UGC NET English Paper 2 – 2021 cycle (Shift 1) – Question Paper with Answer Key

Which is the only extant trilogy of Greek tragedy?

What was Yorick in Hamlet?

In Shakespeare's sonnets, what does Time with his 'scythe' signify?

1. A. Time preserves human life.
2. B. With time comes change.
3. C. Time creates opportunities.
4. D. Time removes human life.

In which poem does Donne use the conceit of the compass?

Which of the following are works by Aphra Behn?

1. A. The Rover
2. B. Oroonoko
3. C. The Soldier's Fortune
4. D. The Princess of Cleves

Arrange the following characters in the chronological order of the plays in which they appear:

1. A. Mirabell
2. B. Shylock
3. C. Jimmy Porter
4. D. Sir Epicure Mammon

'Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. / The honest thief, the tender murderer…' From which Browning poem?

Match List I with List II:

Which Dickens character appears as a ghost?

Which of the following are works by George Gissing?

1. A. New Grub Street
2. B. Agnes Grey
3. C. The Odd Women
4. D. Mary Barton

What is the poem Orlando writes in Virginia Woolf's Orlando?

Arrange the following lines in chronological order of composition:

1. A. 'An aged man is but a paltry thing'
2. B. 'The world is too much with us'
3. C. 'Daddy, I have had to kill you'
4. D. 'After great pain, a formal feeling comes'

Match List I with List II:

Match List I with List II:

Whose poem inspired Yeats's 'When You Are Old'?

Which of the following are novels by Ian McEwan?

1. A. Atonement
2. B. The Man with Two Left Feet
3. C. The Child in Time
4. D. The Rachel Papers

Which novel has an epigraph from the Katha Upanishad?

Statement I: At the end of both acts of Waiting for Godot, Vladimir questions the Boy from Godot. Statement II: Estragon says, 'Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!'

Which of the following are features of the Theatre of the Absurd?

1. A. A central role for God
2. B. Futile, goalless actions
3. C. Situations pointing to life's meaningfulness
4. D. An absence of conventional conflict and dramatic tension
5. E. Characters in stasis or drift, without defined roles

Which of the following are stage directions in Pinter's The Birthday Party?

1. A. The living-room of a house in a seaside town
2. B. A garbage pail beside the porch steps
3. C. Light from an upstairs bedroom
4. D. Stanley hangs the drum round his neck, marches and beats it

Match List I with List II:

Arrange the following plays in chronological order:

1. A. Serjeant Musgrave's Dance
2. B. The Playboy of the Western World
3. C. Look Back in Anger
4. D. Man and Superman

Who was the first editor of The Cornhill Magazine?

Arrange the following periodicals in chronological order:

1. A. The Spectator
2. B. The Tatler
3. C. The Rambler
4. D. The Critical Review

Arrange the following journals in chronological order:

1. A. The Tatler
2. B. The Examiner (Leigh Hunt's)
3. C. Defoe's The Review
4. D. The Spectator

In which magazine did Charles Lamb's essays under the pseudonym 'Elia' appear?

Which journal was launched at Bowling Green State University in the late 1960s?

Which of the following aims did Wood's Despatch (1854) seek to promote?

1. A. Imparting Western knowledge to Indians
2. B. Restricting access to English education
3. C. Educating British officers in Sanskrit and Persian
4. D. Creating a class of public servants

What did the UGC Working Group of 1978 on the medium of instruction in higher education recommend?

Match List I with List II:

Which of Nissim Ezekiel's poems satirise Indians' use of English?

1. A. 'Goodbye Party for Miss Pushpa T. S.'
2. B. 'Philosophy'
3. C. 'The Patriot' / 'Very Indian Poem in Indian English'
4. D. 'Jewish Wedding in Bombay'
5. E. 'Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher'

Which playwright used elements of Yakshagana in his theatre?

Which Karnad play shares its theme with Thomas Mann's The Transposed Heads?

Which readerships does Meenakshi Mukherjee identify for the early Indian novel in English?

1. A. A pan-Indian readership
2. B. A localised Indian readership
3. C. A British readership
4. D. The colonial administrator in India

What preoccupies Agastya Sen, the protagonist of Upamanyu Chatterjee's English, August?

1. A. Marijuana
2. B. Magic
3. C. Monotheism
4. D. Marcus Aurelius

Which term best describes Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy?

From whom does Spivak borrow the term 'subaltern'?

What does the Subaltern Studies project contend?

1. A. Traditional historiography celebrated the role of the subalterns.
2. B. Traditional history celebrates select icons of the freedom movement.
3. C. Traditional historiography highlights the dominant strands of the freedom struggle.
4. D. Subaltern Studies historiography highlights the dominant strands of the freedom struggle.

Who represented the global spread of English as three concentric circles?

Match List I with List II:

According to Longinus, which two qualities belong to great poetry?

1. A. It must be the work of genius, an inspired person.
2. B. It must cause melancholy in the reader.
3. C. It must employ rhetorical devices.
4. D. It must please selectively, on special occasions.

In An Apology for Poetry, Sidney compares the didactic function of poetry with philosophy and:

Who compared 'the mind in creation' to 'a fading coal'?

In 'The Function of Criticism', Eliot attacked Middleton Murry and similar critics as devotees of:

Arrange the following essays in chronological order:

1. A. Eliot, 'The Function of Criticism'
2. B. Poe, 'The Philosophy of Composition'
3. C. James, 'The Art of Fiction'
4. D. Woolf, 'Modern Fiction'

In 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown', Virginia Woolf:

Which two 'bad habits' of written English does Orwell list in 'Politics and the English Language'?

1. A. Obsolete words
2. B. Pretentious diction
3. C. Dying metaphors
4. D. False modifiers

Who wrote 'Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool'?

Arrange the following terms in the chronological order of their use in literary theory:

1. A. Gynesis
2. B. Scriptible
3. C. Négritude
4. D. Paratext

Who wrote 'What Isn't Literature?'

With a chapter on which work does Auerbach's Mimesis end?

Which two pairings conform to Northrop Frye's theory of mythoi in Anatomy of Criticism?

1. A. Mythos of spring – comedy
2. B. Mythos of summer – satire
3. C. Mythos of autumn – tragedy
4. D. Mythos of winter – romance

In A Book of Answers, A. D. Hope writes poetic replies to which two writers?

1. A. Tolstoy
2. B. Dostoevsky
3. C. Mallarmé
4. D. Goethe

Who called paraphrase 'a heresy'?

Which cluster does Kristeva associate with the 'semiotic'?

Which statement best describes Terry Eagleton's view of literature?

Which two concepts does Stephen Greenblatt highlight in reading specific historical moments?

1. A. Crisis of meaning
2. B. Circulation of meaning
3. C. Production of meaning
4. D. Deferral of meaning

Statement I: New Historicism holds that teleological views of history must be avoided. Statement II: New Historicism neither denies nor accepts totalising explanations.

Who claimed that the Gulf War (1990–91) 'did not take place'?

Who among the following belong to the Chicago School of critics?

1. A. R. S. Crane
2. B. E. M. W. Tillyard
3. C. Elder Olson
4. D. Allen Tate

Assertion (A): Postmodern narratives focus on the unstable, indeterminate nature of textuality and subjectivity. Reason (R): Postmodern narratives treat stories and characters as tentative constructions of writing and identity.

Which UK university first institutionalised cultural studies?

Who most significantly mobilised the concept of 'cultural intermediaries'?

Which questions would cultural studies be most interested in asking of a cultural artefact?

1. A. Who decides what is produced?
2. B. Who can afford the artefact?
3. C. How is the artefact marketed?
4. D. What is the register of speech in the artefact?

Which element do Dorfman and Mattelart identify in How to Read Donald Duck as important to Disney's imperialist ideology?

Match List I with List II:

Which two concepts are used in Fredric Jameson's work?

1. A. Pastiche
2. B. The hyperreal
3. C. Schizophrenia
4. D. Habitus

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o is generally associated with the idea of:

Arrange the following feminist texts in chronological order:

1. A. Moraga and Anzaldúa (eds), This Bridge Called My Back
2. B. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics
3. C. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
4. D. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

Empiricist linguistics is concerned with:

Which two features of Chomsky's definition of grammar are drawn from mathematics?

1. A. Complexity
2. B. Abstraction
3. C. Transformation
4. D. Generation

'Potato' is a sixteenth-century borrowing into English from:

Which term refers to a sound or sound cluster associated with a particular meaning?

When stable bilinguals use English as a link language alongside their first language in defined contexts, English performs which function?

Which of the following statements about 'performance' in linguistic theory are true?

1. A. It is analogous to Saussure's langue.
2. B. It is the specific utterances of speakers in actual situations.
3. C. It is the innate grammar showing universal ability.
4. D. It includes hesitations and unfinished structures caused by psychological factors.

Statement I: Linguists, interested in the scientific study of language, approach it dispassionately. Statement II: Linguists are necessarily polyglots who bring their own biases.

Arrange the following brain areas in the order in which they are involved in hearing, understanding and then saying a word:

1. A. Arcuate fasciculus
2. B. Broca's area (anterior speech cortex)
3. C. Motor cortex
4. D. Wernicke's area (posterior speech cortex)

The loss of a vowel within a word is called:

Who founded the Survey of English Usage?

Who wrote the story 'Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black'?

Match List I with List II:

Match List I with List II:

Which two of the following works were written by Flaubert?

1. A. The Temptation of Saint Anthony
2. B. Old Goriot
3. C. Thérèse Raquin
4. D. Sentimental Education

Which nineteenth-century term of Russian currency did Nietzsche use for the collapse of traditional Western values?

Whom does García Márquez name at the opening of his Nobel lecture, 'The Solitude of Latin America'?

1. A. Ferdinand Magellan
2. B. Christopher Columbus
3. C. Marco Polo
4. D. Antonio Pigafetta

Match List I with List II:

Arrange the following books in chronological order of publication:

1. A. The Handmaid's Tale
2. B. The Color Purple
3. C. The Golden Notebook
4. D. The Bluest Eye

Which two statements are true according to the MLA Handbook (8th edition)?

1. A. When the title page shows an imprint and a publisher, cite only the publisher.
2. B. Copy the URL from the browser but omit 'http://' or 'https://'.
3. C. Quotations of more than five lines are set off one inch from the left margin.
4. D. Long titles are abbreviated by the initial capitals of key words, without spaces.

Statement I: Unlike scientific research, literary research lacks specific materials and tools for reaching conclusions. Statement II: Literary research consists of critical interpretation of an author's work, excluding biography and textual editing.

Which two statements conform to liberal humanist thought?

1. A. Literature transcends the limits of its age and is timeless.
2. B. Literature is untouched by an essential, unchanging human nature.
3. C. Literature has no purpose in enhancing life or promoting human values.
4. D. Individual identity is a unique essence unaffected by environment and society.

In the context of the passage, which is closest to being true?

What is meant by the 'traditional use of poetry'?

If the poet's selfhood is the subject of poetry, originality springs from:

Which best describes the meaning of the opening, 'No worst, there is none'?

Beyond the intensity of known grief, there can be:

Which two of the following are true of the poem?

1. A. Not everyone knows the intensity or depth of suffering.
2. B. Death does not end our suffering.
3. C. Suffering is seen as winds that hinder comfort.
4. D. The intensity or depth of suffering lies in the mind.

How did the 'sport with Tess' end?

Who are the 'two speechless gazers'?

'This insubstantial pageant' refers to:

'We are such stuff / As dreams are made on' means: