ugc net Paper 2- December 2004: part 1

1. In Langlands‘ Piers the Plowman, Piers appears finally as :

(A) Charity (B) The Holy Trinity (C) Jesus (D) The Good Samaritan

Answer: C

“Piers Plowman,” a Middle English poem by William Langland, is a quest that occurs within dream visions that satirize secular and religious figures corrupted by greed. The poem is divided into sections called passus, Latin for step (passus is singular and passi is plural) and means a stage, or the stages, of a journey. It  contains the first known reference to a literary tradition of Robin Hood tales.

 2. It is decided that each Canterbury pilgrim would tell in all :

(A) One story (B) Two stories (C) Three stories (D) Four stories

Answer: D

The Canterbury Tales begins with the introduction of each of the pilgrims making their journey to Canterbury to the shrine of Thomas a Becket. These pilgrims include a Knight, his son the Squire, the Knight's Yeoman, a Prioress, a Second Nun, a Monk, a Friar, a Merchant, a Clerk, a Man of Law, a Franklin, a Weaver, a Dyer, a Carpenter, a Tapestry-Maker, a Haberdasher, a Cook, a Shipman, a Physician, a Parson, a Miller, a Manciple, a Reeve, a Summoner, a Pardoner, the Wife of Bath, and Chaucer himself. Congregating at the Tabard Inn, the pilgrims decide to tell stories to pass their time on the way to Canterbury. The Host of the Tabard Inn sets the rules for the tales. Each of the pilgrims will tell two stories on the way to Canterbury, and two stories on the return trip. The Host will decide whose tale is best for meaningfulness and for fun. They decide to draw lots to see who will tell the first tale, and the Knight receives the honor.

 3. Venus and Adonis is a long narrative poem by :

 (A) Shakespeare (B) Marlowe (C) Drayton (D) Sydney

Answer: A

During his lifetime Shakespeare’s fame as a poet equalled and perhaps outstripped his fame as a playwright. His most popular poem was Venus and Adonis. It was reprinted nine times in his lifetime, and there are more surviving contemporary references to Venus and Adonis than to any of Shakespeare’s plays. The poem was most likely written in 1592, when London’s theaters were closed due to an outbreak of plague, and it was first published in 1593. Venus and Adonis was published with a dedication to the Earl of Southampton in which Shakespeare promised to follow up this light-hearted and erotic poem with a “graver labor.” This almost certainly refers to The Rape of Lucrece, which was published a year later, in 1594, and which was also dedicated to the Earl of Southampton. The Rape of Lucrece was almost as popular as the earlier poem, going through at least six editions in Shakespeare’s lifetime. The poem is a “graver labor” than Venus and Adonis because it is neither humorous nor erotic, and it tackles troubling moral and political themes. However, like Venus and Adonis, Lucrece is also interested in the uncontrollable power of desire. Both poems were written in iambic pentameter.

Venus and Adonis retells an ancient Mediterranean myth about a beautiful boy, Adonis, who has no interest in love or sex and spends all his time hunting instead. Venus, the goddess of sexual love, falls in love with Adonis at first sight, and spends most of the poem trying to seduce him, or at least to prevent him from leaving. At the end of the poem, Adonis is killed by a boar while hunting, and Venus transforms his body into a flower to remember him. Venus and Adonis is primarily an erotic poem that focuses on the uncontrollable power of sexual desire. Venus plays the role of aggressive seducer, which in Elizabethan England was reserved for male lovers. Adonis only speaks a fraction of the poem’s lines, and when he does speak, he tries to convince Venus he’s too young to love her, and is only interested in hunting: “‘I know not love,’ quoth he, ‘nor will not know it, / Unless it be a boar, and then I chase it.’” Venus seems to not care about Adonis’s indifference, and because she is a goddess, she has the physical capacity to restrain him easily. The effect is comic, but Venus’s aggressive sexuality challenges conventional Elizabethan ideas about gender.

The Rape of Lucrece retells a story from Roman history that was well-known in Shakespeare’s England. Many authors had composed versions of this story before Shakespeare, including the Roman writers Ovid and Livy, and the medieval English poets Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower. Shakespeare was probably familiar with all these versions. In the poem, Lucrece is the wife of the Roman nobleman Collatine. After Collatine boasts about his wife’s beauty and faithfulness in front of another Roman noble, the king’s son, Tarquin, travels to Lucrece’s house and rapes her. Afterward Lucrece sends her family a message telling them what happened, but not naming her attacker. Collatine returns home, where Lucrece tells him who raped her, then commits suicide.

 4. The total number of poems in Shakespeare‘s Sonnets is :

(A) 123 (B) 142 (C) 104 (D) 154

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Answer: D

 5. Which of the following plays has a Machiavellean hero ?

(A) Tamburlaine Part I (B) Dr. Faustus (C) Jew of Malta (D) Edward II

Answer: C

A Machiavellian hero is willing to do whatever it takes to achieve his goal, no matter the cost. He seems to lack a moral code or a true moral compass.

Here are some examples of Machiavellian heroes:

Jack from Lord of the Flies: Though not the protagonist, he certainly puts up a fierce battle for the role and has some Machiavellian tendencies. Jack wants to be leader of this deserted group of school boys, no matter the cost. He even resorts to murder more than once.

Henry VIII (real life history): Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction, and the rule of Henry VIII certainly seems to indicate that he had some Machiavellian personality traits. He beheaded two wives, had other marriages annulled, and beheaded some of his (former) closest friends when they failed to achieve the goals he had in mind. He was certainly considered a hero early in his rule, being described as attractive and accomplished. By the end of his life, he was a tyrant to deal with.

Shakespeare's Richard III - briefly put, he orders the murders of family members in order to obtain the crown.

Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost-as Milton portrays him, the beautiful angel Satan is willing to risk all, over and over again, in order to grasp ultimate power and revenge.

Khaled Hosseini's Amir in The Kite Runner--this is a more modern version of a Machiavellian hero, but in the first section of the novel, Amir cowardly betrays his friend and then frames him so that his father can focus solely on him. Amir does change as the novel progresses and loses his selfish tendencies, but his willingness to sacrifice anything or anyone to obtain his father's approval is shocking and results in long-term repercussions for him and others.

Napoleon from Orwell's Animal Farm or the "real" Josef Stalin--both use others (such as Snowball or Trotsky) until their use is expended and then annihilate them. 

 6. Which of the following is written by Samuel Butler ?

(A) Religio Laici (B) David Simple  (C) Hudibras (D) Journal of the Plague Year

Answer: C

Samuel Butler (17th-century poet, author of Hudibras)

Hudibras  is a satire in three parts, each containing three cantos, written by Samuel Butler (1613-80 Its narrative form is that of a mock romance, derived from Don Quixote, in which a grotesque Presbyterian knight, Sir Hudibras, and his sectarian squire Ralpho set out on horseback and encounter a bear-baiting mob who, after a comic skirmish, imprison them in the stocks. In the second part a widow, whom Hudibras hopes to marry for the sake of her jointure, agrees to release them on condition that the knight undergoes a whipping for her sake. They visit Sidrophel, a charlatan posing as an astrologer, whom Hudibras assaults

and leaves for dead. In Part III Hudibras returns to the widow and claims that he has fulfilled his promise to whip himself, but is interrupted by a gang which he mistakes for Sidrophel's supernatural agents. They cudgel him and force him to confess to his iniquities. He consults a lawyer, who advises him to write love letters to the widow in order to inveigle her in her replies. The second canto of Part III has no connection with the rest of the poem but consists of an account of political events between the death of Cromwell and the restoration of Charles II and a dialogue between two politicians, one of them modelled on Shaftesbury.

The loose narrative framework of the poem allows Butler ample opportunity to digress; in fact the digressions form the substance of the poem. Hudibras is the most learnedly

allusive poem in English but Butler treats all erudition with contempt. His most powerful satirical weapon is his style, the deliberately cumbersome octosyllabic metre and comic rhymes of which render absurd every subject to which they are applied.

 7. Which of the following poems did Milton write in Octosyllabic Couplets ?

(A) IL Penseroso (B) On His Blindness” (C) On the Late Massacre in Piedmont” (D) Lycidas

Answer: A

 8. Which of the following plays is not written by Congreve ?

 (A) The way of the World (B) The Old Bachelor (C) Love for Love (D) The Relapse

Answer: D

William Congreve (1670 –1729) was an English playwright and poet. His works include plays, opera, and other various works of literature.

·  The Old Bachelor (1693)  ·  The Double Dealer (1694)  ·  Love for Love (1695)  

 ·  The Mourning Bride (1697)  ·  The Way of the World (1700)

Two of his most popular and well-known plays are Love for Love in 1695, and The Way of the World in 1700, for which he is most famous. Congreve came at the end of the period of Restoration literature as the population appeared to rebel against the earlier strictures of the Puritan revolution. As tastes changed again, Congreve fell silent.

 9. Dryden‘s All For Love is an adaptation of :

 (A) Philaster (B) Romeo and Juliet (C) Antony and Cleopatra (D) Edward II

Answer: C

All for Love; or, the World Well Lost, is a 1677 heroic drama by John Dryden which is now his best-known and most performed play. It is a tragedy written in blank verse and is an attempt on Dryden's part to reinvigorate serious drama. It is an acknowledged imitation of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopata, and focuses on the last hours of the lives of its hero and heroine.

 10. Which of the following books proposes a political theory ?

(A) Principia (B) Leviathan (C) Anatomy of Melancholy (D) Liberty of Prophesying

Answer: B

Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, commonly referred to as Leviathan, is a book written by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and published in. Its name derives from the biblical Leviathan. The work concerns the structure of society and legitimate government, and is regarded as one of the earliest and most influential examples of social contract theory. Written during the English Civil War (1642–1651), it argues for a social contract and rule by an absolute sovereign. Hobbes wrote that civil war and the brute situation of a state of nature ("the war of all against all") could be avoided only by strong, undivided government.

beautiful lines from literature- 1

Spring come to you at the farthest. In the very end of harvest - The Tempest by William Shakespeare

Happiness is but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain- The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

If I am destined to be happy with you here—how short is the longest Life—I wish to believe in immortality—I wish to live with you for ever - From the Letters of John Keats

 

No light is found, but rather darkness visible- Paradise lost by John Milton

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter- Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats

A man is not a bird, to come and go with the springtime- Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face- Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought- To a Skylark by P.B Shelley

Courage was mine, and I had mystery, Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery: To miss the march of this retreating world. Into vain citadels that are not walled - Strange Meeting by Wilfred Owen

The awful daring of a moment's surrender which an age of prudence. can never retract. by this, and only this, we have existed- The Waste Land by T.S Eliot

Edward Albee (1928-2016)

Edward Albee has written and directed some of the greatest plays of modern American drama. He won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for ‘Who is afraid of Virginia Woolf?’(1962) and went on to win three Pulitzer prizes, for ‘A Delicate Balance’ (1966), ‘Seascape’ (1975) and ‘Three tall Women (1994).

In his early plays such as The zoo Story (1958) and The American dream (1961), Albee experimented with the Theatre of the absurd. The zoo Story is a one-act play concerns two characters, Peter and Jerry, who meet on a park bench in New York City's Central Park. Peter is a wealthy publishing executive with a wife, two daughters, two cats, and two parakeets. Jerry is an isolated and disheartened man, desperate to have a meaningful conversation with another human being. He intrudes on Peter’s peaceful state by interrogating him and forcing him to listen to stories about his life and the reason behind his visit to the zoo. In fact “nothing happens” except conversation until the violent ending. The play was designed to shock audiences out of complacency and bring them face to face with the painful facts of life. The appearance on the American stage of this tragically alienated character, Jerry, with his powerful rhetoric, had a similar effect to that of John Osborne’s Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger (1956) on the British stage. Albee was hailed as the new voice of contemporary American life and the leader of a new theatrical movement.

The American Dream (1961) exemplifies Albee’s trademark of a middle class American family living on illusion and dominated by an overbearing woman. It’s a dark and grotesque comedy, on the one hand it resembles Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, having a domestic setting; on the other it resembles Ionesco’s Bald Soprano in its depiction of highly exaggerated characters.

Albee’s first full length play Who is afraid of Virginia Woolf?, is unquestionably his best and holds a place beside the best of Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller in the history of American drama. It portrays the venomous marriage of one of the most memorable couples of western literature George and Martha. The couple treat each other, and their guests, to a night of heavy drinking, accompanied by dangerous and psychologically twisted verbal games. By the end of the night a shocking truth emerges- having blamed each other for their adult son leaving home, it emerges that the son is a figment of their combined fantasy, which they have maintained for 21 years as a defense against fear, alienation and the disappointment of life. The play is superbly constructed in its intellectual dialogue and violent emotional outbursts. Albee’s message is that living under illusions become destructive to any relationship. The title is unconnected with Virginia Woolf, but is borrowed from the children’s song ‘Who is afraid of the big bad wolf?, which symbolises the fears and insecurities of modern life.

 A Delicate Balance (1966) dealt with issues similar to those explored in Who is afraid of the big bad wolf?, but in a more moderate manner. The two plays are linked in the way they recognise that social norms, family rituals and even devious behaviour are defense mechanisms against an existential fear that cannot be named. A delicate Balance is about a married couple, Tobias and Agnes, who unexpectedly have to give refuge to some friends whose presence disrupts the precarious peace and civility. The result is a display of antisocial, hysterical, aggressive and altogether grotesque behaviour by the family members. The line between sanity and insanity becomes very thin. The premise of the first part of the play has an affinity with The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O’Neill- it is better to live in illusion than to suffer a disrupting influence.

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With Seascape (1974), a charming and entertaining fantasy, Albee produced a liveliness and lightness that had been absent from his plays for over a decade. A middle aged couple, Nancy and Charlie, meet Sarah and Leslie, two amphibians who are about to evolve. The amphibians are very much like humans, with middle class human values and friction in their marriage. The creatures have doubts about evolving when they realise that human emotions can be painful. The evolution is a metaphor for the uncertainty about what to do when one stage of human life comes to an end. The play ends with Nancy and Charlie promising to help the amphibians with their quest to become human.

During 1970s and 80, his production slowed down and his plays were not commercially successful. Later, in 1994 Albee recaptured the verve of his earlier plays with Three Tall Women (1994), which was indeed a success. The plot consist of a haughty, bitter old woman lies dying, attended by two other women and visited by a young man. The play is about forgiveness, reconciliation and fate, presented through Albee’s black sense of humour.

The Goat, or Who is Sylvia? (2002), a witty and hilarious but disturbing play, his most controversial one. Martin, a successful architect, living harmoniously with his wife Stevie and their homosexual son, falls in love with Sylvia, a Goat, and when his bizarre secret comes out, the whole family structure is destroyed. What starts as a drawing room comedy turns into a tragedy of marital infidelity with a shocking different. There is also a hint of incest between the father and the son. The play’s concern is to test our limits of tolerance by transgressing taboos.

Albee’s work largely exhibits the influence of Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. He depicts humankind’s inability to communicate and the human need for integration involvement with others.    

Patrick White (1912-1990)

Australian Poet, Novelist, Essayist and Playwright, was born in England. The first Australian writer to achieve The Nobel Prize for literature in 1973.    Notable Novels

• Happy Valley (1939)
• The Living and The Dead (1941)
• The Aunt's Story (1948)
• The Tree of Man (1955)
• Voss (1957)
• Riders in The Chariot (1961)
• The Solid Mandala (1966)
• The Eye of The Storm (1973)
• A Fringe of Leaves (1976)
• The Twyborn Affair (1979)

David Marr was his biographer. 

  His most recognized Novel was Voss. It tells the story of a doomed attempt of Johann Voss to cross the Australian continent. Narrating the mystic and spiritual communion that ties him to Laura Trevelyan, who at home in Sydney suffers with him and released from fever at the moment of his death.      

The Novel is based on the life of a nineteenth century German(Prussian) explorer and Naturalist Ludwid Leichhardt, who faded away on the occasion of his expedition into the Australian outback.

  The Eye of The Storm and A Fringe of Leaves created a powerful and bold female characters. The Eye of The Storm unfolds the life of Elizabeth Hunter, the powerful matriarch, who maintains her boldness until her last breath.   "Dorothy was breathless with resentment for what she herself could no more than half-remember, had perhaps only half discovered - on the banks of the Seine? in dreams? as part of that greatest of all obsessions, childhood? and how could Elizabeth Hunter have got possession of anything so secret? Only Mother was capable of slicing in half what amounted to psyche, then expecting the rightful owner to share".  - The Eye of the Storm, Chapter Eight      While  A Fringe of Leaves revolves around the journey of Mrs.Ellen Roxburg with her much older husband Austin. It captures the real life of Aboriginal people in Australia   "... she fell back upon the dust, amongst intimations of the nightmare which threatened to re-shape itself around her. Her trembling only gradually subsided as she lay fingering the ring threaded into her fringe of leaves..."  P.223 

The Twyborn Affair in some respect echoes Virginia Woolf''s Orlando. with its gender switching protagonist. The author portrays the transition of a soul through the different identities Eudoxia, Eddie, and Eadith, two of them are incognito as female.   Patrick White dedicated the novel Happy Valley to the Artist Roy De Maistre.  

 

The Living and The Dead represents the life after second world war.features mother Catherine, son Elyot and daughter Eden. they were leading a desperate life under a single roof. A claustrophobic ambiance permeates in the novel.    

The Aunt's Story recounts the experiences of Theodora Goodman, a lonely middle aged woman. who travels to France after the death of her mother and then to America where she experiences a mental breakdown and an epiphanic revelation.   White himself expressed a personal fondness for it. he says : "It is the one i have most affection for. and I always find it irritating that only 6 Australians seem to have liked it."   "The sun was still a manageable ball above the ringing hills as Lou went outside. She walked through this stiff landscape, carrying her cold and awkward hands. She thought about the cardboard aunt, Aunt Theodora Goodman, who was both a kindness and a darkness. Lou touched the sundial, on which the time had remained frozen. She was afraid, and sad, because there was some great intolerable pressure from which it is not possible to escape. Lou looked back over her shoulder, and ran."   -   The Aunt's Story.   One of the great opening lines : "But old Mrs.Goodman did die at last" ‘Lou’ was Theodora’s soulmate.

The Tree of Man captures the domestic life featuring the lives of the Parker family and their changing fortunes over many decades. It is steeped in Australian folklore and cultural myth, and is recognized as the author's attempt to infuse the peculiar and unique way of life in the remote Australian bush with some sense of the cultural traditions and ideologies.    White wrote, in an attempt to explain the novel, "I felt the life was, on the surface, so dreary, ugly, monotonous, there must be a poetry hidden in it to give it a purpose, and so I set out to discover that secret core, and The Tree of Man emerged."   The title comes from A.E Housman's Poetry Cycle A Shropshire Lad.    The novel is one of three by White included in "1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die". The others are Voss and The Living and The Dead.

Chinua Achebe (1930-2013)

List of works in chronological order

· Things Fall Apart (1958)

· No Longer at Ease (1960)

· Arrow of God (1964)

· A Man of the People (1966)

· Anthills of the Savannah (1987)

He is regarded as the founding father of modern African literature. His novels are noted for the effects of western customs and values on traditional African society. While his mother tongue was Igbo, Achebe was educated in English and his literary language is standard English blended with Igbo vocabulary, proverbs, images and speech patterns. He has defended the use of in the production of African Fiction.

Achebe’s debut novel Things Fall Apart (1958) (title is taken from the poem The Second Coming), a central text of postcolonial literature, is set in the 1890s when missionaries and colonial government imposed themselves on Igbo society. His aim in writing the novel was to ‘write back’ to novels such as Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson (1939) to present an insider’s view on his country and its people which he felt had been misrepresented.

The story depicts the life of Okonkwo, the ambitious and powerful leader of an Igbo community, who relies on his physical strength and courage. He is respected by his fellow villagers. When he accidentally kills a clansman he is banished from the village for seven years. The ultimate causes of his downfall are his blindness to circumstances and influence of the missionary church. He tries to fight colonialism single-handedly. Achebe took the title from a line from the poem ‘The Second Coming’ by W.B Yeats: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold’.

No Longer at Ease (1960)is set in Nigeria in the late 1950s; most of the action occurs in the capital city of Lagos. At the beginning of the novel Obi Okonkwo a member of the Igbo ethnic group,  is on trial for accepting a bribe. The focus of the novel then shifts back in time. He leaves his home in south-eastern Nigeria to follow his dream of going to school in Britain. Thereafter, he works in Nigeria’s civil service, a colonial institution, and is forced to reflect on the fraught relationship between the Western world and the many African cultures that it hassystematically subjugated. The novel details the course of events that led to Obi accepting a bribe. The work’s title is a reference to the poem “The Journey of the Magi” by British modernist writer T.S. Eliot, in which the speaker laments, “We returned to our places, these kingdoms, / But no longer at ease here.”. The novel is the second work in what is sometimes referred to as the "African trilogy," following Things Fall Apart and preceding Arrow of God.

Arrow of God (1964) shares similar settings and themes. The novel focuses on Ezeulu, who is the High Priest of Ulu, who confronts colonial powers and Christian missionaries in the 1920s. Ulu is the most important deity in the town of Umuaro, and he brought together six warring villages to create a strong community that shares core values but preserves local village traditions. Because Ezeulu is half deity and half man, he struggles to discern what is human will and what is divine will. This conflict grows more pertinent as new challenges, in the form of British authority and Christian religion, question the hierarchies and beliefs upon which the community was built. The phrase Arrow of God is drawn from an igbo proverb in which a person or sometimes an event is said to represent the will of God.

A Man of the People (1966) is a first-person account of Odili, a school teacher in a fictional country closely resembling post-colonial Nigeria. Odili receives an invitation from his former teacher, Chief Nanga, who is now the powerful but corrupt Minister of Culture. As Minister, Nanga's job is to protect the traditions of his country especially when he is known as "A Man of the People". Instead, his position is used to increase his personal wealth and power that proves particularly alluring to Odili's girlfriend. Odili takes a stand against the government, not for ideological reasons but because Nanga has seduced his girlfriend. The novel reflects Achebe’s deep personal disappointment with what Nigeria has become since independence.

In his famous essay ‘An image of Africa: racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’ is a condemnation of imperial exploitation, it also exhibits racist attitudes.

Wole Soyinka said: ‘Achebe never hesitates to lay blame for the woes of the African continent squarely where it belongs’.