UPHESC Assistant Professor English Syllabus 2026

UPHESC Assistant Professor English Syllabus

The written exam has two parts: General Knowledge (30 questions, the same for all subjects) and English (90 questions). Both syllabi below are the official ones of the Uttar Pradesh Education Service Selection Commission, Prayagraj.

Part 1: General Knowledge (30 questions, 90 marks)

Compulsory for all disciplines. Download PDF (0.3 MB)

Unit 1: Current Affairs

• Major events and current affairs: national and international
• Personalities in news
• Sports news
• Current research in the field of science

Unit 2: Teaching and Research Aptitude

• Teaching: nature, objectives, need, methods, evaluation and factors affecting teaching
• Research: meaning and methods
• Data: source, collection and analysis
• Role of UGC in qualitative development in higher education

Unit 3: Information and Communication Technology (ICT)

• ICT: meaning, advantages and disadvantages
• Basics of internet and e-mailing
• General abbreviations and terminology

Unit 4: People and Environment

• People and environment interaction
• Environmental degradation: causes and solutions
• National and international efforts for a better environment
• Environmental control

Unit 5: Indian History and Geography

• Salient features of Indian culture
• Indian National Movement (1857–1950)
• Origin of the universe and the solar system
• Indian geography (general)

Unit 6: Indian Constitution and Economy

• Preamble, Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles
• Indian political system: legislature, executive and judiciary
• Election Commission and Public Service Commission
• Population, poverty, unemployment; planning and development; income tax
• Agriculture, industry, trade; money, currency, banking and capital market

Part 2: English (subject code 10) – 90 questions, 270 marks

The English paper is at post-graduate (Master's) level. The complete official syllabus is below. Download English syllabus PDF (0.7 MB)

Unit I: Literature and Society in the following periods

• (a) Renaissance & Reformation
• (b) Restoration Period
• (c) Neo-classical Period
• (d) Romantic Period
• (e) Victorian Period
• (f) Modern Period
• (g) Post-Modern Period

Unit II: British Drama

• C. Marlowe : Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta
• Ben Jonson : Everyman in His Humour
• W. Shakespeare : Hamlet, Macbeth, The Twelfth Night, As You Like It, The Tempest, Julius Caesar
• John Webster : The Duchess of Malfi
• John Dryden : All For Love
• W. Congreve : The Way of the World
• George Bernard Shaw : Candida, Man and Superman, Pygmalion, Arms and the Man
• John Galsworthy : Strife, Loyalties
• John Synge : The Playboy of the Western World
• T.S. Eliot : Murder in the Cathedral
• Sammuel Beckett : Waiting for Godot
• John Osborme : Look Back in Anger
• Harold Pinter : The Birthday Party
• Tom Stoppard : Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
• Caryl Churchill : Top Girls

Unit III: British Prose and Fiction

• Francis Bacon : ‘Of Truth’, ‘Of Revenge’, ‘Of Studies’, ‘Of Marriage and Single Life’,
• John Milton : ‘Areopagitica’
• Addison and Steele : Essays dealing with Coverly Papers from ‘The Spectator’.
• Mary Wollstonecraft : ‘A vindication of the Rights of Woman’
• Charles Lamb : ‘The South Sea House’, ‘Dream Children’, ‘Christ Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago’, ‘The Superannuated Man’ ‘Poor Relations’, ‘Imperfect Sympathies’
• William Hazlitt : ‘Public Opinion’, ‘On Reading Old Books’, ‘On Reading New Books’
• Virginia Woolf : ‘A Room of One’s Own’
• Henry Fielding : Joseph Andrews
• Jane Austen : Pride and Prejudice
• Mary Shelley : Frankenstein
• Charles Dickens : Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities
• George Eliot : Middle March
• Thomas Hardy : Tess of the D’Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge
• D.H. Lawrence : Sons and Lovers
• James Joyce : A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Graham Greene : The Power and the Glory
• George Orwell : Nineteen Eighty-Four
• William Golding : Lord of the Flies
• Kazuo Ishiguro : The Remains of the Day

Unit IV: British Poetry

• G. Chaucer : ‘The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales’
• E. Spenser : ‘The Faerie Queene Book I’
• Philip Sidney : ‘Sonnet 1’ and ‘Sonnet 31’ (from Astrophil and Stella)
• John Donne : ‘The Canonization’, ‘The Flea’, ‘A Valediction Forbidding Mourning’, ‘Goe and Catche a Falling Starre’, ‘Death Be Not Proud’
• J. Milton : ‘Paradise Lost Book I’, ‘Lycidas’
• J. Dryden : ‘Absalom & Achitophel’
• A. Pope : ‘The Rape of the Lock’
• William Blake : ‘London’, ‘Tyger’
• Thomas Gray : ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’
• William Wordsworth : ‘The Prelude’ Book I, ‘Tintern Abbey’, ‘The Daffodils’
• S.T. Coleridge : ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, ‘Kubla Khan’
• P.B. Shelley : ‘Ode to the West Wind’, ‘Adonais’, ‘Ode to Skylark’
• John Keats : ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, ‘Ode to Autumn’
• A. Tennyson : ‘Lady of Shallot’, ‘Ulysses’, ‘The Princess’, ‘The Lotos Eaters’
• Christina Rossetti : ‘Goblin Market’
• Robert Browning : ‘Rabbi Ben Ezra’, ‘Prospice’, ‘Porphyria’s Lover’, ‘The Last Ride Together’, ‘My Last Duchess’
• Matthew Arnold : ‘The Scholar Gypsy’, ‘Dover Beach’
• W.B. Yeats : ‘Easter 1916’, ‘The Second Coming’, ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’, ‘Among School Children’, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, ‘Byzantium’
• T.S. Eliot : ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, ‘The Waste Land’,
• W.H. Auden : ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’, ‘The Shield of Achilles’, ‘Partition’, ‘The Unknown Citizen’, ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’
• Philip Larkin : ‘The Whitsun Weddings’, ‘Ambulances’, ‘Church Going’
• Ted Hughes : ‘Hawk Roosting’, ‘The Thought Fox’
• Seamus Heaney : ‘Digging’, ‘Death of a Naturalist’
• Carol Ann Duffy : ‘Valentine’

Unit V: Literary Theory and Criticism

• Aristotle : Poetics
• Longinus : ‘On the Sublime’
• J. Dryden : ‘An Essay of Dramatic Poesy’
• Dr Johnson : ‘Preface to Shakespeare’
• W. Wordsworth : ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’
• S.T. Coleridge : Biographia Literaria (Chaps XIII, XIV, XVIII)
• Matthew Arnold : ‘Study of Poetry’, ‘Culture and Anarchy’
• T.S. Eliot : ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, ‘Hamlet’, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’
• I.A. Richards : The Principles of Literary Criticism
• F.R. Leavis : ‘Literature and Society’, ‘Literary Criticism and Philosophy’

Unit VI: Literary Theory and Literary Criticism

New Criticism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, New Historicism, Feminism, Post-Colonialism, Cultural Theory, Psycho-analytical Criticism, Marxism, Reader-Response Theory, Indian Poetics – Rasa, Dhvani Schools, Eco-Criticism, Queer Theory, Digital Humanities, Posthumanism, Medical Humanities

Unit VII: American Literature

• R.W. Emerson : ‘Hamatreya’, ‘Brahma’, ‘The Over Soul’
• Walt Whitman : ‘One’s Self I Sing’, ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed’, ‘A Passage to India’, ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’
• Emily Dickinson : ‘I never Lost as Much but Twice’, ‘Success is Counted Sweetest’, ‘I felt a Funeral in my Brain’, ‘If I should Die and you should Live’
• Robert Frost : ‘Birches’, ‘Mending Wall’, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, ‘The Road not Taken’, ‘Mowing’, ‘The Death of the Hired Man’
• Wallace Stevens : ‘The Emperor of Ice Cream’, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Bird’, ‘The World as Meditation’
• Langston Hughes : ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’, ‘Harlem’
• Sylvia Plath : ‘Daddy’, ‘Ariel’
• Eugene O’ Neill : The Hairy Ape
• Tennessee Williams : The Glass Menagerie
• Arthur Miller : Death of a Salesman
• N. Hawthorne : The Scarlet Letter
• E. Hemingway : The Old Man and the Sea
• H. Melville : Moby Dick
• Mark Twain : The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• H.D. Thoreau : Civil Disobedience.
• Tony Morrison : The Bluest Eye
• Maxine Hong Kingston : The Woman Warrior

Unit VIII: Indian Literature in English

• Toru Dutt : ‘Lakshman’, ‘The Lotus’, ‘Our Casuarina Tree’
• Sarojini Naidu : ‘Palanquin Bearers’, ‘Bangle-sellers’, ‘Weavers’, ‘The Flute-Players of Vrindavan’
• R.N. Tagore : Gitanjali
• M.K. Gandhi : Hind Swaraj
• Swami Vivekanand : ‘Chicago Lecture’
• Sri Aurodindo : Savitri Canto I, ‘The Future Poetry’, ‘Is India Civilized’
• Nissim Ezekiel : ‘Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher’, ‘Background Casually’, ‘The Night of the Scorpion’, ‘Background Casually’
• Kamala Das : ‘An Introduction’, ‘My Grandmother’s House’, ‘Summer in Calcutta’
• A.K. Ramanujan : ‘Self – Portrait’, ‘A River’, ‘Obituary’
• Jayanta Mahapatra : ‘Hunger’, ‘Dawn at Puri’
• Raja Rao : Kanthapura
• R.K. Narayan : The Guide
• Anita Desai : Cry the Peacock
• Shashi Deshpande : That Long Silence
• Salman Rushdie : Midnight’s Children
• Amitav Ghosh : The Shadow Lines
• Girish Karnad : Hayavadana

Unit IX: Linguistics, Phonetics & Modern Grammar

1. Properties of Human Language
2. Scope and Branches of Linguistics
3. Language Varieties and Language Change
4. Saussure’s Concept of Linguistic Sign, Immutability and Mutability of Sign.
5. Speech Mechanism and Phonemes in English
6. Consonant Clusters, Syllables and Word Stress
7. English Morphology and Syntax.
8. Chomsky’s Transformational and Generative Grammar and Leech’s Communicative Grammar
9. Stylistics and Literary Criticism, Discourse Analysis, ELT & ESP
10. Sociolinguistics

Unit X: New Literatures in English

Australian and New Zealand Literature

• Patrick White : Voss
• Judith Wright : ‘Woman to Man’
• Sally Morgan : My Place
• Peter Porter : ‘Your Attention Please’
• Pry Lawler : Summer of the Seventeenth Doll
• Allen Curnow : ‘Time’, ‘House and Land’
• Keri Hulme : The Bone People

Canadian Literature

• M.G. Vassanji : ‘Am I a Canadian Writer ?’
• Marshall McLuhan : The Mechanical Bride : Folklore of Industrial Man
• Margaret Atwood : Surfacing
• A.M. Klein : ‘Indian Reservation : Caughnwaga’
• P.K. Page : ‘First Neighbours’
• Earle Birney : ‘Bushed’, ‘The Bear on the Delhi Road’

African and Caribbean Literature

• Chinua Achebe : Things Fall Apart
• Ngugi Wa Thiang’o : ‘Decolonizing the Mind’
• Dennis Brutus : ‘A Common Hate Enriched our Love and US’
• Gabriel Okara : The Mystic Drum
• David Diop : ‘Africa’
• Edward Braithwaite : ‘Tizzic’
• Derek Walcott : ‘Ruins of a Great House’
• Mervyn Morris : ‘Judas’
• Wole Soyinka : Lion and the Jewel
• Nadine Gordimer : ‘English Language Literature and Politics in South Africa’
• Chimamanda Adichie : Half of a Yellow Sun

How to prepare

• Match the official English syllabus unit by unit with your Master's notes and mark weak units first.
• Solve previous UPHESC/UPESSC Assistant Professor English papers (Advt 51 re-exam of April 2026 is the most recent).
• Do not leave GK for the end: Teaching and Research Aptitude and ICT are scoring units of the GK paper.
• Practise MCQs under time limits because of negative marking (-1 per wrong answer).

Syllabus PDFs of all 43 subjects are on UPHESC Assistant Professor.