Past Papers Literary Criticism (2004 - 2019) | M.A. English 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

Thoughts have begun to stretch
With an elastic ease
Changing shape and form at will
But I'm where I've always been stuck of earth eyeing
The sky
Where there are no answers
Only careless questions
 And woes the size of elephants

My specie is ridden with moles
Who recount to the Almighty all my sins
Some real others crafted and imagined. 

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.

'Tis to work, and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day
In you limbs, as in a cell,
For the tyrants' use to dwell

So ye for them are made
Loom and plough, and sword and spade
With or without your own will bent
To their defense and nourishment.

(From: The Mask of Anarchy by Shelly) 

(ii) They're lying; lying all of them:
He never loved his shadow,
And tried to wring its neck.
Not love but murder on his mind,
He grappled with the other man
Inside the lucid stream

Only the surface broke,
Unblinking eyes
Came swimming back in view.
At last he knew
He never would
Destroy the other self
And knowing made him shrink
He shrank into a yellow --- bellied flower

(Narcissus by Mervyn Morris)

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)

11. YEAR 2014

Attempt any FOUR questions. All questions carry equal marks. 

1. Discuss at length the criterion for a tragic hero laid down by Aristotle in Poetics.

2. Sidney's Apology for Poetry is a work which has rightly been valued as one of the outstanding performances in English Criticism and one which inaugurated a new phase in the history of criticism. What is your opinion? Explain with arguments.

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 is meant by the term New Criticism? Does Belsey oppose it or support it? Discuss. 

5. Why in Raymond William's view Greek tragedy is unique and cannot be reproduced in modern times? Discuss with reference to Modern Tragedy. 

6. "The ultimate objective of Criticism is neither to accept nor to reject but to take issue & proceed." What is your opinion? 

7. Critically examine any ONE of the following:

(i) Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Easter tide. 

Now, of my three score years and ten

Twenty will not come again, 

And take from seventy Springs a score, 

It only leaves me fifty more, 

And since to look at things in bloom

Fifty springs are little room

About the woodland I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow. (A.E. Houseman) 

(ii) The silver swan, who living had not note, 

When death approached, unlocked her silent throat, 

Leaning her breast against the ready shore, 

Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more:

Farewell all joys! O death, come close mine eyes;

More geese than swans now love, more fools than wise. (Anonymous) 

12. YEAR 2015

Attempt any FOUR questions. All questions carry equal marks. 

1. Critically analyze Aristotle's concept of a tragic hero.

2. How far would you agree that in moral doctrine also, the poet surpasses the historian as well as the philosopher? Discuss in the light of Sidney's "An Apology for Poetry". 

3. Is it justified to call Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" a manifesto of Eliot's criticism?

4. What according to Raymond Williams are the distinctive features of Secular tragedy?

5. What is structural criticism? What position does Belsey take on structuralist criticism?

6. What are the main qualities of a good critic? Refer to at least two of the critics in your course to elaborate you answer. 

7. Critically examine any ONE of the following poems. 

(i) I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone,

Stand in the desert ... near them, on the sand

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:

And on the pedestal those words appear;

'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sand stretch far away.

(P.B. Shelley)

(ii) I have finished my combat with the sun,

And my body, the old animal, Knows nothing more.

The power seasons bred and killed,

And where themselves the genii

Of their own ends.

Oh, but the very self of the storm

Of sun and slaves, breeding and death,

The old animal. 

(Wallace Stevens)

13. YEAR 2016

Attempt any FOUR questions. All questions carry equal marks. 

1. What are the major features of Aristotle's concepts in "Poetics"? 

2. Sidney's "Apology for Poetry" is a work which has rightly been valued as one of the outstanding performances in English criticism and one which inaugurated a new phase in the history of criticism. What is your opinion? Explain with arguments. 

3. "It is not 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. Evaluate Belsey's work "Critical Practice" as a critic. 

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, with obtrusion of personal liking or disliking". What is your opinion? 

7. Critically examine any ONE of the following poems. 

(i) How can I, that girl standing there, 

My attention fix

On Roman or on Russian

Or on Spanish politics? 

Yet here's a traveled man that knows

What he talks about 

And there's a politician 

That has read and thought, 

And may be what they say is true

Of wars and warm's alarms, 

But O that I were young again

And hold her my my arms!  

(W.B. Yeats) 

(ii) The silver swan, who living had no note. 

When death approached, unlocked her silent throat, 

Leaning her breast against the reedy shore, 

Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more: 

Farewell all joys! O death, come close mine eyes; 

More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise. 

(Anonymous) 

14. YEAR 2017

Attempt any FOUR questions. All questions carry equal marks. 

1. What are the seven characteristics Aristotle uses to define tragedy in Poetics? 

2. Discuss the narrative style and structure of Sidney's An Apology for Poetry? 

3. Which critical schools according to Belsey have been successful in challenging the expressive realist position? 

4. For T.S. Eliot's what is the value and significance of tradition? Why is it useful? 

5. Critically analyze some of the major arguments presented in Williams' Modern Tragedy? 

6. Discuss in detail some of the benefits and drawbacks of Literary Criticism. Give support with the help of examples. 

7. Critically analyze any ONE of the following poems. 

(i) [Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean]

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, 

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eys, 

In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, 

And thinking of the days that are no more. 

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail, 

That brings our friends up from the underworld, 

Sad as the last which reddens over one

That sinks with all we love below the verge; 

So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more. 

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns

The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds

To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square; 

So sad, so strange, the days are no more. 

Dear as remember'd kisses after death, 

And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd

On lips that are for others; deep as love, 

Deep as first love, and wild with all regret; 

O Death in Life, the days are no more. 

(Lord Alfred Tennyson) 

OR

(ii) Some Trees

These are amazing: each 

Joining a neighbor, as though speech

Were a still performance. 

Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning

From the world as agreeing

With it, you and I

Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us wer are: 

That their merely being there

Means something; that soon

We may touch, love, explain. 

And glad not to have invented

Such comeliness, we are surrounded: 

A silence already filled with noises, 

A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning. 

Placed in a puzzling light, and moving, 

Our days put on such reticence

These accents seem their own defense. 

(John Ashbery) 

15. YEAR 2018

Attempt any FOUR questions. All questions carry equal marks. 

1. Aristotle redifines Poetry not as an imitation of some ideal reality, but a more creative endeavor to improve upon different forms of reality. Prove or refute the statement. 

2. According to Aristotle the tragic hero "must be an intermediate kind of a person, a man not pre-eminently just and virtuous, whose misfortune, however, is brought upon him not by voice or depravity but by some error of judgment." Elaborate. 

3. "Nature's world is brazen, only a poet creates a golden one." What is you opinion? Elaborate with examples from Sidney's book An Apology for Poetry. 

4. Discuss Eliot's ideal theory of imperonality in Poetry. How is it relevant to some of the modern Poetic texts that you have read. 

5. "Modern tragedy is not what happens to the hero what what happens through him." Elaborate with reference to Raymond Williams Book Modern Tragedy. 

6. Discuss the main contribution of Belsey as a critic. 

7. Critically analyze any ONE of the following poems. 

Love- An Essence of All Religions

Through love thorns become roes, and 

Through love vinegar becomes sweet wine, 

Through live the stake becomes a throne, 

Through love misfortune becomes good fortunes, 

Through love burning fire becomes pleasing light, 

Through love stone becomes soft as butter, 

Through love grief becomes a joy, 

Through love lions become harmless, 

Through love sickness becomes health, 

Through love wrath seems to be a mercy, 

Through love the dead rise to life, 

Through love the king becomes a slave. 

(Jalaluddin Rumi) 

OR 

A man of words and not of deeds, 

Is like a garden full of weeds. 

And when the weeds begin to grow

It's like a garden full of snow. 

And when the snow begins to fall, 

It's like a bird upon the wall.

And when the bird away does fly, 

It's like an eagle in the sky. 

And when the sky begins to roar

It's like a lion at the door. 

And when the door beings to crack, 

It's like a stick across your back. 

And when your back begins to smart, 

It's like a penknife in your heart. 

And when your heart begins to bleed, 

Your're dead and dead and dead indeed. 

(Charles Perrault) 

16. YEAR 2019

Attempt any FOUR questions. All questions carry equal marks. 

1. Define and discuss the characteristics of Tragedy brought about by Aristotle. 

2. An Apology for Poetry is one of the most important contributions to literary theory written in English during the Renaissance. Discuss. 

3. Criticism is "a disinterested endeavor to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world". 

4. Accordian to Eliot tradition is a living culture which is inherited from the past and also has an important function in formating the present. Discuss. 

5. "There is no justice and no external law, but there is hurt and revenge, exposure and hatred; a simply human struggle." Explain with reference to Raymond Williams' concept of tragedy. 

6. What are those characteristics of Belsey's criticism which make her a great critic in the modern times? 

7. Critically analyze any ONE of the following poems. 

(i) A Sindhi Woman

Bare foot, through the bazaar, 

And with the same undulant grace

As the cloth blown back from her face, 

She glides with a stone jar, 

High on her head

And not a ripple in her tread. 

Watching her cross erect

Stones, garbage, excrement and crumbs

Of glass in the Karachi slums, 

I, with my stoop, reflect; 

They stand most straight 

Who learn to walk beneath a weight. 

(ii) The Feed

Holding a grain of millet in her beak

The mother sparrow has come to feed. 

The young ones are so tiny and small

From head to tow they are beaks

When they cry. 

One grain to be fed the ten young ones

To whom the mother sparrow should feed? 

Conjuring beak with beak

With whom should she solace? 

Fissuring the atom

You have learnt to weep and wail in a loud tone, 

Splitting the grain, 

You have learnt to set life on foot

Could you split the grain? 

One grain to be fed to the ten young ones.