UPSC Mains ENGLISH-LITERATURE-PAPER-II 2015

All changed, changed utterly : A terrible beauty is born.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each I do not think that they will sing to me.

Was he free ? Was he happy? The question is absurd : Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

This was Mr. Bleaney's room. He stayed The whole time he was at the Bodies, till They moved him.

The new poets still quoted the old poets, but no one spoke in verse of the pregnant woman.

Auden asserts in "The Memory of W.B. Yeats" that poetry is a purely aesthetic and not an ethical or religious practice. Discuss.

What do the images, "Astride of a grave and a difficult birth; down in the hole, lingeringly, the gravedigger puts on the forceps; we have time to grow old" suggest in Waiting for Godot?

All Yeats touched he turned into symbols: Ireland, Byzantium, Maud Gonne, The Easter Rising, The Tower Discuss.

Examine Philip Larkin's bleak view of human life and relationship with reference to his poems.

Discuss Eliot's religious-philosophical reflections on time and consciousness in "Burnt Norton".

Deconstruction is not synonymous with destruction, it is in fact closer to the original meaning of the word, "analysis" which originally means to undo. Discuss.

Discuss how Jimmy's frenetic quest for real life destroys the lives of those to whom he is closest.

The mother figuring in Ramanujan's poem becomes a representative of all that is left behind, lost and never found. Discuss.

The characters in Waiting for Godot go on; in the universe of this play "go on" leads no where Elucidate.

The novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is structured in the manner of a classical drama.

“Oedipus complex” as the basis of Sons and Lovers.

Mrs. Dalloway is constructed in terms of the two dimensions of space and time.

Ratna [Kanthapura] is a symbol of some aspects of the social injustice done to women.

Naipaul's use of imagery and symbolism to enhance the meaning of his novel A House for Mr. Biswas.

How does Conrad depict the difficulty of finding a secure moral base in the ambience of political violence, economic oppression, isolation and existential dread in Lord Jim ?

Lawrence's writings transcribe the most elusive sensations and emotions of life of men and women and in the physical world of nature. Discuss.

Forster's Passage to India exists on two plains and it has different meanings on different plains. Elaborate.

Joyce freed himself from socially structured emotions by means of creating art as a new religion he detached fiction from one particular ideological base. Discuss with reference to Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man.

Describe Naipaul's depiction of humour in raucous scenes of life in Mr. Biswas's career and in the language of the characters.

With something of the passion of the mystic Virginia Woolf in Mrs. Dalloway values reality of the perceptive moment and of inner wonder. Elaborate.

How does the narrative of Kanthapura establish the parameters of the story within old and new legends ?

How does E.M. Forster portray the common racial tensions and prejudices between the Indians and the British in his A Passage to India ?

Argue why Lord Jim is considered the Hamlet of Joseph Conrad.