Subjective / Written Questions (100)
1. How does the syllabus’s distinction between Old World and New World wilderness complicate the idea of nature as an untouched space?
2. Evaluate the concept of the sublime as an environmental aesthetic and relate it to the course’s ecocritical framework.
3. Analyse Flight Behaviour as a literary representation of ecological crisis and human responsibility.
4. Discuss Gift in Green in relation to indigenous ecological consciousness and the tension between development and environmental sustainability.
5. Compare the environmental imagination of Jim Corbett’s India with the perspectives offered in Landscape, History and the Pueblo Imagination.
6. Analyse Louis MacNeice’s treatment of place, movement and modernity across the prescribed poems.
7. Discuss Black Prince as an exploration of identity, desire and moral ambiguity within the Irish literary context.
8. Examine Brooklyn through the tension between migration, belonging and the construction of Irish identity.
9. How does Riders to the Sea transform familial loss and the sea into a tragic meditation on human vulnerability?
10. Assess the significance of Tain Bo Cualnge and the Ireland–India colonial comparison for understanding Irish cultural identity.
11. Explain Judith Butler’s account of sex, gender and desire and assess its challenge to essentialist ideas of identity.
12. Compare Simone de Beauvoir’s account of woman as ‘Other’ with Tarabai Shinde’s critique of unequal gender relations.
13. Analyse We Should All Be Feminists as an intervention in contemporary debates about gender socialisation and power.
14. Discuss Yajnaseni as a literary reconstruction of female subjectivity, agency and patriarchal constraint.
15. Examine A Doll’s House through the conflict between social role, marriage and individual autonomy.
16. Assess Suresh Awasthi’s ‘Theatre of Roots’ argument in relation to the recovery of traditional performance practices.
17. Examine the relationship between Sanskrit dramatic theory and performance as presented through V. Raghavan’s prescribed work.
18. Analyse Ghasiram Kotwal as a negotiation between Tamasha/Lavani performance traditions and political satire.
19. Discuss Charandas Chor as an example of Nacha theatre and evaluate its potential for social critique.
20. Compare Mother of 1084 and Fida as forms of socially interventionist and experimental Indian theatre.
21. Examine Karan Ghelo as a translated historical narrative and discuss how it participates in the representation of Gujarati cultural memory.
22. Analyse Anandamath in relation to nationalism and the ideological construction of collective identity.
23. Discuss Six Acres and a Third as a critique of agrarian exploitation, class power and colonial economic structures.
24. Examine Umrao Jaan Ada through gender, social marginality and the politics of cultural representation.
25. Assess The Gift of a Cow as a literary representation of peasantry, exploitation and social hierarchy.
26. Explain the existential concepts of freedom, choice, dread, despair and authenticity and show how they inform literary interpretation.
27. Analyse Gregor Samsa’s transformation in The Metamorphosis as a crisis of identity, agency and social belonging.
28. Discuss Thus Spoke Zarathustra in relation to the existential problem of self-creation and the rejection of inherited values.
29. How does existentialist literature negotiate the conflict between individual particularity and universal social expectations?
30. Evaluate the usefulness and limitations of applying existentialist philosophy as a framework for interpreting literary texts.
31. Explain the relationship among language, linguistics and theories of language that forms the conceptual foundation of the course.
32. Distinguish phonetics from phonology and explain why the distinction matters for the systematic study of speech.
33. Discuss how the study of sound patterns can contribute to a rigorous account of spoken English.
34. Examine the role of grammatical structure in producing meaning beyond the level of individual words.
35. Assess the value of modern linguistic approaches for literary students who analyse language as a formal system.
36. Discuss Partition literature as a form of historical memory rather than merely a record of political events.
37. Analyse how competing ideas of nation, territory and belonging can be represented through Partition narratives.
38. Evaluate the relationship between communal violence and literary testimony in representations of the 1947 Partition.
39. Discuss the significance of oral narratives and remembered loss in constructing histories of Partition.
40. How can literary representations of Partition challenge official nationalist accounts of history?
41. Analyse The Virgin and the Gypsy as a study of social convention, desire and individual freedom.
42. Discuss the treatment of instinct, civilisation and human–animal relations in Snake.
43. Examine Piano as a poem in which memory complicates the speaker’s present consciousness.
44. Compare the treatment of nature and perception in Autumn Sunshine and Butterfly.
45. Assess the relationship between emotional intimacy and social constraint in Cruelty and Love.
46. Explain the significance of Vedic and early Sanskrit traditions in the historical development of Indian classical literature.
47. Discuss the relationship between myth, ritual and literary imagination in selected classical Indian texts.
48. Analyse the concept of Rasa as a bridge between aesthetic theory and literary experience.
49. Examine the relationship between classical literary form and philosophical thought in the prescribed texts.
50. Assess how the study of Indian classical literature can contribute to a culturally grounded theory of literary interpretation.
51. Examine how children’s literature can construct ideas of childhood rather than merely reflect them.
52. Discuss the relationship between imagination and moral education in children’s literary texts.
53. Analyse the ways authority and obedience may be represented through narratives written for young readers.
54. How can children’s literature be studied as a serious cultural form rather than as a simplified literary category?
55. Evaluate the importance of genre, narrative voice and the implied child reader in children’s literature.
56. Analyse Tagore’s conception of the relationship between the individual and the natural world.
57. Discuss the tension between spiritual freedom and social constraint in Tagore’s literary thought.
58. Examine Tagore’s treatment of nationalism in relation to his broader humanistic vision.
59. How does Tagore negotiate the relationship between tradition and modernity?
60. Assess the significance of aesthetic experience and spiritual consciousness in Tagore’s literary imagination.
61. Explain the foundational assumptions of Rasa theory and its implications for the interpretation of literary experience.
62. Compare Dhvani with other theories of meaning in Indian poetics and assess its critical importance.
63. Discuss the function of Alankara in relation to poetic beauty and literary expression.
64. Examine how Indian Sanskrit poetics integrates aesthetic response with theories of language.
65. Assess the relevance of classical Indian poetics to the close reading of modern literary texts.
66. Discuss how literature can function as a mode of understanding Indian cultural plurality.
67. Analyse the relationship between literary representation and the construction of Indian identity.
68. How can literary texts reveal tensions between regional, linguistic, caste, gender and national identities?
69. Examine the usefulness of literature as a source for understanding social memory and historical consciousness in India.
70. Evaluate the limits of treating literary texts as transparent representations of Indian society.
71. Define popular literature as a critical category and distinguish it from assumptions of purely ‘serious’ literature.
72. Discuss the relationship between mass readership, market forces and literary production.
73. Analyse how genre conventions shape readers’ expectations in popular literary forms.
74. How can popular literature reproduce or challenge dominant social ideologies?
75. Evaluate the critical problems involved in studying popular literature within university literary studies.
76. Explain why film should be studied as a language of images, sound, editing and performance rather than merely as a recorded story.
77. Discuss mise-en-scène as a critical tool for interpreting cinematic meaning.
78. Analyse the role of editing in controlling narrative time, viewpoint and audience response.
79. Examine the relationship between spectatorship and the construction of cinematic meaning.
80. Assess how adaptation from literary text to film changes the nature of narrative representation.
81. Discuss the principal features that distinguish French literary traditions within a comparative literary framework.
82. Analyse the relationship between literary form and intellectual history in French literature.
83. Examine how French literary texts can be situated within changing ideas of society, reason and individual identity.
84. Discuss the significance of literary movements in understanding developments in French writing.
85. Evaluate the usefulness of reading French literature comparatively with English literary traditions.
86. Discuss the relationship between Russian literary imagination and social transformation.
87. Analyse how Russian fiction can use the individual protagonist to expose tensions within society.
88. Examine the relationship between psychological depth and social criticism in Russian literary traditions.
89. Discuss the role of realism and moral inquiry in Russian literature.
90. Evaluate the contribution of Russian literature to comparative understandings of the modern novel.
91. Define comparative literature as a method and distinguish comparison from simple parallel reading.
92. Discuss the problem of literary influence and explain why similarity between texts does not necessarily establish influence.
93. Examine the importance of cultural context in comparative literary interpretation.
94. How does translation complicate the comparative study of texts written in different languages?
95. Assess the value and limitations of comparative methodology for postgraduate literary research.
96. Explain the major conceptual problems involved in defining translation as an act of textual transfer.
97. Discuss the tension between fidelity to the source text and readability in the target language.
98. Analyse the role of cultural context in determining translation choices.
99. Examine the translator’s visibility and agency in the production of a translated literary text.
100. Assess how translation can reshape the reception and cultural status of a literary work.