Subjective / Written Questions (100)
1. Develop an advanced ecocritical argument about the relationship between environmental crisis and literary form.
2. Analyse how literature can represent ecological interdependence without reducing nature to a passive background.
3. Discuss the relationship between gender, environmental ethics and the representation of non-human life.
4. Examine the politics of environmental justice through literary representations of land, labour and vulnerable communities.
5. Assess how the course’s ecocritical perspective can challenge anthropocentric assumptions in literary studies.
6. Examine how later Irish writing negotiates the relationship between national history and individual identity.
7. Discuss the continuing significance of colonial memory in Irish literary representation.
8. Analyse the role of migration, displacement or cultural belonging in modern Irish writing.
9. Evaluate the ways Irish literary texts distinguish cultural nationalism from narrower forms of political identity.
10. Compare the Irish literary imagination with another postcolonial literary tradition studied in the programme.
11. Analyse how feminist literary criticism can move beyond representation toward questions of power, embodiment and social structure.
12. Discuss the relationship between gender and ecological ethics in the course’s feminist intersections with animals and the earth.
13. Examine care, empathy and relationality as concepts within feminist ethical thought.
14. Analyse One Part Woman through gender, caste, community pressure and the politics of reproductive choice.
15. Evaluate how postfeminist discourse complicates earlier models of feminist literary criticism.
16. Analyse the relationship between text and performativity in contemporary Indian theatre.
17. Discuss K. G. Paulose’s treatment of Abhinaya and its implications for understanding Natyasastra in performance.
18. Examine Mareech, The Legend through the framework of Bangla experimental theatre.
19. Discuss Badal Sircar’s Scandal in Fairyland as an example of Third Theatre and its challenge to conventional stage practice.
20. Compare One Day in Ashadh with another prescribed theatre text in terms of the relationship between literary text, performance and cultural context.
21. Analyse The Last Flicker in relation to social change, memory and the representation of marginalised experience.
22. Discuss Beware! The Cows Are Coming as a literary exploration of social values and community tensions.
23. Examine Bharathipura through caste, social reform and the individual’s encounter with inherited structures.
24. Analyse The Princess and the Political Agent as a narrative shaped by gender, power and colonial encounter.
25. Discuss The Man from Chinnamasta and Of Men and Moments as texts through which cultural critique can expose social hierarchies.
26. Analyse Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus as a philosophical response to the problem of absurdity.
27. Discuss Cocoon through the existential tension between individual identity and social reality.
28. Examine Andha Yug as a literary representation of moral responsibility, despair and historical catastrophe.
29. Analyse Malone Dies through Beckett’s treatment of consciousness, isolation and the instability of narrative identity.
30. Compare Beauvoir’s Ambiguity and Freedom with any one prescribed literary text to examine the existential problem of freedom under social conditions.
31. Assess how advanced linguistic analysis can illuminate stylistic variation in literary and spoken English.
32. Discuss the relationship between phonetic description and the interpretation of speech patterns in literary dialogue.
33. Examine grammatical structure as a resource for analysing emphasis, viewpoint and meaning.
34. Evaluate the contribution of linguistic analysis to stylistics and close reading.
35. Discuss the limitations of applying formal linguistic models to literary language without attention to context.
36. Examine the long afterlife of Partition in literature through memory, displacement and inherited trauma.
37. Discuss refugee experience as a literary problem involving home, locality and belonging.
38. Analyse the relationship between communal violence and the representation of personal memory.
39. Evaluate the idea of the ‘Long Partition’ as a challenge to narratives that treat 1947 as a single completed event.
40. Discuss how literary narratives can contest official histories through marginal voices and remembered experience.
41. Analyse ‘Human Relations and the Unconscious’ as a framework for understanding Lawrence’s treatment of interpersonal life.
42. Discuss the representation of nature and perception in Mountain Lion, At the Window and Birdcage Walk.
43. Examine Women in Love through Lawrence’s treatment of intimacy, modernity and psychological conflict.
44. Analyse Odour of Chrysanthemum and The Women Who Rode Away as studies of desire, alienation and social constraint.
45. Discuss A Collier’s Friday Night as a dramatic exploration of class, family and industrial social conditions.
46. Analyse the philosophical and literary significance of the Purusha-Suktam and Shivasankalpa Suktam within the prescribed Vedic selections.
47. Discuss the relationship between philosophical inquiry and literary expression in the Kathopanishad and Dhammapada selections.
48. Examine the treatment of Rasa, dramatic form and performance in the prescribed chapters of the Natyasastra.
49. Analyse the ethical and political dimensions of the Dicing episode and the Temptation of Karna in the Mahabharata.
50. Assess how classical Indian texts integrate aesthetics, philosophy, ethics and social thought.
51. Analyse contemporary children’s literature through the categories of gender, ideology and representation.
52. Discuss how narratives for young readers can reproduce or question social hierarchies.
53. Examine the relationship between childhood, agency and cultural authority in contemporary children’s texts.
54. Assess the role of fantasy and imagination in negotiating difficult social realities for young readers.
55. Evaluate children’s literature as a field capable of sustaining serious theoretical and ideological analysis.
56. Analyse Tagore’s later literary thought in relation to universal humanism and cultural identity.
57. Discuss the tension between national identity and Tagore’s critique of aggressive nationalism.
58. Examine the relationship between nature, spirituality and freedom in Tagore’s literary imagination.
59. How can Tagore’s work be read through the interaction of Indian cultural traditions and modern global thought?
60. Evaluate Tagore’s contribution to comparative and world-literary studies.
61. Analyse the relationship between Rasa and Dhvani as complementary approaches to aesthetic meaning.
62. Discuss the role of Vakrokti, Aucitya or related concepts in explaining the distinctive force of poetic expression.
63. Examine how Sanskrit poetics theorises the relation between language, emotion and aesthetic response.
64. Discuss the implications of Indian aesthetic theory for interpreting dramatic performance.
65. Evaluate the continuing critical relevance of Sanskrit poetics within contemporary literary theory.
66. Discuss how literature can interrogate rather than merely reproduce dominant constructions of Indian identity.
67. Analyse the role of regional and marginal voices in producing a more complex understanding of India.
68. Examine the relationship between literary memory, history and cultural belonging in Indian texts.
69. Discuss how caste, gender, language and region complicate the idea of a unified India in literature.
70. Evaluate the methodological problems involved in using literature to understand a culturally diverse nation.
71. Examine how contemporary popular literature negotiates the relationship between entertainment and ideology.
72. Discuss the role of genre conventions in producing reader identification and commercial success.
73. Analyse how popular narratives can both reinforce and subvert stereotypes.
74. Evaluate the influence of mass media and changing technologies on the production and reception of popular literature.
75. Assess whether popular literature can sustain complex social and political criticism without losing its mass appeal.
76. Analyse film form through the combined operation of cinematography, editing, sound and mise-en-scène.
77. Discuss spectatorship as an active process rather than passive consumption of images.
78. Examine how film genre influences narrative expectations and ideological interpretation.
79. Analyse the politics of adaptation when a literary narrative is transformed into a cinematic text.
80. Evaluate the usefulness of film theory for interpreting questions of representation, identity and power.
81. Analyse the relationship between French literary modernity and changing conceptions of the individual.
82. Discuss how French literary movements can be read as responses to historical and intellectual transformations.
83. Examine the interaction between philosophical thought and literary form in French traditions.
84. Compare a major concern of French literature with its treatment in an English literary tradition.
85. Evaluate the contribution of French literature to the development of comparative literary theory.
86. Analyse the relationship between psychological interiority and social criticism in Russian literary traditions.
87. Discuss the ethical questions raised by Russian representations of suffering, responsibility and moral choice.
88. Examine how historical upheaval can reshape literary representations of individual identity.
89. Compare Russian realism with another literary tradition in terms of its treatment of society and the individual.
90. Evaluate the place of Russian literature in the development of modern world literature.
91. Critically examine the methodological problems that arise when comparing texts from unequal cultural and linguistic contexts.
92. Discuss the role of translation in enabling and complicating comparative literary research.
93. Analyse the difference between thematic similarity, formal analogy and demonstrable literary influence.
94. Evaluate comparative literature as an interdisciplinary field involving history, culture, language and literary theory.
95. Design a comparative research argument that avoids reducing two distinct literary traditions to superficial similarities.
96. Discuss the cultural turn in Translation Studies and its implications for the study of translated texts.
97. Analyse the relationship between translation, power and cultural representation.
98. Examine how translators negotiate culturally specific concepts that have no direct equivalent in the target language.
99. Discuss the ethical responsibilities of translators when representing marginalised cultures and identities.
100. Evaluate translation as an interpretive act rather than a mechanically transferable reproduction of the source text.