UPHESC Assistant Professor English 2025 PYQs

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.

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.