CIVILS MAINS 2013
ENGLISH
PAPER-II
LITERATURE)
ITime Allowed Three Hours I IMaximum Marks 250 I
QUESTION PAPER SPECIFIC INSTRUCTIONS
Please read each of the following instructions carefully
before attempting questions
There are EIGHT questions divided in two Sections.
Candidate has to attempt FIVE questions in all.
Question Nos. 1 and 5 are compulsory and out of the remaining, THREE are to be
attempted choosing at least ONE question from each Section.
The number of marks carried by a question/part is indicated against it.
Answers must be written in ENGLISH.
Word limit in questions, if specified, should be adhered to.
Attempts of questions shall be counted in chronological order. Unless struck off, attempt
of a question shall be counted even if attempted partly. Any page or portion of the page
left blank in the Question-cum-Answer Booklet must be clearly struck off.

SECTION-A
1. Write short notes on the following 10x5=50
The comically self-aware persona in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
Yeats's fancy for an aristocratic life of elegance and leisure in "A Prayer for
My Daughter"
The thematic rhymes in Section 3 of "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"
Postcolonial melancholia
Postmodern 'realisms'

2. Write essays on the following questions 25x2=50
How sustainable is the argument that Indian writers in English betray an
'anxiety of Indianness'?
To what extent have Indian traditions of thought influenced A. K. Ramanujan's
poetry?

3. How does Beckett exploit the metaphor of life as theatre in Waitingfor Godot? 25
Was Philip Larkin, the poet troubled by the socio-economic imbalances in
post-World War II Britain? Substantiate. 25

4. Discuss some major issues involving language as power in postmodern English
writing. 25
How crucial in your view is the concept of 'Othering' in postcolonial literatures? 25
SECTION-B
5. Answer the questions that follow this passage 10x5=50
It is worth attempting some head-on thoughts about 'meaning'. Confronted with
passages of text you may sometimes face a choice between leading questions: 'what
does it mean' versus 'how does it work'. It will be evident that words and phrases
carry lexical meanings, sometimes in multiple array of possible signif'ying activities,
sometimes also echoing other literary or historical usage. It will be evident too that
what words mean is a different question from what a text-passage means; or what
are the meanings at work in a whole literary composition, its thematic conflicts and
developments and layers of interpretation. Also a further complication arises when
we speak of what a person means, of his or her intention to be understood in a
certain way, through speech or action; thus concerning Cordelia's silence in King
Lear we may ask two slightly but importantly different questions what does her
silence mean, and what does she mean by her silence. In drama, these issues can

be especially acute: what a particular speech will vary amongst its onstage
auditors, some of whom may be more inward than others with part hidden
purposes; and for the larger audience an initial array of distinct possible or probable
meanings may be modified in retrospect by later disclosures or the 'dramatic irony'
of subsequent events. It is fairly unlikely that questions of the playwright's own
meaning or meaning-intention will feature strongly In this interplay of
interpretation, though the choice of topic may indicate certain possible motives in
the context of the times.
Where personal character is represented as a focus for point-of-view interaction, as
in narrative fiction, again what is meant may be an aspect of what this person
means, in speech and action, or what this person is capable of successfully wishing
to mean, depending on self-knowledge and expressed in the sense of actions
consequentially undertaken, such actions then interpreted by others from differing
viewpoints along significantly divergent lines. The resulting social complex of
behavior, and the novelist's construction of an extended meaning-process in many
strands, give the reader much work for imaginative and emotional intelligence, for
sympathy tempered by judgment. Linguists and philosophers of language, and even
lawyers, sometimes speak of 'plain sense', normative or 'ordinary-language'
meaning; but students of literature know well that literary language is not ordinary,
even when it adopts for stylistic purposes the speech patterns of natural utterance.
Patterns of symbolism or constructed allegory, especially in pre-modern works, or
tragic foreclosure in tightly plotted drama, may also require us to read for the sense
of the design along more or less genre-specific lines of construal, just as earlier
communities once read the pattern of daily events in terms of a directing
providence. Both grammar and syntax inflect the stylistic pitch and meaning-effects
of writing, and formal devices like prosody and meter and figuration will alert the
reader to further aspects of meaning carried by structure and form-bringing into
view what may be meant by 'carried' in this context. Richness of meaning may
challenge or even defeat coherence of design; or it may reveal ordered depths of
multiple significance (polysemy, ambiguity), or layers of structure and
structure-echo, so that successive readings and succeeding generations of readers
can discover constantly new insights and rewards.

What possible meanings exist beyond mere lexical meaning?
How differently significant are the two questions concerning Cordelia's silence
in King Lear?
What special meaning to a speech does 'dramatic irony' give?
In what way is the meaning of a character's utterance limited and lImiting
in narrative fiction?
Explain the phrase 'the sense of the design'.

6. Write essays on the following questions 25x2=50
What memories of childhood and family inform A House for Mr Biswas?
Comment critically on the view that A Passage to India presents a muddlethe
whole country as a place of division and disjunction.
7. Attempt a critique of the writer as worker as enunciated in Marxist critical
thought. 25
How do Feminist writers engage cultural politics? 25
8. How does Mrs Dalloway capture the sense of rupture caused by a catastrophic
war? 25
Comment on the deployment of repetitive language and action in the English
'new theatre'. 25