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Part II (PU) | Eureka Study Aids
1. YEAR 2004
Attempt any FOUR questions including questions No. 5 which is
COMPULSORY. All questions carry equal marks.
1. Describe Aristotle's view on Ideal Tragic Hero. Or
Critically examine Aristotle's concept of Catharsis.
2. Critically assess Raymond William's essay on "Tragedy and
Contemporary Idea". Or
Explain in detail what Raymond William means by the "Rejection of
Tragedy".
3. Where does the meaning lie, in the Text, reader, writer or the
structure? Explain in the light of Catherine Belsey's "Critical Practice".
Or
Discuss Belsey's arguments in favour of structural criticism.
4. What relationship does Catherine Belsey establish between
criticism and commonsense? Or
On what grounds in tradition linked to tragedy? Discuss in the light of
Raymond William's "Modern Tragedy".
5. Critically appreciate any ONE of the following:
(a) Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop her, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain
And sings a melancholy strain;
O Listen! For the vale profound
Is overflowing with sound
No nightingale did ever chant
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands.
(b) When we two parted
In silence and tears,
Half broken hearted,
To sever for years,
Pale grew they cheeks and cold
Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
Sorrow to this!
2. YEAR 2005
Attempt FOUR questions including Question No. 5 which is
COMPULSORY. All questions carry EQUAL marks.
1. Critically evaluate Aristotle's concept of imitation. OR
Discuss Aristotle's concept of Ideal Tragic Hero.
2. Elucidate Raymond William's views on 'Rejection of Tragedy'. OR
Critically access Raymond William's concept of 'Tragedy and
Tradition'.
3. Discuss deconstruction method in detail. How has it changed the
concept Modern Criticism? (critical practice) OR
Elucidate the relationship between criticism and commonsense in the
light of Catherine Belsey's views.
4. Discuss Raymond Williams as a critic. OR
Discuss expressive realism and new criticism and also differentiate
them from each other.
5. Critically appreciate any ONE of the following:
(i) In room, darker than the night, I lay,
Thinking about thine mysterious universe
Never reaching the conclusion, I pray,
I would not crouch in the lap of death if I could converse.
Forests deep and wild, people merry and in gloom
Rivers flowing and oceans dry, autumn leaves and roses bloom.
Lonely clouds wandering in the light of serene moon
Never reaching a reason, an insane will die soon.
(ii) The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This sea that bears her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping Flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune.
It moves us not --- Great God! I would rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old triton blow his wreathed horn.
3. YEAR 2006
Attempt FOUR questions. All questions carry equal marks.
1. The constituent elements of tragedy work together to define first its
complication and then the denouement. Explain with reference to
Aristotle's Poetics. OR
The art of tragedy aims itself at the audience. Discuss with reference
to Aristotle's Poetics.
2. Explain Raymond Williams, reading of 18th and 19th century tragic
theory. OR
In Bertoit Brecht the rejection of tragedy has many motives and takes
many forms. Explain.
3. What are some of the assumptions of classic Realism that New
Criticism attempts to challenge? OR
How can meaning be constructed by reproducing what is familiar?
4. 'You cannot value him (artist) alone, you must set him, for contrast
and comparison, among the dead'? Discuss with reference to T.S.
Eliot's Tradition and Individual Talent. OR
'Difference between art and event is absolute'. Explain with reference
to T.S. Eliot's essay Tradition and Individual Talent.
5. The poet is a 'maker'. Justify in the light of Sidney's essay An
Apology for Poetry. OR
According to A.G. George, Sidney's essential contribution to criticism
lies in his redefinition of poetry in such a manner as to make the moral
content of poetry a part of its essential requirement. How far would
you agree with A.G. George's reading of An Apology for Poetry?
6. Critically appreciate any ONE of the following:
(i) One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away;
Again I wrote it, with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
'Vain man, 'said she, 'that dost in vain assay
A mortal thing so to immortalize;
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eke my names be wiped our likewise',
'Not so,' quoth I. 'Let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by frame;
My verse your virtues rare shall eternise,
And in the heavens with your glorious name.
Where, when as death shall all the world subdue,
Our love shall live, and later life renew'.
(ii) I live in one city
But then it becomes another.
The point where they mesh --
I call it mine.
Dacoits creep from caves
In the banks of the Indus
One of them is displaced.
From Trafalgar Square
He dominated London, his face.
Masked by scarves and sunglasses.
He draws towards him all the conflict
of the metropolis -- his speech
A barrage of grenades, rocket launchers.
He marks time with his digital watch
The pigeons get under his feet.
In the double city the beggar's cry
Travels from one region to the next.
4. YEAR 2007
Attempt any FOUR questions. All questions carry equal marks.
1. "The first essential" says ARISTOTLE the life and soul, so to speak
of tragedy is the plot; character comes second. How far can this
statement be defended? OR
The tragic pleasure is that of pity and fear and the poet has to produce
it by a work of imitation. Discuss.
2. "From almost the highest estimation of learning" says Sidney it "is
fallen to be the laughing stock of children, "what were the views of
poetry in his time? OR
Does the writing and appreciation of poetry require a non-rational
mode of study? Answer with reference to Sidney's An Apology for
Poetry.
3. How does Eliot conceptualize tradition and how can it be acquired?
OR
How does a classic realist text address the subject?
4. How does Eliot conceive the contribution made by Milton and
Dryden to the literary tradition in his essay: The Metaphysical Poets?
OR
How does ideology sharp the subject? Can the subject find his-way
out of ideology?
5. How is Brechtian drama a rejection of tragedy? OR
Emphasis on evil is a recurrent concern of tragedy. Discuss with
reference to Collians' essay Tragedy and Tradition' and Tradition and
Tragedy and contemporary ideas'.
6. Give critical appreciation of ONE of the following:
(i) Prospero's Farewell To His Magic
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all "spirits and
Are Meltod into air, into thin air
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud --- capp'd towers the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave, not a rack behind. We are stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
(ii) From: Cult of Indecision
I live in that strange land
Between promises made to myself
And broken with liquid precision
Where days roll into night
Nights collide with days
Like marbles in black and white
With a yin --- yang wisdom
That thrives on indecision
5. YEAR 2008
Attempt FOUR questions. All questions carry equal marks.
1. Imitation is crucial to tragic pleasure. Discuss in the light of
Aristotle's Poetics.
2. How does Williams trace the career of Brechtian tragedy?
3. What do you understand by a dialectical text? How is Reader
Power criticism well suited to the analysis of such texts?
4. What are the three features that describe a classic realist text?
5. How does 'individual talent' relate with the existing literary
'tradition'?
6. How does 'poesy' construct delight out of what is 'horrible', 'cruel'
and 'unnatural'?
7. Critically evaluate any ONE of the following:
(i) Out of the wood of thoughts that grows by night
To be cut down by the sharp axe of light,
Out of the night, two cocks together crow,
Cleaving the darkness with a silver blow;
And bright before my eyes twin trumpeters stand,
Heralds of splendour, one at either hand,
Each facing each as in a coat of arms;
The milkers lace their boots up at the farms.
From Cock Crow by Edward Thomas
(ii) My silting hope. My lowlands of the mind.
Heaviness of being. And poetry
Sluggish in doldrums of what happens.
Me waiting until I was nearly fifty
To credit marvels. Like the tree clock of tin cans
The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten,
Time to be dazzled and the heart of lighten.
From Fosterling by Seamus Heaney
6. YEAR 2009
Attempt FOUR questions. All questions carry equal marks.
1. Discuss Aristotle's theory of tragedy with reference to any tragedy
that you have read. (Aristotle: Poetics)
2. How does Williams trace the rank of the tragic hero from the
Classical to the Modern times? (Raymond Williams: Modern Tragedy)
3. In what ways did New Critics change the approach of criticism
towards a literary text? (Catherine: Critical Practice)
4. How is a young writer disadvantaged without a sense of tradition?
(T.S. Eliot: Tradition and Individual Talent)
5. How does Sydney perceive Plato's stance on poets and poetry?
(Philip Sydney: Apology for Poetry)
6. Differentiate between the Dialectical and the Rhetorical text. How
does each determine the role of the reader differently? (Catherine
Belsey: Critical Practice)
7. Critically evaluate any ONE of the following extracts:
(i) Twelve o' clock
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium
(T.S. Eliot: Rhapsody on a Windy Night)
(ii) Walking across the Brooklyn Bridge
Even on a hot afternoon
One sees many joggers.
And there is the view, of course
Looking across the water
I think of those people from Vietnam.
The mothers, the fathers,
What they would'not have given,
What they would still give-
Their blood, their hair, their livers, their kidneys,
Their lunges, their fingers, their thumbs-
To get their children
Past the Statue of Liberty
7. YEAR 2010
Attempt FOUR questions. All questions carry equal marks.
1. Aristotle's theory of tragedy is governed by a preoccupation with
audience response. Discuss.
2. 'Our tragedies and comedies not without cause cried out against
observing rules neither of honest civility nor of skillful poetry', says
Sidney. Discuss Sidney's statement.
3. T.S. Eliot says you cannot value the poet alone 'you must set him,
for contrast and comparison, among the dead.' In the light of this
statement explain Eliot's perspective in the essay, Tradition and
Individual Talent.
4. Discuss Classical Tragedy with reference to Hegel and Nietzsche.
(Williams)
5. 'There is no Criticism without Ideology.' How does Belsey argue this
thesis in Critical Practice.
6. Raymond Williams in 'Tragedy and Tradition' and Belsey in Critical
Practice urge us to revaluate existing approaches to Criticism.
Discuss.
7. Critically evaluate any ONE of the following:
(i) I am not one who much or oft delight
To season of my fireside with personal talk,
Of friends who live within an easy walk,
Or neighbours, daily, weekly in my sight:
And for my chance acquaintance ladies bright,
Sons, mothers, maidens withering on the stalk,
These all wear out of me, like Forms, with chalk
Painted on rich men's floor, for one feast night.
(From Wordsworth's Personal Talk)
(ii) I say him leap and thwack you with
Inherited expertise. I
Saw you still the pole and work your
Son to the ground. A dying art
Bridged two generations. You thought.
Now we come for formalities
But you talk of poetry and how
Meaningful some verses become
When the young die and old men live.
(Athar Tahir - Subtraction II)
8. YEAR 2011
Attempt any FOUR questions including Question No. 5 which is
COMPULSORY. All questions carry equal marks.
1. Aristotle's discussion on Tragedy is determined by his conception of
human nature and social relations. Discuss.
2. What is William's thesis in Tragedy and Tradition, and how does it
determine the structure of the essay?
3. Critical Practice is produced with a bias in favour of the interrogative
text. Would you agree? Give reasons for your answer.
4. What risks could 'Individual Talent' run in its disregard of tradition?
5. Who is the assumed audience of Sidney's An Apology for Poetry?
Justify your answer with close reference to the text.
6. Explain the radical position of 'New Criticism' in its time and say
how it fails to break free from 'Expressive Realism'.
7. Critically evaluate any ONE of the following:
(i) What is Freedom? --- Ye can tell
That which Slavery is too well,
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own.
9. YEAR 2012
Attempt FOUR questions. All questions carry equal marks.
1. "Poetry is something more philosophic and of graver importance
than history, since its statements are of the nature of universals".
Estimate the relative importance of poetry and philosophy in the light
of the above statement.
2. How does modern tragedy encounter the issues of order and
accident?
3. Sum up the contribution of Roland Barthes and Jacque Lacan to the
development of modern critical trends.
4. Why does T.S. Eliot use the analogy of the catalyst for explaining
the role of the poetic mind in the act of creation? How appropriate is
this comparison in your own view?
5. Does Philip Sidney present a plausible critical picture of the
contemporary British theatre? What are his chief observations in this
regard?
6. "By a change of dramatic view point, we have to look not only at the
isolated experience of the martyr, but at the social process of his
martyrdom". How does the statement point out the departure of Brecht
from the classical notion of tragic hero and tragic experience?
7. Critically examine any ONE of the following:
"MISERRUMUS,' and neither name nor date,
Prayer, text, or symbol, graven upon the stone,
Nought but that word assigned to the unknown,
That solitary word-to-separate
From all, and cast a cloud around the fate
Of him who lies beneath. Most wretched one,
'Who' chose his epitaph?--- Himself alone
Could thus have dared the grave to agitate,
And claim, among the dead, this awful crown;
"Nor doubt that He marked also for his own
Close to these cloistral steps a burial place,
The every foot might fall with heavier tread,
Trampling upon his vileness. Stranger, pass
Softly! To save the contrite, Jesus bled
(William Wordsworth)
(ii) BRIGHT star! Would I were steadfast as thou art ---
Not in love splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors ---
No --- yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever --- or else swoon to death.
(John Keats)
10. YEAR 2013
Attempt FOUR questions. All questions carry equal marks.
1. Discuss Aristotle's concept of a tragic hero in the light of his book
Poetics.
2. Sidney's Apology for Poetry presents a brilliant analysis of the
contemporary dramatic practice. Explain.
3. "It is not the, the greatness the intensity of emotions, the
components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so
to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts." Explain this
statement in the light of Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual
Talent".
4. What are the limitations of Experience Realist critical approach to
Literature?
5. What are Raymond Williams' views regarding culture and tragedy?
Discuss in detail.
6. Criticism is an effort "to see things as they are, without partiality,
without obtrusion of personal liking of disliking." What is your opinion?
7. Critically examine any ONE of the following:
(i) Full fathom five my father lies,
Of his bones are coral made:
Those were pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell;
Burthen: Ding, Dong.
Hark, now I hear them --- ding-dong bell.
(Shakespeare)
(ii) A poor bird freely roaming in the jungle
He might not have been affected by these hindrance
On whose decoration the nature is decorated
His world might be innocent".
(Sarala Bista)