UPHESC Assistant Professor English 2025 PYQs

Concept: The line is from Viktor Shklovsky's 'Art as Technique' (1917), the manifesto of Russian Formalism.

1. Shklovsky argues art 'makes the stone stony' through defamiliarization (ostranenie).
2. Nietzsche – will to power; Derrida – deconstruction; Bakhtin – dialogism/carnival.

Short trick: Art as Technique → Shklovsky → defamiliarization.

Concept: Hemingway describes Santiago's shack: on the wall were pictures of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Virgin of Cobre.

1. Once there had been a tinted photograph of his wife, but he took it down because it made him lonely.
2. So A, B and D did hang there; no picture of Fidel Castro is ever mentioned (the novella appeared in 1952).

Short trick: Relics of his wife + two religious pictures – no politics.

Concept: In transformational grammar the actual spoken/written sentence is its surface structure; its underlying meaning-representation is the deep structure.

1. The sentence is the form actually uttered – a surface structure derived by transformations.
2. Chomsky used 'Flying planes can be dangerous' to show one surface structure may reflect two deep structures ('planes that fly' / 'to fly planes').
3. It is a full sentence, not merely a noun phrase.

Short trick: What you see/hear = surface; what it means underneath = deep.

Concept: Dates: The Scarlet Letter 1850; Moby-Dick 1851; Death of a Salesman 1949; The Old Man and the Sea 1952.

1. Correct sequence: II (1850) → IV (1851) → I (1949) → III (1952).
2. None of the four options gives II, IV, I, III (nor its exact reverse III, I, IV, II).
3. So no option is correct as printed; the question is treated as a bonus.

Short trick: Hawthorne 1850 → Melville 1851 (19th c.), Miller 1949 → Hemingway 1952 (20th c.).

Concept: Match each concept with the thinker who formulated it.

1. a. Chitra Kavya (the lowest, 'pictorial' poetry without dhvani) – Anandavardhana, Dhvanyaloka (iii).
2. b. Bhayanaka (terrible) rasa – Bharata Muni, Natyashastra (i).
3. c. Affective stylistics – Stanley Fish, 'Literature in the Reader' (iv).
4. d. Racial memories / collective unconscious – Carl Jung (ii).

Short trick: Dhvani → Anandavardhana; rasa → Bharata; reader-response → Fish; archetypes → Jung.

Concept: In Browning's poem the disciples carry their master's body up to a mountain top for burial.

1. "Let us begin and carry up this corpse… leave him – still loftier than the world suspects".
2. The high mount symbolises the lofty aim of the scholar who lived for learning, not for the 'unlettered plain'.

Short trick: Lofty mind → lofty grave (mountain top).

Concept: Dates: Corn Laws (Importation Act) March 1815; Emma December 1815 (dated 1816); Ricardo's Principles April 1817; Frankenstein January 1818.

1. I (1815) → III (1815/16) → IV (1817) → II (1818).
2. Only option B gives this order.

Short trick: Corn Laws 1815 → Emma → Ricardo 1817 → Frankenstein 1818.

Concept: At Stanley's 'birthday party' in Act II the characters play blind man's buff.

1. During the game McCann breaks Stanley's glasses; Stanley tries to strangle Meg.
2. The lights go out and Stanley is found attacking Lulu – the game turns menacing.

Short trick: Blindfold game → blacked-out stage → menace.

Concept: The lines are from Chapter 4 of Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929).

1. Woolf argues that great writers (like Shakespeare) need a tradition behind them – 'the experience of the mass is behind the single voice'.
2. She uses it to explain why women writers lacked such a tradition.

Short trick: Masterpieces need tradition + room + money → Woolf.

Concept: The epigraph is from Petronius's Satyricon, about the Sibyl of Cumae.

1. Latin/Greek: 'I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in a jar; when the boys asked her, "Sibyl, what do you want?" she replied, "I want to die."'
2. It sets the theme of death-in-life. The dedication is to Ezra Pound, 'il miglior fabbro' (from Dante, Purgatorio).

Short trick: Sibyl in a jar → Satyricon (Petronius).

Concept: The Essay (1668) is a dialogue among four speakers, each defending a position.

1. Crites – the Ancients (Greek and Roman drama).
2. Eugenius – the Moderns, against the Ancients.
3. Lisideius – French drama; Neander – English drama (Dryden's own voice).

Short trick: C-E-L-N = Classical, Era-modern, Louis's France, Native English.

Concept: Robert Frost said: "If I must be classified as a poet, I might be called a Synecdochist".

1. He preferred synecdoche – the part standing for the whole – a small scene suggesting a large truth.
2. Thus a wall, a road or a birch tree in his poems points to universal meanings.

Short trick: Frost: 'a small thing that stands for a larger thing' = synecdoche.

Concept: Baroka, the cunning old Bale of Ilujinle, is called 'the fox' (and also 'the Lion').

1. He spreads the rumour of his impotence to trap Sidi – a fox-like trick.
2. Sadiku and Lakunle refer to his wiliness: 'the old fox'.
3. Sidi is the 'Jewel'; Lakunle is the westernised schoolteacher.

Short trick: Baroka = Lion + old fox (cunning).

Concept: Sociolinguistics studies language in relation to society.

1. It covers dialects (regional, social), variation, standardisation, pidgins/lingua francas, codes and registers.
2. Psycholinguistics – language and mind; Applied linguistics – teaching/translation; Stylistics – style in texts.

Short trick: Society + language = sociolinguistics.

Concept: Lysander says it to Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act I, Scene i.

1. Hermia is forbidden to marry Lysander by her father Egeus.
2. Lysander consoles her: "The course of true love never did run smooth."

Short trick: Lovers' troubles in the Athenian wood → Midsummer.

Concept: The phrase comes from Frances (Fanny) Burney's novel Cecilia (1782).

1. Near the end Dr Lyster says: "The whole of this unfortunate business has been the result of PRIDE and PREJUDICE."
2. Austen's draft was first titled First Impressions; she renamed it for 1813 publication.

Short trick: Cecilia (Burney) → 'PRIDE and PREJUDICE' in capitals.

Concept: Ahab commands the whaler Pequod, named after an extinct Native American tribe.

1. The Rachel is another ship searching for its lost boys; it rescues Ishmael at the end.
2. The Essex was the real whaler sunk by a whale (1820) that inspired the novel; the Endeavour was Cook's ship.

Short trick: Pequod sinks, Rachel rescues.

Concept: In English intonation the falling tone signals finality and definiteness; the rising tone signals politeness, incompleteness or doubt.

1. Falling tone: neutral statements, neutral wh-questions, commands, exclamations.
2. Polite requests ('Could you open the window?') are usually said with a rising tone.
3. So C is not a falling-tone use.

Short trick: Fall = final/firm; Rise = polite/open.

Concept: Homophones have the same pronunciation but different spelling and meaning.

1. 'too' and 'two' (and 'to') are all /tuː/ – homophony.
2. Homography = same spelling, different sound/meaning (lead/lead).
3. Polysemy = one word, related meanings; collocation = habitual word partners.

Short trick: Homo-PHONE = same sound.

Concept: Walcott's 'Ruins of a Great House' opens: "Stones only, the disjecta membra of this Great House".

1. Disjecta membra (Latin) = scattered limbs/fragments – the ruins of a colonial plantation house.
2. The poem reflects on the brutality of empire and the poet's divided inheritance.

Short trick: Scattered stones of a colonial house = disjecta membra.