M.A. (Final) DEGREE EXAMINATION, DECEMBER Second Year. English. Paper I LITERARY CRITICISM. Answer question 1 which is Compulsorily.

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1 (DEG 21) M.A. (Final) DEGREE EXAMINATION, DECEMBER Second Year English Paper I LITERARY CRITICISM Time : Three hours Maximum : 100 marks Answer question 1 which is Compulsorily. Answer ONE question from each UNIT making FIVE questions in total. All questions carry equal marks. UNIT I 1. Attempt a critical appreciation of the following passage. I grew up in the kind of town few people believe exists: a black upper-middle-class suburb full of colonial-style houses and Volkswagen Rabbits. Yes, Virginia, there is a black bourgeoisie, it has existed for years, and it summers on Martha s Vineyard. The Philadelphia suburb of Yeadon, my home through childhood and adolescence, is one of many black enclaves that someday will make a very interesting study for a sociologist. After World War II, housing speculators found it profitable to scare off white residents and sell whole streets of Yeadon to black professionals who were as eager as anyone else at that time to pursue the romantic suburban dream of fieldstone patios and eye-level ovens. in the 1950 s; half the black doctors and lawyers in Philadelphia crowded into this rather small town, which was one of the few integrated suburbs, and we Yeadon kids grew up with tree houses and two-car garages and fathers who commuted into the city. Our parents had a vision of pastoral normalcy for their children that was little different from the white ideal laid out in the Dick and Jane readers. Their attempts to provide this and to protect us from the slightest contact with race prejudice left us extraordinarily, perhaps unhealthily, sheltered: We were sent to Quaker schools and camps where race and class were discounted with eager innocence.

2 UNIT II 2. Discuss Hamartia and its relation to tragedy. 3. What are Dr. Johnson s views expressed in Life of Milton? 4. Critically comment on Coleridge s concept of imagination. 5. Discuss Arnold s poetry as criticism of life. UNIT III 6. Give an account of Eliot s definition of Tradition and the Individual Talent. 7. How does T. S. Eliot defend the metaphysical poets from the criticism of Dr. Johnson? 8. Any communication is a combination of different elements used by the writer and speaker. Illustrate with reference to Four Kinds of Meaning. UNIT IV 9. What is the relevance of irony as a poetic principle according to Cleanth Brooks? 10. Discuss intentional fallacy and its role in literature. 11. Why does Empson call the seventh type of ambiguity the most ambiguous that can be conceived? 12. Assess the practical value of stylistic analysis to the teaching of literature. UNIT V 13. Comment on the relation of structuralism to other schools of criticism. 14. What, according to Stanley Fish, are the factors that make an utterance intelligible? 15. How does Derrida substantiate his arguments in Structure, Sign and Play? 16. Trace the history of feminist poetics.

3 M.A. (Final) DEGREE EXAMINATION, DECEMBER Second Year English Paper II AMERICAN LITERATURE (DEG 22) Time : Three hours Maximum : 100 marks Answer question 1 which is compulsory. Answer any TWO questions from Unit II and TWO from Unit III. All questions carry equal marks. UNIT I 1. Annotate any FOUR of the following passages : (a) I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter Talking of all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them. (b) Solitary the thrush. The hermit withdrawn to himself, avoiding the settlements Sings by himself a song. (c) He said twice over before he knew himself Can t a man speak of his own child he s lost? (d) I like to think some boy s been swinging them But swinging doesn t bend them down to stay. (e) We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. (f) Him nature solicits with all her placid, all her monitory pictures : him the past instructs : him the future invites. (g) Will you take that phony dream and burn it before something happens? (h) He had a good dream. It s the only dream you can have to come out number one man. He fought it out here and this is where I am gonna win it for him.

4 UNIT II 2. How does Emerson distinguish between a true scholar and a bookworm? 3. How does Robert Frost respond to nature? Can we call him a regionalist? 4. Write a critical note on Whitman s use of symbols. 5. Consider Death of a Salesman as a critique of American values and culture. 6. Write a note on the impact of the Puritan Ethic on American culture. UNIT III 7. How does Thoreau s experiment at Walden represent simple living and high thinking? 8. How does Emily Dickinson deal with the traditional theme of death in a startling way? How does she perceive death? 9. Discuss The Old Man and the Sea as a symbolic novel. 10. Critically examine O Neill s use of experimental techniques in The Hairy Ape. 11. Attempt a critical appreciation of Poe s Raven. 12. Write Short notes on any TWO of the following : (a) Boston Brahmins (b) American Civil War (c) Depiction of slavery in 19 th century fiction (d) Democracy in literature.

5 (DEG 23) M.A. (Final) DEGREE EXAMINATION, DECEMBER Second Year English Paper III INDIAN ENGLISH LITERATURE Time : Three hours Maximum : 100 marks Question No. 1 in unit I is Compulsory. Answer any TWO questions each from Unit II and III. All questions carry equal marks. 1. Annotate FOUR of the following. UNIT I (a) Mayst thou be numbered when my days are done Under whose awful branches lingered pale. Fear, trembling Hope, and death the skeleton. (b) Secrets white - fire - veiled of the last Beyond, Crossing power swept silences rapture - stunned (c) The trip had darkened every face, Our deeds were neither great nor rare. Home is where we have to gather grace. (d) I am Indian,very brown,born in Malabar,I speak three languages, write in Two, dream in one. (e) By the deep roar of funeral pyres.

6 In the darkened room A woman Cannot find her reflection in the mirror. (f) All your words are like that - dark, strange, And wake. I cannot understand what you mean. (g) It is useless now, your highness. These are not good tidings. I am perfectly certain that it is our emperor himself who has secretly spread the report everywhere. (h) In Vedic language God has been called Avih, denoting that his nature is Revelation. UNIT II 2. Comment on autobiographical significance of Toru Dutt s Casurina Tree. 3. How do you account for the statement that Ramanujan is essentially a poet of memory? 4. Bring out the element of humour in Nissim Ezekiel s poems. 5. Comment on the imagery used in the king of the dark chamber. 6. What are Tagore s views on Man? Explain. UNIT III 7. Explain the symbolic and thematic implications of The Symbol Dawn. 8. Write a note on the relevance of the characters of Devadatta and Kapila to the central theme of Hayavadana. 9. Consider The Ganga Ghat as yet another triumph of Raja Rao s mastery of the craft of the fiction. 10. Bring out the element of social realism in Mulk Raj Anand s novel Untouchable. 11. Discuss the theme of alienation in Anita Desai s novel Fire on The Mountain.

7 12. Write short notes on any FOUR of the following: (a) Tagore as a playwright (b) Role of Bhagavatha in Hayavadhana. (c) Love and passion in Gitanjali. (d) Significance of the title A Tiger for Malgudi. (e) Ambedkar s social concerns in The Adoption of the constitution of India. (f) Irony in Night of the Scorpion. (g) Art of characterization in The long silence. (h) Theme of Chicago Zen.

8 (DEG 24) Time : Three hours M.A.(Final) DEGREE EXAMINATION, DECEMBER Second Year English Paper IV TWENTIETH CENTURY POETRY AND DRAMA Maximum : 100 marks Answer Questions No.1 from Unit I, TWO questions from Unit II and TWO questions from Unit III. All questions carry equal marks. 1. Annotate FIVE of the following. UNIT I (a) You were silly like us, your gift survived it all. The parish of rich women, physical decay, yourself. Had Ireland hurt you into poetry. (b) And the true Joy of the long dead child sand burning In the sun. (c) When the fact fails him, he approved his senses, when the fact fails me, approve my senses. (d) Never was such antiqueness of romance, such tasty honey oozing from the heart. (e) Over the stone reeshes the wind, Able to mingle with nothing,like the hearing of the blind stone itself. (f) And as the lightened brakes took hold, there swelled, A sense of falling, like an arrow shower sent out of eight, somewhere becoming rain. (g) With the help of God I did, surely, and that the Holy Immaculate mother may intercode for his soul. (h) This is where the staring angles go through. This is where all the stars bow down.

9 UNIT II 2. What commitment to political interest do you find in W.H.Auden? Elaborate. 3. Explain how Deplan Thomas draws the parallel between poet s and flowers, poet s and Nature s vitality and confronts them with the universal fact of death in the poem The Force that through the green Fuse Drives the Flower. 4. Would you subscribe to the view that Ted Hughes is a poet of violence? Support your argument with suitable illustrations. 5. Trace the development of thought in Robert Graves s In Booken Images. 6. Church going is a moving consideration by the poet of What church means to him. 7. Discuss the conflict between romantic illusions and reality that permeate The Playboy of the Western World. 8. What according to you are the chief characteristics of the Theatre of the Absurd? UNIT III 9. Do you agree that Stephen Spender s poetry is diffuse and talkative? Explain. 10. Bring out the irony and humour in A Phoenix Too Frequent. 11. Consider Winnie as a naturalistic figure. 12. Is it correct to interpret The Birthday Party as an allegory of death? 13. Write short notes on FOUR of the following. (a) Surrealism. (b) Poetic Drama. (c) The Ballie Revival. (d) Mock-Hero. (e) Myth in Modern Poetry. (f) Nature Imagery in Modern Poetry. (g) Movement Poetry. (h) War Poetry.

10 (DEG 25) M.A. (Final) DEGREE EXAMINATION, DECEMBER Second Year English Paper V TWENTIETH CENTURY PROSE AND FICTION Time : Three hours Maximum : 100 marks Question in UNIT I is Compulsory. Answer any TWO questions from UNIT II and TWO questions from UNIT III. 1. Annotate any FOUR of the following : All questions carry equal marks. UNIT I (a) Hamlet s bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the face of his artistic problem. (b) The kind of criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most misleading kind possible. (c) I believe... that poetry is the natural and complete medium for drama, that the prose plays are a kind of abstraction capable of giving you only a part of what the theatre can give, and that the verse play is capable of something much more intense and exciting. (d) In matters of great importance the critic must not coerce, and he must not make judgement of worse and better. He must simply elucidate; the reader will form the correct judgement for himself. (e) A precept such as Horace or Boileau gives us, is merely an unfinished analysis. (f) Since Arnold s attempt to correct his country men English criticism has followed two directions. (g) And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. (h) It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman manly or man womanly.

11 UNIT II 2. Write a critical note on T.S. Eliot s idea of a Perfect Critic. 3. Comment of T.S. Eliot s views on poetic drama. 4. Analyse T.S. Eliot s assessment of Hamlet as a work of art. 5. "To live one s femininity and to learn to let others alone are Tanta mount, in A Room of One s Own, to a positive activity, that of being a mute commentator, or commentator by example, of on the actions of men". Discuss. 6. Critically examine Virginia Woolf s claim that "Judith" could not have become a Shakespeare even if she had her brother s genius. UNIT III 7. What is Lytton strachey s attitude to the Victorian social values as revealed in The Eminent Victorians? 8. How does Conrad s narrative technique of multiple points of view contribute to the enrichment of the moral meaning of Lord Jim. 9. Trace the development of the recurrent molefe the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a young. 10. "The Moon and six peace is Somerset Maugham s contribution to a dialectic about the nature of genius and its role in relation to society". Discuss. 11. C.P. Snow s "intelligence is both institutional and humane". Illustrate with reference to his The Masters. 12. Examine the existential implications of Mess Rain s rejection of her lover. 13. Lord of the Flies proposes a view of man s essential nature which one might more normally expect to find argued in a philosophical treatise on theological work. Discuss. 14. Examine the treatment of the theme of martyrdom in The Power and the Glory.

12 15. Write short notes on FOUR of the following : (a) Strachey s prose style. (b) Chriet symbolism in The Power and the Glory. (c) Fable form of the novel Lord of the Flies. (d) Symbolism. (e) Limitations of Stephen s theory of aesthetics. (f) Interior monologue. (g) Slicam of consciousness technique. (h) The function of literary criticism.