CRITICISM PAST PAPERS 2011 TILL 2012

CRITICISM 2011

Attempt any FOUR questions including Question No. 5 which is COMPULSORY. All questions carry equal marks. 
1. Aristotle's discussion on Tragedy is determined by his conception of human nature and social relations. Discuss.
2. What is William's thesis in Tragedy and Tradition, and how does it determine the structure of the essay?
3. Critical Practice is produced with a bias in favour of the interrogative text. Would you agree? Give reasons for your answer.
4. What risks could 'Individual Talent' run in its disregard of tradition?
5. Who is the assumed audience of Sidney's An Apology for Poetry? Justify your answer with close reference to the text.
6. Explain the radical position of 'New Criticism' in its time and say how it fails to break free from 'Expressive Realism'.
7. Critically evaluate any ONE of the following:
(i) What is Freedom? --- Ye can tell
That which Slavery is too well,
   For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own.

'Tis to work, and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day
In you limbs, as in a cell,
For the tyrants' use to dwell

So ye for them are made
Loom and plough, and sword and spade
With or without your own will bent
To their defense and nourishment.

(From: The Mask of Anarchy by Shelly) 

(ii) They're lying; lying all of them:
He never loved his shadow,
And tried to wring its neck.
Not love but murder on his mind,
He grappled with the other man
Inside the lucid stream

Only the surface broke,
Unblinking eyes
Came swimming back in view.
At last he knew
He never would
Destroy the other self
And knowing made him shrink
He shrank into a yellow --- bellied flower

(Narcissus by Mervyn Morris)

11. YEAR 2011 (Supplementary)

Attempt any FOUR questions including Question No. 5 which is COMPULSORY. All questions carry equal marks. 
1. In what ways does The Poetics by down the principles of criticism in terms of analysis and categorization?
2. How does the treatment of the tragic hero change from classical to modern times?
3. What do you understand of 'Deconstruction' from Belsey's Critical Practice?
4. How does 'Individual Talent' relate with 'Tradition'?
5. Explain the significance of the title of Sidney's text: An Apology for Poetry.
6. Williams' essay 'Tragedy and Tradition' assumes as 'informed reader'. Discuss.
7. Critically evaluate any ONE of the following:
(i) There be none of Beauty's daughters
With a magic like thee;
And like music on the waters
Is thy sweet voice to me;
When, as if its sound were causing
The Charmed Ocean's pausing,
The waves be still and gleaning,
And the lulled winds seen dreaming:
And the Midnight Moon is weaving
Her bright chain o'er the deep;
Whose breast is gently heaving,
As an infant's sleep:
So the spirit bows before thee,
To listen and adore thee;
With a full but soft emotion,
Like the swell of summer's ocean

(Stanzas for Music by Byron) 

(ii) From the centre
From the nothing
Of not seen
Of not heard,
There comes
A shifting
A stirring
And a creeping forward
There comes
A standing
A springing
To an outer circles,
There comes
An intake
Of breath
Tihe Mauriora!

(From: Potiki by Patricia Grace)

12. YEAR 2012

Attempt FOUR questions. All questions carry equal marks. 
1. "Poetry is something more philosophic and of graver importance than history, since its statements are of the nature of universals". Estimate the relative importance of poetry and philosophy in the light of the above statement.
2. How does modern tragedy encounter the issues of order and accident?
3. Sum up the contribution of Roland Barthes and Jacque Lacan to the development of modern critical trends.
4. Why does T.S. Eliot use the analogy of the catalyst for explaining the role of the poetic mind in the act of creation? How appropriate is this comparison in your own view?
5. Does Philip Sidney present a plausible critical picture of the contemporary British theatre? What are his chief observations in this regard?
6. "By a change of dramatic view point, we have to look not only at the isolated experience of the martyr, but at the social process of his martyrdom". How does the statement point out the departure of Brecht from the classical notion of tragic hero and tragic experience?
7. Critically examine any ONE of the following:
"MISERRUMUS,' and neither name nor date,
Prayer, text, or symbol, graven upon the stone,
Nought but that word assigned to the unknown,
That solitary word-to-separate
From all, and cast a cloud around the fate
Of him who lies beneath. Most wretched one,
'Who' chose his epitaph?--- Himself alone
Could thus have dared the grave to agitate,
And claim, among the dead, this awful crown;
"Nor doubt that He marked also for his own
Close to these cloistral steps a burial place,
The every foot might fall with heavier tread,
Trampling upon his vileness. Stranger, pass
Softly! To save the contrite, Jesus bled

(William Wordsworth) 

(ii) BRIGHT star! Would I were steadfast as thou art ---
Not in love splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors ---
No --- yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever --- or else swoon to death.

(John Keats) 

13. YEAR 2012 (Supplementary)

Attempt FOUR questions. All questions carry equal marks. 
1. "Aristotle's statement about the end of tragedy --- purgation or catharsis --- has been so endlessly misunderstood, so uncritically assumed to be true". Discuss.
2. The Aristotelian concept of tragedy requires considerable modifications in the light of later developments in the field of tragedy. What are Raymond Williams' chief observations in this regard?
3. Critical Practice is produced with a bias in favour of the interrogative text. Would you agree?
4. What relationship, according to T.S. Eliot, must exist between tradition and individual poetic talent?
5. Does Philip Sydney  support the concept of the imitative nature of poetry in An Apology of Poetry? How?
6. What does the term 'split subject' imply? How does 20th century critically deal with the phenomenon?
7. Critically examine any ONE of the following:
(i) A pinup of Rita Hay worth way taped
To touch the bomb that fell on Hiroshima
The Avant-garde makes me weep with boredom,
Horses are wishes, especially dark ones.
That's why twitches and fences.
That's why switches and spurs.
That's why the idiom of betrayal
They forgive us.
Their wind-swayed manes and tails
Their eyes,
Affront the winter-scrubbed prairie
With gentleness.
They live in both worlds and forgive us.
I'll give you a hint: the wind in fits and stars.
Like schoolchildren when the teacher walks in,
The aspens jostles for their places
And fall still
A delirium of ridges breaks in a blue streak;
A confusion of means
Saved from annihilation
By catastrophe.
A horse gallops up to the gate and stops.
The rider dismounts,
Do I know him?

(James Galvin) 

(ii) Epitaph
The first time I died, I walked my ways;
I followed the file of limping days.
I held me tall, with my head flung up,
But I dared not look on the moon's cup.
I dared not look on the sweet rain,
And between my ribs was a gleaming pain.
The next time I died, they laid me deep,
They spoke worn words to my hallow sleep.
They tossed me petals, they wreathed me fern,
They weighted me down with a marble urn.
And I lie here warm, and I lie there dry.
And I watch worms slip by, slip by.

(Dorothy Parker)

14. YEAR 2013
Attempt FOUR questions. All questions carry equal marks. 
1. Discuss Aristotle's concept of a tragic hero in the light of his book Poetics.
2. Sidney's Apology for Poetry presents a brilliant analysis of the contemporary dramatic practice. Explain.
3. "It is not the, the greatness the intensity of emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts." Explain this statement in the light of Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent".
4. What are the limitations of Experience Realist critical approach to Literature?
5. What are Raymond Williams' views regarding culture and tragedy? Discuss in detail.
6. Criticism is an effort "to see things as they are, without partiality, without obtrusion of personal liking of disliking." What is your opinion?
7. Critically examine any ONE of the following:
(i) Full fathom five my father lies,
Of his bones are coral made:
Those were pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell;
Burthen: Ding, Dong.
Hark, now I hear them --- ding-dong bell.

(Shakespeare) 

(ii) A poor bird freely roaming in the jungle
He might not have been affected by these hindrance
On whose decoration the nature is decorated
His world might be innocent".

(Sarala Bista)

15. YEAR 2014
Attempt any FOUR questions. All questions carry equal marks. 
1. Discuss at length the criterion for a tragic hero laid down by Aristotle in Poetics.
2. Sidney's Apology for Poetry is a work which has rightly been valued as one of the outstanding performances in English Criticism and one which inaugurated a new phase in the history of criticism. What is your opinion? Explain with arguments.
3. "It is not the, the greatness the intensity of emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts." Explain this statement in the light of Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent".
4. What is meant by the term New Criticism? Does Belsey oppose it or support it? Discuss.
5. Why in Raymond William's view Greek tragedy is unique and cannot be reproduced in modern times? Discuss with reference to Modern Tragedy.
6. "The ultimate objective of Criticism is neither to accept nor to reject but to take issue & proceed." What is your opinion?
7. Critically examine any ONE of the following:
(i) Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Easter tide.
Now, of my three score years and ten
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy Springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more,
And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room
About the woodland I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow. (A.E. Houseman)
(ii) The silver swan, who living had not note,
When death approached, unlocked her silent throat,
Leaning her breast against the ready shore,
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more:
Farewell all joys! O death, come close mine eyes;
More geese than swans now love, more fools than wise. (Anonymous)