UGC NET English Paper 2 – June 2025 – Question Paper with Answer Key

Identify the poem in which these lines occur: 'My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart / With tender gladness, thus to look at thee'.

Identify the set of poems all written by W. B. Yeats.

What is the subtitle of Goldsmith's semi-autobiographical poem The Traveller (1764)?

Which group of poets is known as the Georgian Poets?

Who is considered 'the father of South African English poetry'?

In how many parts was George Eliot's Middlemarch first published?

Kipling's story 'Mrs Bathurst' is set in:

The term Erziehungsroman means:

Which of the following works is NOT by William Cooper?

Which of the following is by Joseph Conrad?

According to Saussure, what is the minimum number of persons needed to complete the speaking-circuit?

Which Mughal ruler had infants raised in silence, with the result that they produced no speech?

Who said that Sanskrit is 'more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either'?

If the glide is distinct enough to be heard, the vowel + glide will be treated as:

The study of how humans acquire language and use it to speak and understand is called:

Who prepared the first blueprint on English education in India in 1792?

Who wrote to the Committee of Public Instruction on introducing English as official language of the Government and that of education?

Lord Curzon used the report of the Indian Universities Commission of 1902 to:

According to the 1991 Census, ________ languages are considered scheduled languages.

Who described Raja Rammohun Roy as 'the inauguration of the modern age in India'?

Who is of the opinion that the concept of 'ideology' is 'the most important conceptual category in cultural studies'?

Who coined the term 'Bricolage'?

Who coined the term 'Onto-Theology'?

Who designed the 'Panopticon' and described it as 'a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind'?

Name the theory which assumes that 'culture is not separate from nature, and that there is no hierarchy of actants such that the human is more privileged'.

Since the publication of Samuel Johnson's 'Preface to Shakespeare' (1765), which of the Unities have been regarded as optional devices, available to playwrights in England to achieve special effects of dramatic concentration?

Who, amongst the following, attempted to reconcile discrepancies between various classical authors such as Plato and Aristotle, as well as between philosophy and poetry?

Who said that 'Shakespeare was the Homer, or father of our dramatic poets; Jonson was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate writing'?

Who described his criticism as a 'by-product' of his 'private poetry-workshop' and as 'a prolongation of the thinking that went into the formation of my own verse'?

Who wrote, 'The two pillars upon which a theory of criticism must rest are an account of value and an account of communication'?

The term 'Trace', which refers to the trace of the other, has been borrowed by Jacques Lacan [read: Derrida] from:

The term 'Remainder' was first used by:

The term 'Chronotope' was coined by:

'The notion of author constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy and the sciences.' Identify the critical essay in which the line occurs.

'Territorialization' is a term given by:

Which bibliography is concerned with the close analysis of individual copies of books in the light of our knowledge of how books were produced?

Which of the following is NOT a kind of literary research?

Jacques Derrida's 'Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression' is related to:

Which of the following is NOT a distinct discourse-analytical research tradition as suggested by Margaret Wetherell et al.?

Arrange the following books in chronological order:

1. A. G. N. Shuster, The English Ode from Milton to Keats
2. B. Paul H. Fry, The Poet's Calling in the English Ode
3. C. John Heath-Stubbs, The Ode
4. D. Carol Maddison, Apollo and the Nine: A History of the Ode
5. E. John Miles Foley (ed.), Oral Traditional Literature

Arrange the following statements in chronological order:

1. A. Nissim Ezekiel founded Quest, a general intellectual review associated with liberal democratic politics.
2. B. The Illustrated Weekly of India sponsored a short story competition and began publishing contemporary Indian English poetry.
3. C. The Writers Workshop began to publish volumes of poetry.
4. D. C. R. Mandy became editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India.

Arrange the following novels in chronological order of publication:

1. A. The Serpent and the Rope
2. B. Two Leaves and a Bud
3. C. A Bend in the Ganges
4. D. So Many Hungers!
5. E. Waiting for the Mahatma

Identify the correct chronological order of publication of the following works:

1. A. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times
2. B. The Advancement of Learning
3. C. An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue
4. D. The Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language

Arrange the following stages of first language acquisition in chronological order:

1. A. The two-word stage
2. B. Telegraphic speech
3. C. The one-word stage
4. D. Cooing
5. E. Babbling

Arrange the following commissions, committees and events in the history of English in India in chronological order:

1. A. Gokak Committee Report
2. B. Acharya Ramamurti Commission
3. C. All India Language Conference
4. D. Kothari Commission
5. E. The Official Languages Act

Arrange the following works of S. Radhakrishnan chronologically:

1. A. The Heart of Hindustan
2. B. Occasional Speeches and Writings
3. C. Eastern Religions and Western Thought
4. D. The Dhammapada (translation)
5. E. The Principal Upanishads

Arrange the following works of John Storey in chronological order of publication:

1. A. Inventing Popular Culture: From Folklore to Globalization
2. B. Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction
3. C. What is Cultural Studies? A Reader
4. D. Cultural Consumption and Everyday Life
5. E. Culture and Power in Cultural Studies: The Politics of Signification

Arrange the following works of criticism chronologically:

1. A. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
2. B. A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition
3. C. The History of Sexuality
4. D. New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings
5. E. Bodies That Matter

Arrange the following statements in the order of their appearance in Aristotle's Poetics:

1. A. The plot is 'the end at which tragedy aims'.
2. B. Regarding the plot, 'a whole is what has a beginning, middle and end'.
3. C. The plot should have unity: 'the component incidents must be so arranged that if one of them be transposed or removed, the unity of the whole is dislocated and destroyed'.
4. D. The tragic character must be a man 'who is not pre-eminently virtuous and just... but falls through some flaw in him'.
5. E. The function of the poet is to narrate 'events such as might occur... according to the laws of probability or necessity'.

Choose the correct chronological order of the following works on postcolonial criticism:

1. A. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics
2. B. Postcolonial Literary Studies: The First Thirty Years
3. C. Nation and Narration
4. D. The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism
5. E. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization

Arrange the following feminist works in chronological order:

1. A. The Female Imagination
2. B. The Madwoman in the Attic
3. C. A Literature of Their Own
4. D. Women's Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis
5. E. Revolution in Poetic Language

Arrange the following core elements of a Works Cited entry according to the MLA Handbook (9th edition):

1. A. Publisher
2. B. Title of source
3. C. Author
4. D. Title of container
5. E. Publication date

Arrange the following steps of material collection according to the hierarchy given by Delia da Sousa Correa and W. R. Owens in The Handbook to Literary Research:

1. A. Identify your nearest major research library
2. B. Visit your own university library
3. C. Identify what is available online
4. D. Visit your nearest major research library

Choose the correct matches of play and playwright:

1. A. Hali – Rabindranath Tagore
2. B. Tiger Claw – Lakhan Deb
3. C. The Flute of Krishna – P. A. Krishnaswamy
4. D. Nalini – Gurcharan Das
5. E. Hayavadana – Girish Karnad

Read the following statements carefully and find the correct ones:

1. A. Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde and The Legend of Good Women.
2. B. John Milton wrote Comus, Astrophel and Stella and Paradise Lost.
3. C. S. T. Coleridge composed The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel and The Curse of Kehama.
4. D. Shakespeare wrote The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Rape of Lucrece and Troilus and Cressida.
5. E. Alexander Pope's works include The Dunciad, The Rape of the Lock and the Epistles.

Read the following statements carefully and choose the correct ones:

1. A. Patrick White, Christina Stead and Robertson Davies are famous Australian novelists.
2. B. The notion of 'civilized barbarity' was anticipated in H. Rider Haggard's 1887 novel Allan Quatermain, in which civilization is said to be 'only savagery silver-gilt'.
3. C. Novels like The French Lieutenant's Woman, Midnight's Children and Waterland deconstruct traditional notions of history and subjectivity.
4. D. Edna O'Brien's Country Girls trilogy and McGahern's The Dark, which were banned in Ireland, were published during the 1950s.
5. E. The trauma of the mid-century years accounts for the prevalence of dystopian elements in novels like A Clockwork Orange, Lanark and The Handmaid's Tale.

Read the following statements carefully and find the correct ones:

1. A. Charles Lamb was a lifelong friend of Coleridge and a defender of the poetic creed of Wordsworth.
2. B. The London crowd, with its pleasures and occupations, never attracted Charles Lamb.
3. C. Charles Lamb gave us the best pen-portraits of Coleridge, Hazlitt, Landor, Hood and many more interesting men and women of his age.
4. D. Charles Lamb wrote Essays of Elia, Tales from Shakespeare and The Revolt of the Tartars.
5. E. Lamb was especially fond of old writers and was apparently unable to express his new thought without using their old quaint expressions.

Choose the correct definitions of language:

1. A. Language uses symbols that are primarily vocal but may also be visual; its subfields are phonetics, phonology, writing systems, orthography and nonverbal communication.
2. B. Language is used for communication; its subfields are sentence processing, pragmatics, discourse analysis and conversation analysis.
3. C. Language uses symbols that have conventionalized meanings; its subfields are universal grammar, innateness, emergentism, neurolinguistics and cross-cultural analysis.
4. D. Language is a systematic means of communicating ideas or feelings by the use of conventionalized signs, sounds, gestures or marks having understood meanings.
5. E. Language has region-specific characteristics; its subfields are phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, discourse analysis and lexical analysis.

Choose the events correctly matched with their year:

1. A. The Official Languages Commission submitted its report in 1936.
2. B. The first ELTI was established in Allahabad in 1954.
3. C. The Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages was established in Hyderabad in 1958.
4. D. The National Policy on Education came in 1960.
5. E. The NPE and its Programme of Action came in 1986.

Choose the statements made by Virginia Woolf about women:

1. A. 'She is born stupid and can do nothing but stupidity.'
2. B. 'She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction.'
3. C. 'She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history.'
4. D. She criticized Shakespeare for being harsh and rude to his female characters.
5. E. 'In real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband.'

For Matthew Arnold, culture is:

1. A. the ability to know what is best
2. B. the ability to know what is worst
3. C. the mental and spiritual application of what is best
4. D. the pursuit of what is best
5. E. the pursuit of what is worst

Which of the following statements were made by J. S. Mill in The Subjection of Women?

1. A. 'The husband was called the lord of the wife.'
2. B. 'She is a slave of any boy whose parents force a ring upon her finger.'
3. C. 'Wives are in general no better treated than slaves.'
4. D. 'The wife is the actual bondservant of her husband.'
5. E. 'If all women are not the victims of actual rape, then all of them are the victims of the threat of rape.'

Which of the following rules on formatting dates and times in the body of a paper are correct according to the MLA Handbook (9th edition)?

1. A. When using the month-day-year style in prose, a comma must follow the year unless another punctuation mark follows it.
2. B. Use a comma between month and year or between season and year.
3. C. Decades can be written out or expressed in numerals.
4. D. Spell out centuries in uppercase letters.
5. E. Numerals are used for most times of the day; generally use the twelve-hour clock in prose.

Choose the correct statements:

1. A. Miller's play The Crucible was first written in verse.
2. B. The American Dream is a play by Edward Albee about the absurd situation and immediate realities.
3. C. The American Dream is a novel by Ionesco about the problems of a middle-aged professional.
4. D. Miller's play The Price is set in a baroque palace in Eastern Europe, debating the responsibility of the writer and the extent to which reality is a series of performed gestures.
5. E. Miller's play The Price explores the extent to which we retrospectively invent our own history.

Read the following statements carefully and choose the correct ones:

1. A. A mixed metaphor conjoins two or more obviously diverse metaphoric vehicles.
2. B. In metonymy, a part of something is used to signify the whole.
3. C. To scan a passage of verse is to go through it line by line to analyse its content, theme and diction.
4. D. The term 'kenning' denotes the recurrent use, in poems in Old Germanic languages, of a descriptive phrase in place of the ordinary name for something.
5. E. Figurative language is often divided into two categories: tropes and schemes.

Read the following statements carefully and choose the correct ones:

1. A. Mikhail Bakhtin traces the roots of the novel back to imperial Rome and ancient Hellenistic romances.
2. B. Henry James considers the novel as the epic of a prosaic modern world.
3. C. Margaret Anne Doody locates the novel's birthplace in the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean.
4. D. F. R. Leavis defines the novel as 'one bright book of life'.
5. E. Georg Lukács calls the novel 'the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God'.

Choose the correct statements about Victorian prose writers:

1. A. Macaulay was the practical man of affairs, helping and rejoicing in the progress of his beloved country.
2. B. Ruskin was like a Hebrew prophet just in from the desert, and the burden of his message was 'Woe to them that are at ease in Zion!'
3. C. Arnold was much like the cultivated Greek; his voice was soft, his speech suave, but he left the impression that you must be deficient in culture.
4. D. Newman was like the best French prose writers in expressing his thought with such naturalness and apparent ease that, without thinking of style, we received exactly the impression he meant to convey.

Choose the correct statements regarding the scope of linguistics:

1. A. To describe and trace the history of all observable languages.
2. B. To determine the forces that are permanently and universally at work in all languages.
3. C. To study manifestations of civilized human speech only.
4. D. To consider only correct speech and flowery language.
5. E. To delimit and define itself.

Choose the correct statements:

1. A. English literature was first offered as a subject of study at King's College, London, in 1831.
2. B. English was first offered as a subject of study in England in 1828 at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
3. C. Though taught as a medium of instruction and a subject in India since the 1850s, English literature was not taught at Oxford and Cambridge till the end of the nineteenth century.
4. D. In 1931, English replaced the study of classics in Greek and Latin in Oxford and Cambridge.
5. E. Until the end of the nineteenth century, literature meant only the study of great books in classical languages like Greek and Latin at Oxford and Cambridge.

Which of the following statements were made by Barbara Johnson?

1. A. 'Deconstruction is not synonymous with destruction...'
2. B. 'The deconstruction of a text does not proceed by random doubt or arbitrary subversion...'
3. C. 'Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself.'
4. D. 'If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not the text, but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another.'
5. E. 'Deconstruction as a mode of interpretation works by a careful and circumspect entering of each textual labyrinth...'

Which of the following critics are associated with the Frankfurt School?

1. A. Walter Benjamin
2. B. Laura Mulvey
3. C. Travis Henderson
4. D. Max Horkheimer
5. E. Leo Lowenthal

Choose the correct key points related to the approach of feminism and gender studies:

1. A. Feminism is concerned with the marginalization of women in a patriarchal culture.
2. B. Feminist critics explain how the subordination of women is reflected or challenged by literary texts; they examine the experiences of women of all races, classes, sexual preferences and cultures.
3. C. Mary Wollstonecraft defines four models of sexual difference: biological, linguistic, psychoanalytic and cultural.
4. D. Feminist critics aim to expose patriarchal premises and prejudices, promote the discovery and re-evaluation of literature by women, and examine the social, cultural and psychosexual contexts of literature and criticism.
5. E. Simone de Beauvoir prefers 'womanism' to 'feminism'.

Match List I with List II:

Match List I with List II:

Match List I with List II:

Match List I with List II:

Match List I with List II:

Match List I with List II:

Match List I with List II:

Match List I with List II:

Match List I with List II:

Match List I with List II:

Match List I with List II:

Match List I with List II:

Match List I with List II:

Match List I with List II:

Match List I with List II:

What internal conflict does the speaker express?

'Thieves for their robbery have authority / When judges steal themselves' implies:

According to the speaker, how does temptation disguise itself?

What kind of temptation does the speaker say is most dangerous?

What emotion is the speaker feeling at the end of the passage?

The author's primary argument suggests that technical mastery in painting is:

What implicit assumption about language and expression underpins the passage's argument?

What does the phrase 'possesses more power of delighting the sense, while it speaks to the intellect' imply about visual art?

What does the passage emphasize as the true measure of greatness in painting and writing?

What is the broader philosophical implication of the statement 'It is not by the mode of representing and saying, but by what is represented and said...'?