UPSC Mains ENGLISH-LITERATURE-PAPER-II 2013

The comically self-aware persona in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Yeats's fancy for an aristocratic life of elegance and leisure in "A Prayer for My Daughter"

The thematic rhymes in Section 3 of "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"

Postcolonial melancholia

Postmodern 'realisms'

How sustainable is the argument that Indian writers in English betray an 'anxiety of Indianness'?

To what extent have Indian traditions of thought influenced A. K. Ramanujan's poetry?

How does Beckett exploit the metaphor of life as theatre in Waiting for Godot?

Was Philip Larkin, the poet troubled by the socio-economic imbalances in post-World War II Britain? Substantiate.

Discuss some major issues involving language as power in postmodern English writing.

How crucial in your view is the concept of 'Othering' in postcolonial literatures?

Answer the questions that follow this passage

What possible meanings exist beyond mere lexical meaning?

How differently significant are the two questions concerning Cordelia's silence in King Lear?

What special meaning to a speech does 'dramatic irony' give?

In what way is the meaning of a character's utterance limited and limiting in narrative fiction?

Explain the phrase 'the sense of the design'.

What memories of childhood and family inform A House for Mr Biswas?

Comment critically on the view that A Passage to India presents a muddle—the whole country as a place of division and disjunction.

Attempt a critique of the writer as worker as enunciated in Marxist critical thought.

How do Feminist writers engage cultural politics?

How does Mrs Dalloway capture the sense of rupture caused by a catastrophic war?

Comment on the deployment of repetitive language and action in the English 'new theatre'.