SINDH PUBLIC SERVICE COMMISSION, HYDERABAD.
Combined Competitive Examination, 2020
ENGLISH LITERATURE
Monday the 23rd November, 2020.
Time: 02:00 pm to 05:00 pm
Maximum marks: 100
Note: Attempt any Five questions. All questions carry equal marks.
1
(A) Write an Essay on timeless wisdom of Bertrand Russell reflected in “The Conquest of Happiness.”
(B) Write short note on “Politics and the English Language”
2 Despite its length, an abundance of allusions and no-overall plotline or chronological sequence, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is the single most important 20th century modern poem which stands out because of its style, themes and pervasive legacy. Elaborate.
3 How do Keats’ strong pictorial imagination, linguistic appeal to the senses and extraordinary sensitivity to the impressions of the moment engage in the formulation of his view of poetry: “If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all”?
4 The dramaturgical inventiveness of Shakespeare lies in his power of using language and investing insight into his tragic characters that render uniqueness to each play he wrote, yet giving a certain structure and style to what we know as a Shakespearean tragedy. Discuss with reference to both Hamlet and King Lear.
5 How successfully James Joyce perfects the literary technique of the stream of consciousness in his bildungsroman “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”?
6 Postcolonialism is neither a new discipline nor a clearly identifiable field of research; it is undeniably a gesture rather than a demarcation and points out not towards a new knowledge but rather towards an examination and critique of knowledge(s). Discuss.
7 Elaborate, how does the psychoanalytic method for understanding multiple meanings, formal complexities, and the involvement of human personality in the literary experience better help establish the worth of literature in modern times?
8 How would you substantiate the belief that Marxist criticism not only determines the progressive social content and literary form of a literary work, analyzing the class constructs, class struggles and subverting the dominant ideologies in it but also pays a close attention to its forms, styles and meanings within a particular historical context?