UGC NET Solved Paper II ; Subject -- English ; December : 2010

ENGLISH

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. Jeremy Collier’s A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage attacked among others.

(A) John Bunyan

(B) Thomas Rhymer

(C) William Congreve

(D) Henry Fielding

<Note: When the work of Congreve and his colleagues was attacked by the clergyman Jeremy Collier as licentious, Congreve replied with Amendments of Mr. Collier's False and Imperfect Citations (1698). >

2. The Crystal Palace, a key exhibit of the Great Exhibition, was designed by

(A) Charles Darwin

(B) Edward Moxon

(C) Joseph Paxton

(D) Richard Owen

< Note: Crystal Palace, famous exhibition hall was designed by Sir Joseph Paxton for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, England. Because of its great size and its innovative use of glass and iron in prefabricated units, it was a milestone in the development of modern architecture. >

3. Influence of the Indian Philosophy is seen in the writings of

(A) G.B. Shaw

(B) Noel Coward

(C) Tom Stoppard

(D) T.S. Eliot

4. In which of his voyages, Gulliver discovered mountain-like beings?

(A) The land of the Lilliputians

(B) The land of the Brobdingnagians

(C) The land of the Laputans

(D) The land of the Houyhnhnms

< Note: Brobdingnag is the nation of giants visited by Gulliver in Part II. The people are sixty feet tall and everything else in their land is sized in proportion, on a scale of one foot to one inch. Though the giants of Brobdingnag are repulsive to look at closely, they are sound in their politics in many ways. The king of that land felt “whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together.” The king of Brobdingnag is not only much like Swift’s mentor, Sir William Temple, he is both a Tory mouthpiece and a humanist, and possibly Swift’s ideal of a good monarch. >

5. Patrick White’s Voss is a novel about

(A) the sea

(B) The capital market

(C) The landscape

(D) The judicial system

< Leichhardt , a 19th-century German explorer, planned to cross Australia from east to west and, with a party of six, started from the Condamine River in March, 1848. His last expedition was the subject of the novel Voss (1957) by Australian Nobel laureate Patrick White. It covers mostly the expedition through wild barren lands of Australia.>

6. Although Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney writes in English, in voice and subject matter, his poems are

(A) Welsh

(B) Scottish

(C) Irish

(D) Polish

< Haney’s poetry, beginning with Death of a Naturalist (1966), is rooted in the physical, rural surroundings of his childhood in Northern Ireland. >

7. To whom is Mary Shelley’s famous work Frankenstein dedicated?

(A) Lord Byron

(B) Claire Clairmont

(C) William Godwin

(D) P.B. Shelley

<Some scholars have identified Frankenstein as the source of the genre of science fiction, which seeks to define the place of man in the universe. Both the idea of a 'mad scientist' and the concept of creating a person in a laboratory originated with Frankenstein. Following Mary Shelley's lead, authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, and, more recently, Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury have created horror stories whose protagonists face problems brought about by science gone awry.>

8. Which among the following poems by Philip Larkin records his impressions while traveling to London by train?

(A) “Aubade”

(B) “Church Going”

(C) “The Whitsun Wedding”

(D) “An Arundel Tomb”

< “At first, I didn't notice what a noise
The weddings made
Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys
The interest of what's happening in the shade.”- “The Whitsun Wedding”>

9. The English satirist who used the sharp edge of praise to attack his victims was

(A) Ben Jonson

(B) John Donne

(C) John Dryden

(D) Samuel Butler

10. One of the most famous movements of direct address to the reader – “Reader, I married him” – occurs in

(A) Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones

(B) Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre

(C) Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy

(D) George Eliot’s Middlemarch

< Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre CHAPTER XXXVIII--CONCLUSION

Reader, I married him.  A quiet wedding we had:  he and I, the parson and clerk, were alone present.  When we got back from church, I went into the kitchen of the manor-house, where Mary was cooking the dinner and John cleaning the knives, and I said ->

11. Langland’s Piers Plowman is a satire on

(A) Aristocracy

(B) Chivalry

(C) Peasantry

(D) Clergy

< The 14th-century poem The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman, better known as Piers Plowman, is generally attributed to William Langland. Three distinct versions of it exist, the first c. 1362, the second c. 1377, and the third 1393 or 1398. It has been described as "a vision of Christ seen through the clouds of humanity."  A religious allegory, the work is written as a dream vision, a popular medieval form in which a story is presented as if the author had dreamed it. Piers Plowman is also a famous example of alliterative verse. >

12. Which of the following thinker concept pair is correctly matched?

(A) I.A. Richards – Archetypal Criticism

(B) Christopher Frye– Mysticism

(C) Jacques Derrida– Deconstruction

(D) Terry Eagleton– Psychological Criticism

< I.A. Richards – New Criticism

Christopher Frye–

 Jacques Derrida– Deconstruction

Terry Eagleton–political Criticism>

13. Sexual jealousy is a theme in Shakespeare’s

(A) The Merchant of Venice

(B) The Tempest

(C) Othello

(D) King Lear

<Othello is a tragedy on the theme of Sexual jealousy by English playwright William Shakespeare. It was written in about 1604 and first performed that year for King James I at Whitehall Palace in London.  >

14. The title, The New Criticism, published in 1941, was written by

(A) Cleanth Brooks

(B) John Crowe Ransom

(C) Robert Penn Warren

(D) Allan Tate

15. Which of the following is not a Revenge Tragedy?

(A) The White Devil

(B) The Duchess of Malfi

(C) Doctor Faustus

(D) The Spanish Tragedy

< The White Devil: John Webster’s great tragedy The White Devil, produced in 1612 depicts a world of extravagant passions, dark intrigue, and fratricidal violence. Despite its melodramatic themes, Webster's The White Devil is redeemed by his soaring poetic dialogue and his grasp of human psychology.

The Duchess of Malfi: John Webster’s great tragedy The White Devil staged about 1614 is even better than The White Devil.

The Spanish Tragedy:Thomas Kyd ‘s Spanish Tragedy (1589?) is best Senecan Revenge Tragedy in the use of shocking and horrifying melodramatic situations.>

16. Who of the following playwrights rejects the Aristotelian concept of tragic play as imitation of reality?

(A) G.B. Shaw

(B) Arthur Miller

(C) Bertolt Brecht

(D) John Galsworthy

< Brecht's narrative style, which he called epic theater, was directed against the illusion created by traditional theater of witnessing a slice of life. Instead, Brecht encouraged spectators to watch events on stage dispassionately and to reach their own conclusions. To prevent spectators from becoming emotionally involved with a play and identifying with its characters, Brecht used a variety of techniques. Notable among them was the Verfremdungseffekt (alienation or estrangement effect), which was achieved through such devices as choosing (for German audiences) unfamiliar settings, interrupting the action with songs, and announcing the contents of each scene through posters. Brecht temporarily returned to a more traditional dramatic mode in Furcht und Elend des Dritten Reiches (1941; The Private Life of the Master Race, 1944), an attack on the fascist government of Germany under Hitler. >

17. The label ‘Diasporic Writer’ can be applied to

I. Meena Alexander

II. Arundhati Roy

III. Kiran Desai

IV. Shashi Deshpande

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

(A) I and IV are correct.

(B) II and III are correct.

(C) I, II and IV are correct.

(D) I and III are correct.

18. The letter ‘A’ in The Scarlet Letter stands for

I. Adultery

II. Able

III. Angel

IV. Appetite

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

(A) I and II are correct.

(B) II and III are correct.

(C) I, II and IV are correct.

(D) I, II and III are correct.

< Scarlet Letter "A" represents the act of adultery that she has committed and it is to be a symbol of her sin—a badge of shame—for all to see. WIKI>

19. A monosyllabic rhyme on the final stressed syllable of two lines of verse is called

(A) Moonshine

(B) Feminine rhyme

(C) Masculine rhyme

(D) Eye rhyme

20. A fatwa was issued in Salman Rushdie’s name following the publication of :

(A) Midnight’s Children

(B) Shame

(C) Satanic Verses

(D) Grimus

21. “There is nothing outside the text” is a key statement emanating from

(A) Feminism

(B) New Historicism

(C) Deconstruction

(D) Structuralism

22. The Augustan Age is called so because

(A) King Augustus ruled over England during this period

(B) The English writers imitated the Roman writers during this period

(C) The English King was born in the month of August

(D) This was an age of sensibility

23. One of the important texts of Angry Young Man Movement is

(A) Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis

(B) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

(C) Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

(D) The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles

24. Whom does Alexander Pope satirise in the portrait of Sporus ?

(A) Lady Wortley Montague

(B) Joseph Addison

(C) Lord Shaftsbury

(D) Lord Harvey

UGC

25. The hero of Marlowe’s Tamburlaine was born as a

(A) Carpenter

(B) Goldsmith

(C) Shepherd

(D) Fisherman

26. In a letter to his brother George in September 1819, John Keats had this to say about a fellow romantic poet: “He describes what he sees –I describe what I imagine – Mine is the hardest task.” The poet under reference is

(A) Wordsworth

(B) Coleridge

(C) Byron

(D) Southey

<John Keats’ letter to his brother George, September 1819>

27. A sequence of repeated consonantal sounds in a stretch of language is

(A) Alliteration

(B) Acrostic

(C) Assent

(D) Syllable

28. Reformation was predominantly a movement in

(A) Politics

(B) Literature

(C) Religion

(D) Education

29. The motto “only connect” is taken from

(A) Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo

(B) Rudyard Kipling’s Kim

(C) H.G. Wells’ The History of Mr. Polly

(D) E.M. Forster’s Howards End

30. English Iambic Pentameter was brought to its first maturity in

(A) sonnet

(B) Dramatic verse

(C) lyric

(D) Elegy

31. Who among the following was not a member of the Bloomsbury Group?

(A) Lytton Strachey

(B) Clive Bell

(C) E.M. Forster

(D) Winston Churchill

32. The concept of human mind as tabula rasa or blank tablet was propounded by

(A) Bishop Berkley

(B) David Hume

(C) Francis Bacon

(D) John Locke

33. The terms ‘resonance’ and ‘wonder’ are associated with

(A) Stephen Greenblatt

(B) Terence Hawkes

(C) Terry Eagleton

(D) Ronald Barthes

34. The rhetorical pattern used by Chaucer in The Prologue to Canterbury Tales is

(A) ten-syllabic line

(B) eight-syllabic line

(C) Rhyme royal

(D) ottava rima

( In middle English all the consonants and final 'e' is sounded  from general prologue:

Whan that A-pril with his show-res soot-e
The droughte of March hath perced to the root-e,
And bathed e-very vein-e in swich li-cour,
Of which ver-tu en-gen-dred is the flowr;
Whan Ze-phy-rus eek with his sweet-e breeth
In-spired hath in e-very holt and he-eth )

35. Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species was published in the year

(A) 1859

(B) 1879

(C) 1845

(D) 1866

< Few books have rocked the world the way that On the Origin of Species did. Influenced in part by British geologist Sir Charles Lyell’s theory of a gradually changing earth, British naturalist Charles Darwin spent decades developing his theory of gradual evolution through natural selection before he published his book in 1859. The logical—and intensely controversial–-extension of Darwin’s theory was that humans, too, evolved through the ages. For people who accepted the biblical view of creation, the idea that human beings shared common roots with lower animals was shocking. In this excerpt from On the Origin of Species, Darwin carefully sidesteps the issue of human evolution (as he did throughout the book), focusing instead on competition and adaptation in lower animals and plants. >

36. Who of the following is the author of Juno and the Paycock ?

(A) Lady Gregory

(B) W.B. Yeats

(C) Oscar Wilde

(D) Sean O’Casey

< Referring to Ireland here is the famous remark in Juno and the Paycock: “The whole country's in a state o' chassis.”>

37. The title of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is taken from a play by

(A) Christopher Marlowe

(B) William Shakespeare

(C) Ben Jonson

(D) John Webster

38. “Silverman has never read Browning.” This is an example of

(A) Chiasmus

(B) Conceit

(C) Zeugma

(D) Metonymy

39. The term ‘Intentional Fallacy’ is first used by

(A) William Empson

(B) Northrop Frye

(C) Wellek and Warren

(D) Wimsatt and Beardsley

40. “Recessional: A Victorian Ode”, Kipling’s well-known poem,

I. laments the end of an Era

II. Marks a new commitment to scientific knowledge

III. Expresses the sincerity of his religious devotion

IV. Was occasioned by Queen Victoria’s 1897 Jubilee Celebration

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) I and IV are correct.

(D) I, III and IV are correct.

41. Who among the following is not a Restoration playwright?

(A) William Congreve

(B) William Wycherley

(C) Ben Jonson

(D) George Etherege

42. Which famous Romantic poem begins with the line : ‘Hail to thee, blithe spirit ! / Bird thou never wert” ?

(A) “Ode to a Nightingale”

(B) “To the Cuckoo”

(C) “To a Skylark”

(D) “To the Daisy”

43. Who among the following Victorian poets disliked his middle name ?

(A) Arthur Hugh Clough

(B) Dante Gabriel Rossetti

(C) Gerard Manley Hopkins

(D) Algernon Charles Swinburne

<One striking example is his comment that life at Oxford in the 1860s "did not encourage the growth of heterosexual responses." He is often ironic, in a way appropriate to his subject. In describing how young Gerard hated his middle name, Martin observes that it could not have escaped the young poet that his father intended to lay on him the qualities of the word "manly." Re: @http://articles.latimes.com/1991-06-18/news/vw-865_1_gerard-manley-hopkins>

44. Aston is a character in Pinter’s

(A) The Birthday Party

(B) The Caretaker

(C) The Dumb Waiter

(D) The Homecoming

45. Byron’s English Bards and Scottish Reviewers is about

I. the survey of English poetry

II. Evangelism in English poetry

III. Contemporary literary scene

IV. The early English travelers

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

(A) III and IV are correct.

(B) II, III and IV are correct.

(C) I and II are correct.

(D) I and III are correct.

46. Which Eliotian character utters the question – “Do I eat a peach” ?

(A) Marina

(B) Prufrock

(C) Sweeney

(D) Stetson

47. Which among the following works by Daniel Defoe landed him in prison and the pillory ?

(A) The True-Born Englishman

(B) Captain Singleton

(C) The Shortest Way with Dissenters

(D) Moll Flanders

< For publishing the pamphlet The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1703), English novelist and journalist Daniel Defoe was placed in the pillory, where an English mob could torment him. Defoe’s pamphlet satirized the intolerance of the Church of England toward Dissenters—Protestants who refused to accept the authority of England’s established church—at that time. >

48. The arrival of printing in fifteenth century England was engineered by

(A) Sir Thomas Malory

(B) John Gower

(C) John Barbour

(D) William Caxton

49. About which nineteenth century English writer was it said that “He had succeeded as a writer not by conforming to the Spirit of the Age, but in opposition to it” ?

(A) Lord Byron on Coleridge

(B) Coleridge on Keats

(C) Hazlitt on Lamb

(D) De Quincey on Crabbe

(William Hazlitt's The Spirit of the Age)

50. The Restoration comedy, The Double Dealer was written by

(A) John Dryden

(B) William Wycherley

(C) William Congreve

(D) George Etherege

Solved by Ardhendu De 

References: 

Wikipedia,

History of English Literature - Elbert,

Social History of England- Dr. Amio Sutradhar,

Twentieth Century Views- Ronald Paulson