UPHESC Assistant Professor English 2025 PYQs

Concept: Bilabial sounds are made with both lips: /p/, /b/, /m/ (and /w/ labial-velar).

1. /p/ – voiceless bilabial plosive.
2. /t/, /d/ – alveolar plosives.
3. /f/ – labiodental fricative (lower lip + upper teeth).

Short trick: Bi-labial = two lips: p, b, m.

Concept: 'Dissociation of sensibility' appears in Eliot's 'The Metaphysical Poets' (1921).

1. Eliot says after Donne and the Metaphysicals, 'a dissociation of sensibility set in' – thought and feeling split apart.
2. 'Objective correlative' is in 'Hamlet and His Problems' (1919).
3. 'The Perfect Critic' and 'The Function of Criticism' deal with the critic's role.

Short trick: Metaphysical poets had unified sensibility → after them, dissociation.

Concept: Bishop Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry appeared in 1765.

1. It collected old ballads (e.g. 'Chevy Chase', 'Sir Patrick Spens').
2. It strongly influenced the Romantic revival – Wordsworth, Coleridge and Scott acknowledged it.

Short trick: Percy's Reliques 1765 – same decade as Ossian (1760s).

Concept: In Scene V (Rheims Cathedral) the Archbishop rebukes Joan's pride after the coronation.

1. The Archbishop tells Joan she is guilty of the sin of pride: "The old Greek tragedy is rising among us. It is the chastisement of hubris."
2. Charles merely complains that Joan thinks she knows better than everyone.
3. Joan would not accuse herself of hubris.

Short trick: Hubris lecture = churchman (Archbishop).

Concept: 'Derelict' is the last chapter of Sons and Lovers.

1. After his mother's death (chapter 'The Release'), Paul is left derelict and drifting.
2. At the end he turns away from darkness 'towards the faintly humming, glowing town' – the final stage of his journey.
3. 'The Death of William' is an early chapter (Part I); 'The Triumph of Clara' is not a chapter title.

Short trick: Last chapter = Derelict (after The Release).

Concept: Dates: Lyrical Ballads 1798; Biographia Literaria 1817; Culture and Anarchy 1869; The Study of Poetry 1880.

1. IV (1798) → II (1817) → I (1869) → III (1880).
2. Option C wrongly puts The Study of Poetry before Culture and Anarchy.

Short trick: Romantics first (Wordsworth, Coleridge), then Arnold's prose before his 1880 essay.

Concept: Each rasa has a presiding deity and colour; Shanta rasa (sthayi bhava: nirveda/shama) is white and presided over by Vishnu (Narayana).

1. Shringara – shyama (dark) – Vishnu; Raudra – red – Rudra; Bhayanaka – black – Kala.
2. Shanta, added by later theorists (Udbhata, Abhinavagupta), is described as white like the kunda flower/moon, with Narayana-Vishnu as deity.
3. Indra is the deity of Vira; Brahma of Adbhuta.

Short trick: Shanta = peace = white, Vishnu (preserver, calm).

Concept: The sentence opens Chapter 4 ('Communication and the Artist') of I. A. Richards's Principles of Literary Criticism (1924).

1. Richards built criticism on psychology: value (organisation of impulses) and communication.
2. Leavis, Eliot and Arnold did not formulate criticism in these two 'pillars'.

Short trick: Richards = value + communication (+ emotive vs referential language).

Concept: Edmund Burke published A Philosophical Enquiry… in 1757.

1. Burke links the sublime with terror, obscurity, vastness and power, and beauty with smallness and smoothness.
2. It influenced Kant and Gothic/Romantic aesthetics.

Short trick: Burke 1757: Sublime = terror; Beautiful = love.

Concept: Caliban in The Tempest is generally read as an anagram of 'canibal' (cannibal).

1. C-A-L-I-B-A-N ↔ C-A-N-I-B-A-L.
2. It echoes Montaigne's essay 'Of Cannibals', a known source of the play.
3. Mercutio, Falstaff and Hamlet are not anagrams.

Short trick: Caliban ↔ Canibal.

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).