Subjective / Written Questions (25)
1. Critically examine Saussure’s account of the linguistic sign and explain how structuralism changes the study of literature.
2. Analyse Derrida’s critique of structural stability in Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.
3. Explain Althusser’s concept of Ideological State Apparatuses and assess its usefulness for reading literary texts.
4. Evaluate Showalter’s account of the female tradition and discuss how feminist criticism revises literary history.
5. Examine Gauri Viswanathan’s argument about the institutional beginnings of English literary study in British India.
6. Discuss Spivak’s problem of representation and voice in Can the Subaltern Speak?
7. Assess Greenblatt’s New Historicist method through the relation between fiction, power and historical discourse.
8. Explain Lacan’s treatment of the letter and the unconscious and discuss its implications for literary interpretation.
9. Critically examine Lyotard’s account of postmodernism and the problem of grand narratives.
10. Discuss Jonathan Bate’s ecocritical perspective in Going, Going and its challenge to conventional literary study.
11. Compare Riti, Vakrokti and Aucitya as distinct concepts within Indian classical poetics.
12. Analyse The Way of the World as a comedy of manners shaped by wit, marriage and social performance.
13. Discuss Candida as a drama of competing conceptions of love, marriage and moral authority.
14. Examine The Importance of Being Earnest as a critique of Victorian respectability through comic inversion.
15. Compare Wordsworth’s Ode: Intimations of Immortality with Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner as poems of memory, perception and altered consciousness.
16. Discuss Keats’s treatment of permanence, beauty and mortality in Ode on a Grecian Urn and Ode to Autumn.
17. Analyse Shelley’s Adonais as an elegy that transforms personal grief into aesthetic and philosophical reflection.
18. Examine Arnold’s Scholar Gypsy and Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar as contrasting meditations on modern life, withdrawal and transcendence.
19. Discuss Jane Austen’s treatment of emotional judgement and social economy in Sense and Sensibility.
20. Analyse Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities through its treatment of revolution, sacrifice and historical memory.
21. Examine Middlemarch as a complex representation of provincial society, individual aspiration and social constraint.
22. Discuss Wuthering Heights as a novel that destabilises conventional ideas of love, inheritance and social order.
23. Analyse the relation between voice, identity and marginalised experience in the prescribed American Literature II texts.
24. Compare Beloved with The Grapes of Wrath in their treatment of historical trauma, displacement and collective memory.
25. Critically examine how African, Caribbean, Australian, Canadian and New Zealand texts in Semester II challenge inherited colonial categories of identity and culture.