UPSC Mains ENGLISH-LITERATURE-PAPER-II 2016

O chestnut-tree, great rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole ? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?

I had seen birth and death, But had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry.

Only one ship is seeking us, a black Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back A huge and birdless silence.

Nothing stays out : daughters get married to short-lived idiots; sons who run away come back

Discuss how Yeats asserts the transcendence of art over the fleeting and carnal nature of mortal existence in his Byzantium poems.

How does Eliot convey modern man's chaotic existence through the complex shifts of the past and present moments in his "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"?

It is nothing joined; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' is the metaphor by which it is most naturally described." Elaborate this statement about the Stream of Consciousness Novel.

Show how W.H. Auden views order and universal patterns of human existence with particular reference to his "The Unknown Citizen" and "September 1, 1939".

I have no belief in 'tradition' or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets." How is this attitude reflected in Philip Larkin's poetry?

Psychoanalytic criticism is similar to New criticism in not concerning itself with "what the author intended"," but "what the author never intended". Elucidate.

Though Look Back in Anger is an eloquent testament of alienated youth, it is more a Strindbergian study of a marriage steeped in love and hate." Elaborate.

Discuss the significant differences between Act 1 and Act 2 of Waiting for Godot, despite the apparent repetition and the presence of the same characters in both acts.

A.K. Ramanujan's poetry is born out of the dialectical interplay between his Indian and American experience on the one hand, and that between his sense of his own self and all experiences on the other." Explain.

Lord Jim is "the development of one situation, only one really, from beginning to end".

The conflict between Mrs. Morel and Miriam in Sons and Lovers.

The balance of antipathy and sympathy in A Passage to India.

The use of imagery in Mrs. Dalloway.

Raja Rao's use of English to depict rural Indian experience.

How does Joyce use a complex narrative perspective in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, employing what he termed the "Uncle Charles Principle"?

What role does the “Patna Affair" play in compelling Jim of Lord Jim to look into his deepest self?

Lively, funny and malicious, Naipaul's novel is an ecstatic evocation of Caribbean life." Elucidate.

From a psychoanalytical critic's perspective, pose the question "What is Paul Morel's problem?" and attempt a suitable answer.

In spite of the general view that Forster's A Passage to India is a critique of "Orientalist” stereotypes, the novel still clings to some racial stereotypes while depicting Indian characters. Do you agree?

Consider the statement that "the subaltern nature of Kanthapura arises when the women of the village assume power in the absence of their men, who have fled to the jungle."

While A House for Mr. Biswas is great in macrocosm, it is also flawless in microcosm. Do you agree?

Among the theories about the incident in Marabar Caves involving Adela Adela hallucinated, the guide is the culprit, or a stranger did it - which is the most acceptable to you? Can you offer your own theory?

Discuss Stephen's theory of the depersonalization of the artist in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in the context of Modernism.