UPHESC Assistant Professor English 2025 PYQs

Concept: Bacon says if a man's wit 'be not apt to distinguish or find differences, let him study the Schoolmen; for they are cymini sectores'.

1. Latin: 'dividers of cumin seeds' – people who make minute, over-subtle distinctions.
2. i.e. hair-splitters (the medieval scholastic philosophers).

Short trick: Splitting cumin seeds = splitting hairs.

Concept: In 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' Eliot implicitly treats life as a substance doled out in spoonfuls – an implied comparison, i.e. a metaphor.

1. Life cannot literally be measured with spoons; the line equates its passing with trivial, repetitive coffee-drinking rituals.
2. No human quality is given to an object (not personification); no epithet is transferred.
3. The spoons hint at social occasions, but the figure of the line as a whole is a metaphor of a petty, measured life.

Short trick: Life = coffee measured by the spoon → implied comparison → metaphor.

Concept: English syllable structure is (C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C): up to 3 initial and up to 4 final consonants.

1. Four-consonant final clusters: 'sixths' /sɪksθs/, 'texts' /teksts/, 'glimpsed' /ɡlɪmpst/.
2. Initial clusters are at most three: 'strong' /strɒŋ/.

Short trick: Formula CCCVCCCC: 3 before, 4 after.

Concept: The remark is from Mark Twain's notebook (1897): "I am not an American; I am the American."

1. Twain saw himself as the representative American voice – vernacular, humorous, democratic.
2. Whitman 'sings himself' as America in Leaves of Grass, but this sentence is Twain's.

Short trick: Twain – the American humourist, 'the American'.

Concept: In the tone group, the nucleus syllable carries a moving pitch – the kinetic (nuclear) tone (fall, rise, fall-rise, rise-fall).

1. A static tone is a level pitch with no change.
2. So a syllable with pitch change has a kinetic tone.

Short trick: Kinetic = moving (pitch moves).

Concept: In his final soliloquy Faustus sees Christ's blood – the Christian symbol of redemption – and longs for it to save his soul.

1. 'One drop would save my soul' – the idea is redemption through Christ's sacrifice.
2. Faustus is on the brink of damnation, but the lines themselves express his desperate hope for redemption, which his despair prevents him from accepting.

Short trick: Christ's blood = the price of redemption.

Concept: Each line belongs to a famous Victorian or modern poem.

1. a. "Desire itself is movement / Not in itself desirable" – Eliot, Burnt Norton (III).
2. b. "Consume my heart away; sick with desire" – Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium (IV).
3. c. "Now I hold Creation in my foot" – Hughes, Hawk Roosting (II).
4. d. "Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!" – Arnold, Dover Beach (I).

Short trick: Hawk's foot, Arnold's love, Yeats's heart, Eliot's movement.

Concept: George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) published 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists' in the Westminster Review (1856).

1. She attacked the 'mind-and-millinery' novels by women for unrealistic plots and pretentious style.
2. It appeared just before she began her own fiction (Scenes of Clerical Life, 1857).

Short trick: A woman under a male pen-name mocks silly lady novelists.

Concept: In the Essays of Elia, 'Bridget Elia' is Lamb's name for his sister Mary Lamb.

1. At the end of 'Dream Children' he wakes 'with the faithful Bridget unchanged by my side'.
2. Alice W—n stands for Ann Simmons; John L— (James Elia) is his brother John; Bartrum is Alice's husband.

Short trick: Elia's cousin Bridget = sister Mary.

Concept: Robert J. C. Young proposed 'tricontinentalism' in Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (2001).

1. The term recalls the 1966 Havana Tricontinental Conference of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
2. Fanon – The Wretched of the Earth; Bhabha – hybridity/mimicry; Spivak – subaltern.

Short trick: Tri-continental (Havana 1966) → Young.