lowell, all under the title Some Imagist Poets (1915, 1916, 1917).

20. Who is logocentrism ?

Logocentrism is a term coined by German philosopher Ludwig Klages in the 1920s. It refers to the tradition of Western science and philosophy that situates the logos, ‘the word’ or the ‘act of speech’, as epistemologically superior in a system, or structure, in which we may only know, or be present in, the world by way of a logocentric metaphysics. For this structure to hold true it must be assumed that there is an original, irreducible object to which the logos is representative, and therefore, that our presence in the world is necessarily mediated. If there is a Platonic Ideal Form then there must be an ideal representation of such a form. This ideal representation is according to logocentrist thought, the logos.

Ardhendu De

Reference: Wikipedia, Internet Archive, political History of England- T.N. 

Leonard

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