Subjective / Written Questions (25)
1. Critically examine Aristotle’s conception of tragedy in the prescribed chapters of the Poetics, with particular attention to the relationship among plot, action, character and catharsis.
2. Assess Sidney’s defence of poetry in An Apology for Poetry as a response to the moral and philosophical objections raised against imaginative literature.
3. Analyse Samuel Johnson’s defence of Shakespeare in the Preface to Shakespeare, focusing on his treatment of dramatic representation, genre and the unities.
4. Compare Wordsworth’s account of poetic language in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads with Coleridge’s distinction between imagination and fancy in Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIII.
5. Evaluate Matthew Arnold’s conception of poetry as a means of interpreting life in The Study of Poetry and discuss its implications for critical judgement.
6. Examine T. S. Eliot’s theory of impersonality in Tradition and the Individual Talent and relate it to his conception of tradition.
7. Discuss Eliot’s distinction between the creative and critical functions of literature in The Function of Criticism and assess its theoretical significance.
8. Explain how Cleanth Brooks uses paradox to account for the structural unity of poetic language in The Language of Paradox.
9. Critically assess John Crowe Ransom’s argument for a professionalised discipline of criticism in Criticism, Inc.
10. Compare the assumptions about literary value underlying New Criticism with those visible in Arnold’s critical method.
11. Discuss the concept of Rasa as an aesthetic experience and explain its significance for the critical reading of literary texts.
12. Examine Dhvani as a theory of suggestion and distinguish its critical function from merely decorative meaning.
13. Analyse the use of dramatic conflict and theological ambition in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.
14. Discuss Hamlet as a tragedy of inward conflict, relating its dramatic structure to the protagonist’s uncertainty and delay.
15. Examine The Duchess of Malfi as a tragedy shaped by the interaction of private desire, political authority and social surveillance.
16. Analyse The Alchemist as a comedy of deception and examine how Jonson structures its competing schemes.
17. Discuss Chaucer’s representation of social types in the prescribed opening and later portraits of the General Prologue.
18. Analyse the tension between sacred ritual and sensual celebration in Spenser’s Epithalamion.
19. Examine Milton’s presentation of Satan in Book I of Paradise Lost and assess the rhetorical strategies through which his character is constructed.
20. Compare Donne’s treatment of spiritual crisis in Holy Sonnet: Batter My Heart with the metaphysical argument of The Ecstasy.
21. Discuss the political and satirical dimensions of Absalom and Achitophel through the prescribed portraits of Absalom and Zimri.
22. Analyse the mock-epic method of The Rape of the Lock, particularly the relationship between trivial action and elevated style.
23. Compare Blake’s The Tyger and The Lamb as complementary explorations of creation, innocence, experience and paradox.
24. Examine the conflict between individual consciousness and social order in any two of the prescribed novels from the British Literature I syllabus.
25. Compare the treatment of freedom, authority and cultural identity across any two prescribed texts from American, Indian or New Literatures in English I.