UPHESC Assistant Professor English 2025 PYQs

Concept: Aimé Césaire (Martinique) coined 'Négritude' in Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939).

1. He founded the movement in Paris with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas in the 1930s.
2. Brathwaite, Walcott and Harris are later Caribbean anglophone writers.

Short trick: Césaire coined, Senghor theorised.

Concept: Check the dates and the original language.

1. Statement I: Tagore received the Nobel Prize in 1913 (not 1916) for Song Offerings – false.
2. Statement II: Hind Swaraj was written in Gujarati (1909, on the ship Kildonan Castle) and Gandhi translated it into English (1910) – false.
3. Both are false.

Short trick: Tagore Nobel 1913; Hind Swaraj Gujarati 1909 → English 1910.

Concept: The vocal tract is the air passage above the larynx – the pharynx, oral cavity and nasal cavity.

1. Sounds are shaped (resonated/articulated) in the mouth and nose cavities.
2. Lungs and trachea lie below the larynx – they supply air but are not part of the vocal tract.

Short trick: Vocal tract = above the vocal folds: throat, mouth, nose.

Concept: Edmund Burke brought charges of impeachment against Warren Hastings, ex-Governor-General of Bengal, in the Commons in 1786.

1. Burke led the prosecution; the trial in Westminster Hall began in 1788 and ended in acquittal in 1795.
2. Burns, Burke and Johnson were never put on trial; Burke was the accuser, not the accused.

Short trick: Burke accuses, Hastings is tried (1786–1795).

Concept: Estragon's complaint "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!" sums up Waiting for Godot.

1. The play shows Vladimir and Estragon waiting endlessly for Godot who never arrives.
2. Its circular, static action is the essence of the Theatre of the Absurd.

Short trick: Nobody comes = Godot never comes.

Concept: McCann is a man – the Irish partner of Goldberg who come to take Stanley away.

1. Statement I is false: the female characters are Meg and Lulu.
2. Statement II is true: Irving Wardle applied 'comedy of menace' to Pinter's early plays, including The Birthday Party.

Short trick: Goldberg & McCann = two sinister men.

Concept: The Greek title is Peri Hypsous (περὶ ὕψους) – 'on height/elevation'.

1. Longinus gives five sources of sublimity: great thoughts, strong emotion, figures, noble diction, dignified composition.
2. De Sublimitate is a Latin rendering, not the Greek original; the other two are invented.

Short trick: Peri = 'on', Hypsos = 'height'.

Concept: Roland Barthes analysed clothing as a sign system ('vestimentary code') in The Fashion System (Système de la mode, 1967).

1. He distinguished the real garment, the image-garment and the written garment.
2. Saussure – langue/parole; Genette – narratology; Lévi-Strauss – myth and kinship structures.

Short trick: Barthes read everything as signs – myths, wrestling, fashion.

Concept: Her first published collection was The Golden Threshold (1905, London).

1. Then The Bird of Time (1912) and The Broken Wing (1917).
2. The Sceptred Flute (1928) is a compilation; The Feather of the Dawn (1961) was posthumous.

Short trick: Golden (1905) → Bird (1912) → Broken (1917) → Feather (1961).

Concept: Diglossia (Ferguson, 1959): two varieties of the same language – a High (formal) and a Low (informal) – used in different social domains.

1. E.g. Classical vs colloquial Arabic; Swiss German vs Standard German.
2. Bilingualism/multilingualism involve two or more different languages, not forms of one language.

Short trick: Di-glossia = two 'tongues' of ONE language.

Concept: In Ray Lawler's play, Pearl Cunningham is a widowed barmaid with a teenage daughter, Vera.

1. Pearl replaces Nancy as Barney's companion for the 'lay-off'; she worries about her respectability because of Vera.
2. Roo and Barney are the cane-cutters; Emma is Olive's mother; Bubba is the neighbour girl.

Short trick: Pearl's worry = her daughter Vera.

Concept: The line is spoken by the hawk in Ted Hughes's 'Hawk Roosting' (Lupercal, 1960).

1. "My manners are tearing off heads – / The allotment of death."
2. The hawk's arrogant monologue also says "Now I hold Creation in my foot".

Short trick: Hawk = killer's 'manners'.

Concept: Arnold's Culture and Anarchy first appeared as a series of articles in The Cornhill Magazine (1867–68).

1. It began with his last Oxford lecture 'Culture and Its Enemies' (1867), printed in the Cornhill.
2. Published as a book in 1869.

Short trick: Arnold + Cornhill (editor Thackeray's magazine) → Culture and Anarchy.

Concept: The Libel Act passed by the British Parliament among these dates is Fox's Libel Act, 1792.

1. It made the jury, not the judge, decide whether a publication was a seditious libel; it belongs to the 1790s period of tight control of the press during the French Revolution (Royal Proclamation against seditious writings, May 1792; Paine's Rights of Man prosecuted the same year).
2. 1798 brought the Newspaper Publication Act (registration of printers/publishers) – not a Libel Act; 1789 and 1805 saw no Libel Act.
3. So the only date that fits a Libel Act is 1792.

Short trick: Libel Act = 1792 (Fox), the year of Paine's trial.

Concept: Under the Net (1954) is Iris Murdoch's first novel.

1. Its hero is the struggling writer Jake Donaghue; it reflects Wittgenstein's ideas about language.
2. Greene's first novel – The Man Within; Golding's – Lord of the Flies; Orwell's – Burmese Days.

Short trick: Murdoch's net of language → Under the Net.

Concept: In Poetics ch. 9 Aristotle says poetry is more philosophical than history.

1. "Poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular."
2. He explicitly says the difference is not verse vs prose – Herodotus in verse would still be history.
3. So B, not C.

Short trick: Poetry = what may happen (universal); history = what has happened (particular).

Concept: Louis Althusser introduced RSAs and ISAs in 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses' (1970).

1. RSAs (police, army, courts) work by force; ISAs (school, church, family, media) work by ideology and 'interpellation'.
2. Gramsci – hegemony; Williams – structures of feeling; Marx – base/superstructure.

Short trick: Althusser: A for Apparatuses.

Concept: In Sally Morgan's autobiography My Place (1987) her mother tells her to say she is Indian, hiding their Aboriginal identity.

1. The denial of Aboriginal descent and its later discovery is the core of the book.
2. The two poems in A and B are by A. M. Klein and Earle Birney (Canadian); The Mystic Drum is by Gabriel Okara.

Short trick: 'Tell them you're Indian' = hiding Aboriginality → My Place.

Concept: Atwood has won the Booker Prize twice.

1. 2000 – The Blind Assassin.
2. 2019 – The Testaments (jointly with Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other).

Short trick: Blind Assassin (2000) + Testaments (2019) = 2.

Concept: The title and idea of the 'Superman' come from Nietzsche's Übermensch (Thus Spoke Zarathustra).

1. In the 'Don Juan in Hell' interlude and 'The Revolutionist's Handbook', Shaw argues the Life Force aims to breed the Superman.
2. Shaw also drew on Schopenhauer and Bergson for the Life Force, but the 'Superman' concept is Nietzschean.

Short trick: Superman = Übermensch = Nietzsche.