Ulysses

Ulysses : An Introduction by Terence Killeen

James Joyce's obsession with the figure of Ulysses (the Romanised form of the Greek Odysseus) went back a long way. He told the Italian critic Carlo Linati that Ulysses had fascinated him ever since boyhood. When a fairly standard essay topic, "My Favourite Hero", was assigned to the boys in Belvedere College around 1895, Joyce chose Ulysses in preference to more macho figures such as Achilles or Hector.

In Rome in 1906, he thought of writing an extra story for Dubliners, to be called "Ulysses". This was to be about a Dubliner called Alfred H. Hunter, who lived on Clonliffe Road and whose wife was rumoured to be unfaithful. Although, as he regretfully wrote to his brother Stanislaus in early 1907, " "Ulysses" never got any forrader than its title", it is clear that he was already thinking about a story where the fortunes of the hero would develop in ironic parallel with those of the hero of Homer's epic, The Odyssey.

Satan: Hero or Villain

"Paradise Lost:" A Revival of the Spirit

by
Saif Patel

The Oxford English Dictionary defines "cosmos" as "the world or universe as an ordered and harmonious system," from the Greek, "kosmos," referring to an ordered and/or ornamental thing. Though Pythagoras is credited with first using this term to describe the Universe, probably since he is also the one most commonly cited for ideas of harmony and the Musica Mundana, cosmos is generally a contrast to "chaos"—"the first state of the universe." In explaining the theology and cosmology of Paradise Lost, Milton writes, "the heavens and earth/ Rose out of Chaos," describing the move from the formless mass to the ordered whole. (I:9-10) As much as this delineates the structure of the world, however, its culmination seems to appear in the Spirit, as Milton has conceived it—the free, reasoning, integrated Consciousness. Though many have found a hero in the English epic from its dramatis personae—from Adam to Satan to God/Son himself—the most encompassing heroism seems that of Milton himself, as a manifestation of this most supreme of creations: the wholesome mind.

An instance in which Milton's views on the sovereignty of the Spirit appear in some of the conversations of the Arch Fiend himself with his fellows—which is quite ironic, considering that the story is an extrapolation upon Christian Scripture. One of Satan's "compeers" says, during a discussion after their exile from Heaven:

Too well I see and rue the dire event

That, with sad overthrow and foul defeat,

Hath lost us Heaven, and all this mighty host

In horrible destruction laid thus low,

As far as Gods and heavenly Essences

Can perish: for the mind and spirit remains

Invincible, and vigour soon returns,

Though all our glory extinct, and happy state

Here swallowed up in endless misery (I:135-140).

The invincibility of "the mind and spirit" is something which even the foes of God understand. Though the fallen angels corrupt their "heavenly Essences" with disobedience and revolt, they still have a keen understanding of the powers of perception, of personal reaction to one's environment—"for neither do the Spirits damned/ Lose all their virtue" (2:482-483). Satan boldly speaks to his fellows, asking

What though the field be lost?

All is not lost—the unconquerable will . . .

And courage never to submit or yield (I:105-108).

Like a true hero, Satan refers to conquest and courage, a response to the tyranny he and his cohorts have received from the hand of God. It is this attitude—of adventurous righteousness—which many cite as sufficient to show the fallen Archangel to be the hero of the work. However, working within the confines of the Biblical account, Milton could not reasonably—even if he wished—display Satan as the outright protagonist and epic hero. Therefore, it can only be his qualities of trust in the Spirit, in his own Consciousness as a fortress against the harms surrounding him, that can represent the truly heroic aspect.

Satan is a deeply solipsistic character, well aware of the world and his situation in it. Though he becomes quite fatalistic at times and denies possibilities of recovery from his downfall, essentially, he knows that the loss of Heaven as a place is always permanent:

Infernal world! and thou, profoundest Hell,

Receive thy new possessor—one who brings

A mind not to be changed by place or time.

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

What matter where, if I be still the same

. . . Here at least/ We shall be free . . .

we may reign secure; and, in my choice,

To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:

Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. (I:251-263)

Whatever the reason for their revolt, when Satan and his armies are defeated by the Son, they lose their aspiration, revert to the disintegrated empty air from which they were made: "Exhausted, spiritless, afflicted, fallen" (6:852). In contrast, though Adam and Eve also fall like the Archangel, the difference between Satan and Man is their different choices in the application of their autonomy and spiritual sovereignty, especially after acting against God. Milton explains in his argument for Book X:

Adam more and more perceiving his fall'n condition heavily bewailes, rejects  the condolement of Eve; she persists and at length appeases him: then to evade the Curse likely to fall on thir Ofspring, proposes to Adam violent wayes, which he approves not, but conceiving better hope, puts her in mind of the late Promise made them.

The dividing line between Man and Satan is demonstrated in Milton's summary with his juxtaposition of the proposal of "violent wayes" with "better hope . . . in mind of the late Promise made them." Instead of desperate, destructive means, like Satan and his minions, Adam and Eve are thus able to remain hopeful and humble.

Adam even compares himself to the fallen Archangel, calling himself "miserable/ Beyond all past example and future;/ To Satan only like both crime and doom" (X:820-822). However, the pivotal difference comes later, when the actual consideration of possible choices—freedom—relents to create in Man hope, as opposed to Satan, who remains in "desperate revenge." An important concept here is that of Predestination, with which Milton himself vehemently disagreed, a strong proponent of free will and its acknowledgment. One of the devils in Pandemonium, Belial, describes Satan's justifications for rebellion: "we are decreed,/ Reserved, and destined to eternal woe" (II:160-161). But God charges this notion with sophistry, saying that

Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault . . .

So without least impulse or shadow of fate,

Or aught by me immutably foreseen,

They trespass, authors to themselves in all

. . . I form'd them free . . . Their nature . . . ordain'd

Their freedom: they themselves ordain'd their fall (III:118-128).

Satan later becomes conscious of his freedom, cursing himself who "Chose freely what [he] now so justly rues," but he cannot take this further to repentance and pardon, for which "there [is] no place/ Left . . .but by submission" (X:70, 79-81). This he cannot embrace because of his "disdain [for God] and dread of shame/ Among the Spirits beneath" (X:82-83). All of this is due to the utter perplexity and discord of Satan's situation; Belial sums this up in a bitter paradox: "our final hope/ Is flat despair" (II:142-143).

The difference between Satan and Man emerges in the unfolding of the plot. Instead of taking Satan's view of utter despair and want of death and eternal unconsciousness, Adam and Eve decide to take a submissive place in God's plan. Diametrically opposed to Satan's vengeful schemes to seek war of "the offended Deity," Man seeks Peace—submitting to the Almighty because he is almighty, hoping for "The Spirit of God, promised alike and given/ To all believers" (XII:519-520). Repentance and supplication are things which Satan—in his desperation—could never accomplish. Though the Arch Fiend was strong of Spirit, it was crushed in his attempts to act against Divine Will, destroyed by the "Spirit and Might" given to the Son by God himself.

Whether or not we take a "side" in determining the true victor(s)—Satan and his army in their spiritual "martyrdom" or Adam & Eve in their submission or the Son in his military conquest—Milton's insistence on the inner state as the final determinant of one's position is apparent throughout. Though Satan loses the battle, he is inwardly convinced of his own inability to do otherwise in the face of such extreme circumstances as his. Additionally, though Adam & Eve know that Paradise is lost as a place, their hope is to reach it as a state of mind, to reside there in Spirit. And the Son—though obviously the champion of the battle—was decreed to be victorious by the Almighty, and did not necessarily experience the sort of spiritual change or adventure like the other characters.

This ambiguity by Milton—of not making the hero of his work apparent—is too pervasive to have been unintentional. Rather, it seems that Milton wishes to share his own "heroism" in composing such an epic to his culture—both English and Christian—by taking the reader on a trip through the Consciousness of each of his constructed characters, exploring the different facets of freedom and responsibility. In fact, in his role as narrator, Milton says to the Son:

Thee I re-visit now with bolder wing,

Escap'd the Stygian pool, though long detain'd

In that obscure sojourn, while in my flight

Through utter and through middle darkness borne

. . . I sung of Chaos and eternal Night;

Taught by the heavenly Muse to venture down

The dark descent, and up to re-ascend (3:13-20).

Milton describes his allegorical trek through the heavens and the earth—an "obscure sojourn" quite similar to that of Aeneas or Odysseus or Achilles. Though he is blinded physically, Milton explains—as narrator—that he, like other blind prophets, is granted other boons to recompense for his loss:

with the year . . . Seasons return; but not to me returns

Day . . . So much the rather thou, celestial Light,

Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers

Irradiate; there plant eyes . . . that I may see and tell

Of things invisible to mortal sight. (3:40-55)

It is this "celestial Light" which allows Milton to see things which others cannot, which allows him to be like "Thamyris . . . Maeonides . . . Tiresias, and Phineus" (3:35-36).

Though many arguments and counter-arguments can be made as to who of the figures in Paradise Lost is its hero, as a whole, it is the Spirit, the inward wholesomeness, intellectual autonomy, and strength of character of the individual which appears as the most wide-ranging "epic virtue" in the work, displayed by many of the characters. Essentially, in this piece, Milton takes the entire concept of an epic and transforms it into an engaging experience, one which is not at all an attempt at flattery and sycophantic pandering to his own culture and beliefs, but rather, one which takes the reader's own Spirit to task. Centuries before Milton, Thomas Aquinas wrote in his Summa Theologica: "In the very gift of sanctifying grace, it is the Holy Spirit whom one possesses, and who dwells in man." Milton's epic awakens anyone who participates in this mental voyage from whatever depths of gloom he may reside, transforming the shapeless darkness therein into the integrated Consciousness, the illuminated Spirit, which formed the Son, but lives in us all:

Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heaven firstborn

. . . Before the Heavens thou wert . . .

Won from the void and formless infinite (3:1-12).

Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, Old Times and Ashes to Ashes

Political Commitment in Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming, Old Times and Ashes to Ashes

C Vairavan, Research Scholar (ACR Fellow)

Department of English

Anna University, Chennai-25

Email: vairavaneng@gmail.com

Abstract

In 1975, Howard Brenton dreamed of ‘a play acting like a bush-fire’, smoldering into public consciousness. A few years later Pinter’s writing overtly political plays was actually a dream come true for Brenton and his generation. As early as 1948, Pinter knew that he ‘wanted to get out in the world’ (Gussow, 142). This article explores Pinter’s The Homecoming, Old Times and Ashes to Ashes in the light of literary theories that bring out the theme of political commitment. It also sheds light on the various perspectives such as gender politics and marginalization that show cases political commitment.

Key words: Gender politics, Marginalization, Political commitment, Political plays, Public consciousness

1. Introduction

Harold Pinter was one of the most influential dramatists among the young generation of playwrights. He was born into a Jewish family in the London region of Hackney. His grandparents were Jews who had fled persecution in Poland and Odessa. His father, Jack, was a hard working tailor whose own family had artistic leanings: his mother, Frances, came from a convivial, extrovert and spiritually skeptical relations. And it was not difficult to trace in Pinter's own complex personality essentials from both sides of the family. He balanced his father's faintly authoritarian nature with his mother's instinctive generosity. His family was disrupted by war. He experienced the sense of insecurity by his removal from his family which can be easily seen in various plays, sketches and the poems of him. He was very much influenced by Beckett and Kafka. Most of his contemporary political playwrights were impressed with his works and his political standpoints. Pinter has acknowledged for his contribution to political debate as to his involvement with contemporary drama. The Independent newspaper in December 1998 described Pinter as ‘playwright and human rights activist’ (Derbyshire, 2001) and it seems that his latter role is most certainly assisted by his fame as the former. When this period of the British Government supported it, Pinter seemed more intent on making moral pronouncements on current affairs than producing challenging theatre in the later years of his life. He claimed in 1989 that he had always been ‘a political playwright of a kind’. Yet, in 1966, he said ‘politics bore me … I distrust ideological statement of any kind’. (Pinter, 2005)

Pinter uses it differently according to context, at once about the relations of power between individuals as well as the structures of power which keep us subjugated. The researcher proposes to look at Pinter’s writing through three ‘political lenses: the lens of gender politics, world political history, and marginalization and contemporary politics. In this light these perspectives have been analyzed in Pinter’s plays The Homecoming, Old Times, and Ashes to Ashes.

2. Political Commitment as a Theory

Raymond William’s emphasized that on Political Commitment which signifies the influence of Marxist and feminist perspectives and the break from the conservative Christian framework which has hitherto dominated. According to Homi K Bhabha (1994) theory of political commitment is crucial and must significantly inform political debate, it is not the only option for those critics or intellectuals who are committed to progressive political change in the direction of a socialist society. It is a sign of political maturity to accept that there are many forms of political writing whose different effects are obscured when they are divided between the ‘theoretical’ and the ‘activist’. It is not as if the leaflet involved in the organization of a strike is short on theory, while a speculative article on the theory of ideology ought to have more practical examples or applications.

Stuart Hall (1992) insists that cultural studies, while it may have been radically transformed by the influence of theory and may have no identity or purpose if it loses the critical tension between political commitment and theoretical speculation. Still, it is not always clear what the political commitment of cultural studies is a commitment to, except insofar as the field has always affiliated itself with the question of class and, more recently, with the political issues of gender and race. He was a Conscientious Objector and anger always comes from a place that is linked with personal experience.

Pinter’s lethal invective against the ideological machinery of war and the invasion in Iraq reveals the radical stance that has characterised his artistic temperament and political involvement over the last three decades, and which, at least before the Nobel award, has, possibly, made him more famous in England than his literature ever did. His list of engagement is long. He condemned the role of the U.S.A. in Pinochet’s military coup in Chile in 1973, perhaps the event that initiated his political activism. Pinter’s plays are embodied with these political happening. These embodiments are not direct, but symbolically placed in his characters, settings, dialogues, themes, etc.

3. Analysis of the Plays in the Light of Political Commitment

Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonizing has been avoided at all cost. Objectivity is the key element of the political theatre. The characters of these plays are allowed to breathe their own air. The author did not confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice. He must be prepared to approach them from a variety of angles, from a full and uninhibited range of perspectives, take them by surprise, but nevertheless give them the freedom to go which way they will. This does not always work. And political satire, of course, adheres to none of these precepts, in fact does precisely the opposite, which is its proper function.

In the era of writing that spans plays such as The Birthday Party, The Caretaker and The Homecoming, since 1980s, Pinter’s work seems to be more explicitly about the abuse of human rights and the ‘pattern of lies which government actually tells to its citizens’ (Gussow, 1994: 84) in plays such as The Kind of Alaska, Mountain Language, Ashes to Ashes, and One for the Road. These are the plays which form the phase in his writing which critics deem to be ‘political’ (Billington, 2007).

Pinter's new role as moral chorus in the wings of the political stage has coincided with something of a drought in his playwriting. Not only have his plays been few and far between over the last twenty years, they have also been short and invariably politically-inspired, more agitation than art. Pinter has also been prepared to re-interpret his greatest stage plays in political terms, as an incipient expression of his moral condemnation of injustice (Billington, 2007).

Billington believes that commitment to political drama is evident throughout the British theatre which should engage, wherever possible, with momentous public events’. Perhaps it is hardly surprising, therefore, that his method in writing the book is to set out to prove that Pinter has always, in one way or another, been a political playwright. It is interesting to note the events of Old Times given the context in which the play was written. In Pinter’s career, his arguments exempting Old Times from his claim that he was always a ‘political playwright of a kind’, only contains that this statement is indeed applicable here. He focuses on the Old Times of two women  character who are  both fighting with each other for survival and ‘hostile to the idea of reconciliation with the world of men’ (Sakellaridou, 1988) cannot be anything other than a political act, however unconscious. And compared to Ashes to Ashes, a more overtly political play, and indeed Pinter’s earlier plays such as The Homecoming, and One for the Road sees symmetry in the presentation of women here. All the women end the play in silence, a silence that is maintained despite male insistence to the contrary.

But in Old Times, there were also women remembering, and this is itself a very powerful political act. In Ashes to Ashes, the act of remembering enables Rebecca to have an empathetic response to victims from the past, but Kate and Anna’s remembrances are not designed to provoke empathy, or to forge any kind of connection between people whatsoever. It is used as an instrument of leverage, a way to gain power over another and thereby possess them, or dispossess them of their subjectivity, Just like language, it becomes a political tool.

The political interaction in the play Ashes to Ashes consists of two contradictory discursive modes. Throughout the play, each of the two figures seems to obey a different code of conversation: one conversational pattern, represented by Rebecca, echoes the earlier Pinter, while the other, represented by Devlin, portrays the later Pinter through the direct, explicit style that has come to represent his political phase. The play has an underlying logic which is hidden under several layers of meanings, thus demanding an active engagement from the audience. The public response to the play, since many of them could not understand what it is about. Elyse Sommer, in her review of the New York production through Internet, warns that a proper understanding of any Pinter play demands special attention to every clue. Pinter has introduced in this play two character, both are forty years old. Devlin and Rebecca were discussing the past life experience. Accordingly, as the play starts Rebecca is telling Devlin, who presumably is her husband, of a former lover. The initial scene is reminiscent of Old Times, Whose opening also shows a couple in their forties with the husband questioning his wife about a former relationship. The difference is that whereas in the later Anna, Kate’s old time companion, is a real presence, in Ashes to Ashes Rebecca’s mind is often doubted. Consequently, the situation is defined from the start as a dialogue between two people about a third, absent figure, whose presence is felt throughout the play.

Power, where it comes from and how it is gained, is essentially Pinter’s most prominent subject. When this war of power is fought between individuals of different gender, the fight inevitably becomes sexual and political at the same. Pinter’s gender politics is a widely subject and good reason since he is equally controversial and ambiguous in his gender politics as in other aspects of his work.

3.1. Gender Politics

According to Webster’s New World Dictionary, gender has been used primarily to refer to the grammatical categories of “masculine,” “feminine,” and “neuter,” but in recent years the word has become well established in its use to refer to sex-based categories, as in phrases such as ‘gender gap’ and the ‘politics of gender’. This usage is supported by the practice of many anthropologists, who reserve sex for reference to biological categories, while using gender to refer to social or cultural categories. Gender identity, an individual’s self-conception as being male or female is distinguished from actual biological sex. For most persons, gender identity and biological characteristics are the same. There are, however, circumstances in which an individual experiences little or no connection between sex for example, biological sexual characteristics are distinct and unambiguous he/she is or ought to be of the opposite sex. Gender identity is not fixed at birth, both physiologic and social factions contribute to the early establishment of a core identity, which is modified and expanded by social factors as the child matures.

Gender is not natural but cultural; it is in some sense a role and thus intimately connected with theater, our culture’s privileged site for problematizing the relation of the real and the role, the authentic and the textualized, the natural and the mediated. The recent writers like Anthony Giddens and Barron Giddens obviously believe that women have been denied their real status in the society and personal relationship by men; many playwrights like G.B.Shaw, “a day never passes without a performance of some Shaw play being given somewhere in the world.” Glenn Beck has interview to Bernard Shaw’s when he said “you must all know half a dozen people at least who are no use in this world, who are more trouble than they are worth. Just put them there and say Sir, or Madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you can’t justify your existence, if you’re not pulling your weight in the social boat, if you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we cannot use the organizations of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.” (Beck, Glenn, 2010)

Tennessee Williams was asked by an interviewer if he would ever write “directly” about current political events, including the struggle of African Americans for civil rights and the Vietnam War. “I am not a direct writer,” Williams replied, “I am always an oblique writer, if I can be; I want to be allusive; I don’t want to be one of those people who hit the nail on the head all the time” (qut. In conversations, 129). This did not mean, however, that the important political events of his time had no interest for him. He had interview with Watergate and Nixon’s in Vietnam. (Michael, Paller, 2009).

They have turned into feminists, directly or indirectly. They are trying to bring about a change in the social setting so that women are accepted as equal as or better than the males in all social as well as familial responsibilities, rights and situations. But Harold Pinter thrusts a different point of view. In a typically Pinteresque tongue-in-cheek manner, he seems to be suggestively discarding the popular view that women are inferior to men and, hence, are tortured by them (Bhatnagar, Manmohan Krishna, 2002).  He seems to be breaching the dead wall of complacency as his plays set up the situations which involve the male-female contention. Mostly, the contention in his plays is for superiority, dominance and possession and almost, invariably, it is the female in his plays who imposes her authority over fellow males and assumes the position of superiority and dominance.

The dominance of Pinter’s female characters continues even in his works like Old Times. However, in contrast to the pattern of The Homecoming, wherein there are many men fighting for one women, here it is found that one woman and man fighting for another woman. The object of contention here is Kate and those who fight over her are her husband Deeley and her friend Anna. The play, however, achieves greater amount of dishonesty, slyness and complexity as the characters move more deceitfully than they did in The Homecoming. The characters here attempt to invent and rearrange the past to suit their own ends (Hughes, 1974). Nevertheless, the core of the play lies in the battle for possession, supremacy and dominance among Pinter’s males and females and quite like A Slight Ache and The Homecoming. The success of these plays lies with its female characters.

In the beginning itself, Deeley, the only male in the play Old Times, is shown to be “slumped in arm chair”, which, in itself suggests his defeat even before the struggle begins. Kate is “curled on sofa” while Anna is “Standing at the window, looking out” (Pinter, Harold, 1986 pp.25). Clearly the posture of Kate indicates her security and repose, whereas that of Anna suggests her emotional detachment. But surely married woman, Kate can no longer live with her. But Deeley’s very necessity to ask questions and seek clarifications indicates his weakness and the consequent superiority of Kate over him. Anna is quick to gauge this weakness of Deeley. Sensing very much his possible alienation from Kate, she starts pledging her claims for her and immediately relates herself to Kate with an intimate recollection of their escapade in London: “We sat hardly breathing with our coffee, heads bent, so as not to be seen, so as not disturb, so as not to distract and listened to all those words”. (Pinter, 1986 pp. 14). Deeley tries to belittle the importance of their relationship by derogating the place itself: “We rarely get to London” (Pinter, 1986 pp.25). But Kate aligns herself with Anna as she confirms her recollection: “Yes, I remember” (Pinter, 1986 pp.14). The observation suggests the realistic and close relation of Anna with Kate in contrast to that of Deeley which indicates his isolation and too romantic an approach for his positions of superiority, dominance and control towards the end. In a suggestive manner thus, Pinter provides an anti-thesis to the popular feminist question and indicates the meaninglessness of such talk (Bhatnagar, Manmohan Krishna, 2002).

According to Marc Silverstein develops this argument to examine how language is used by male character in Pinter’s plays as a way to dominate the female characters. The early year plays of Pinter Old Times (1971), which supplementary material from The Homecoming; in these two plays which focus on the dominant female within an overwhelmingly powerful patriarchy. Pinter uses two women character in the play Old Times, is his way of articulating his response to the burgeoning feminist politics of the day. In these plays, Pinter fuses the personal with the political again through a highly symbolic exploration of world politics.

4. Conclusion

 Political commitment may be identified in a work of art in two different contexts. Firstly, an author understands the political happening around him and brings out his understanding in his plays or any form of art, where he uses his work of art as his discourse tool. Secondly, an author brings out a work of art in which the influence of the political happenings can be identified, but without the author’s intention. In case of Pinter, he falls in the first category. Pinter is a critique of his society (Gussow, 1994). He clearly understands his society and the reason for the happening as political based. He views the power, society and its culture in his plays through gender issues, where he identifies the suppression of women. He universalizes the politics for the reader to have proximity.

References

Beck, Glenn. 2010. The Revolutionary Holocaust: Live Free or Die. Fox News. Retrieved 31 October, 2011.

Bhabha, K Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.

Bhatnagar, Manmohan Krishna. 2002. Feminist English Literature. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers and Distributors.

Brenton, Howard. 1975.  Petrol Bombs Through the Proscenium Arch. Theatre Quarterly 5, 4-20

 Derbyshire, Harry. 2001. Pinter as celebrity in The Cambridge Companion to Harold Pinter Peter Raby. (ed.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gussow, Mel. 1994. Conversations with Pinter. London: Nick Hern Books.

Grebowicz,  Margret. 2008. Gender after Lyotard. New York: State University of New York Press.

Hall, Peter. 1993. Directing Harold Pinter's Plays. London: Cambridge University Press.

Hall, Stuart. 1992. Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies. New York: Routledge.

Hughes, Alan. 1974. Myth and Memory in Old Time. Modern Drama 17^th December P.470 London: Eyre Methuen

McGee, Patrick. 1997. Cinema, Theory, and Political Responsibility in Contemporary Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Paller, Michael. A Playwright with a Social Conscience. Published in Tennessee Williams Annual Review, 10^th 2009, Retrieved 03 November 2011.

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Silverstein, Marc. 1993. Harold Pinter and the Language of Cultural Power. London: Associated University Press.

Sakellaridou, Elizabeth. 1988. Pinter’s Female Portraits: a study of the female characters in the plays of Harold Pinter. Totowa: Barnes & Noble Books.

Vanden Heuvel, Michael. 1994. Gender and Power in the Plays of Harold Pinter: Contemporary Literature. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.

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UGC-NET June 2012: Paper II

UGC NET 2012

Paper II

1. To refer to the unresolvable difficulties a text may open up, Derrida makes use of the term :

(A) aporia

(B) difference

(C) erasure

(D) supplement

2. Who, among the following English playwrights, scripted the film Shakespeare in Love?

(A) Harold Pinter

(B) Alan Bennett

(C) Caryl Churchill

(D) Tom Stoppard

3. Arrange the following in the chronological order :

1. Mary Wollstonecraft’sVindication of the Rights of Women

2. Lyrical Ballads

3. French Revolution

4. Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry

(A) 4, 3, 1, 2

(B) 3, 2, 1, 2

(C) 1, 2, 4, 3

(D) 2, 1, 3, 4

4. Which of the following employs a narrative structure in which the main action is relayed at second hand through an enclosing frame story ?

(A) Sons and Lovers

(B) Ulysses

(C) The Power and the Glory

(D) Heart of Darkness

5. The Irish Dramatic Movement was heralded by such figures as

(A) W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregoryand Edward Martyn

(B) Jonathan Swift and his contemporaries

(C) H. Drummond, Edward Irving and John Ervine

(D) Oscar Wilde and his contemporaries

6. Which poem by Chaucer was written on the death of Blanche, Wife of John of Gaunt ?

(A) Troilus and Criseyde

(B) The House of Fame

(C) The Book of Duchess

(D) The Legend of Good Women

7. The Tragedy of Ferrex and Porrex is the other title of

(A) Gorboduc

(B) Ralph Roister Doister

(C) Damon and Pythias

(D) Lamentable Tragedy

8. Who of the following poets is Australian ?

(A) Austin Clarke

(B) Judith Wright

(C) Edwin Muir

(D) Derek Walcott

9. “He found it [English] brick and left it marble”, remarked one great writer on another. Who were they ?

(A) Milton on Shakespeare

(B) Dryden on Milton

(C) Johnson on Dryden

(D) Jonson on Shakespeare

10. Who, among the following, is a Nobel Laureate ?

(A) Tony Morrison

(B) Seamus Heaney

(C) Ted Hughes

(D) Geoffrey Hill

11. List – I List – II

I. “Because I could not stop for death…”           a. Robert Frost

II. “O Captain ! My Captain!”                               b. William Carlos Williams

III. “Two roads diverged in a wood….”               c. Emily Dickinson

IV. “So much depends /upon”                             d. Walt Whitman

The correctly matched series would be :

(A) I-d; II-c; III-b; IV-a

(B) I-a; II-b; III-c; IV-d

(C) I-b; II-a; III-d; IV-c

(D) I-c; II-d; III-a; IV-b

12. The predominant tone and thrust of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” are

(A) comic

(B) solemn

(C) hortatory

(D) irony

13. I sit in one of the dives On Fifty Second Street, Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade. So begins Auden’s “September 1, 1939”. What is the meaning of the word in italics ?

(A) bench

(B) night club

(C) house

(D) park

14. C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards were reputed in the 1930s for introducing

(A) Practical Criticism

(B) New Criticism

(C) Standard English Project

(D) Basic English Project

15. In which of the following works does Mrs. Malaprop appear ?

(A) The Rivals

(B) She Stoops to Conquer

(C) The Mysteries of Udolpho

(D) The Way of the World

16. Which of the following statements about Christopher Marlowe are true ?

I. Edward II was written in the last year of Marlowe’s life.

II. Many critics consider Doctor Faustus to be Marlowe’s best play.

III. His Spanish Tragedy comes a close second.

IV. Marlowe was less educated than Shakespeare.

(A) I and II are true.

(B) II and III are true.

(C) II and IV are true.

(D) III and IV are true.

17. “Art for Art’s Sake” became a rallying cry for

(A) the Aesthetes

(B) the Symbolists

(C) the Imagists

(D) the Art Noveau School

18. Confessions of an English Opium Eater is a literary work by

(A) S. T. Coleridge

(B) P. B. Shelley

(C) Thomas De Quincey

(D) Lord Byron

19. Which of the following statements about The Canterbury Tales is true ?

(A) “The General Prologue’ is appended to The Canterbury Tales.

(B) In all, Chaucer tells thirty tales in this work.

(C) The Canterbury Tales remained unfinished at the time of its author’s death.

(D) The Wife of Bath, The Clerk, Sir Gawain and The Franklin are characters and tale-tellers in this work.

20. Who, among the following, was a Catholic novelist, an Intelligence Officer, a film critic and set his fictions in far-away places wrecked by political conflicts ?

(A) Anthony Powell

(B) Evelyn Waugh

(C) William Golding

(D) Graham Greene

21. List – I List – II

1. Good sense is the body of poetic genius           I. Brooks, “The Formalist Critic”

2. Poetry is the breath and a finer spirit of            II. Sidney, Defence/ An  Apology for Poetry

all knowledge.

3. Literary criticism is a description               III. Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads
and evaluation of its object

4. Nature never set forth the earth in as rich                        IV. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria

a tapestry as diverse poets have done

       1 2 3 4

(A) IV III I II

(B) II IV III I

(C) III II I IV

(D) IV II I III

22. In which of the following travel books does Mark Twain give an account of his visit to India ?

(A) A Tramp Abroad

(B) Roughing It

(C) The Innocents Abroad

(D) Following the Equator

23. William Blake’s famous poems such as “London”, “The Sick Rose”, and “The Tyger” appear in

(A) Songs of Innocence

(B) Songs of Experience

(C) The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

(D) Vision of the Daughters of Albion

24. Who among the following English artists illustrated the novels of Dickens and Scott ?

(A) Richard Hogarth

(B) Joshua Reynolds

(C) George Cruishank

(D) John Tennial

25. The last of Gulliver’s Travels is to

(A) The Land of the Houyhnhnms

(B) The Land of Homosapiens

(C) The Land of the Hurricanes

(D) The Newfound Land

26. Madam Merle is a character in

(A) The Great Gatsby

(B) The Portrait of a Lady

(C) The Jungle

(D) The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

27. In which of the following scenes of The Waste Land do we have a departure from Standard English ?

(A) The typist scene

(B) The pub scene

(C) The hyacinth garden scene

(D) The Chapel Perilous scene

28. The words “If it were done when tis one, then twere well / It were done quickly…” are uttered by

(A) Hamlet

(B) Lear

(C) Othello

(D) Macbeth

29. John Dryden’s Absalom and Achotophel a

(A) religious tract

(B) political allegory

(C) comic verse epic

(D) comedy

30. The term ‘the comedy of menace’ isassociated with the early plays of

(A) Arnold Wesker

(B) John Arden

(C) Harold Pinter

(D) David Hare

31. Examine the following statements and identify one of them which is not true.

(A) Rudyard Kipling died in the year 1936.

(B) He was born in India but schooled in England.

(C) He returned to India as a police constable in Burma.

(D) He is the author of Jungle Book and Barrack Room Ballads.

32. What is the correct combination of the following ?

I. Balachandra Rajan                          a. The TamarindTree

II. R. K. Narayan                                  b. The Coffer   Dams

III. Kamala Markandaya                     c. The Dark Dancer

IV. Romen Basu                                   d. The Dark Room

(A) I – c; II – d; III – b; IV – b

(B) I – d; II – a; III – b; IV – c

(C) I – c; II – a; III – d; IV – b

(D) I – d; II – c; III – a; IV – b

33. Name the poet who chooses his successor and the successor-poet whom Dryden satirises in his famous poem.

(A) James Shirley and Chris Shirley

(B) Henry Treece and Charles Triesten

(C) Richard Flecknoe and Thomas Shadwell

(D) Thomas Percy and Samuel Pepys

34. “If______ comes, can_______ be far behind ?” (Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”)

(A) winter, spring

(B) autumn, summer

(C) wind, rains

(D) spring, winter

35. The following passages are the very first lines of well-known works. Match the lines and the works :

I. Let us go then, you and I…..

II. Call me Ishmael…..

III. When shall we three meet again ?

IV. He disappeared in the dead of winter

V. I wish either….begot me …..

a. Moby Dick

b. Macbeth

c. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

d. Tristram Shandy

e. “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”

(A) I-c; II-a; III-b; IV-e; V-d

(B) I-e; II-b; III-a; IV-c; V-d

(C) I-b; II-a; III-d; IV-e; V-c

(D) I-b; II-e; III-d; IV-c; V-a

36. Which of the following is not a revenge tragedy ?

(A) Hamlet

(B) The Duchess of Malfi

(C) Volpone

(D) Gorboduc

37. What is a neologism ?

(A) A word with roots in a nativelanguage

(B) A word whose meaning changes with every renewed use

(C) A word newly coined or used in a new sense

(D) An obsession with new words and phrases

38. Which of the following is not true of Edward Said’s Orientalism ?

(A) Makes use of Foucault’s concept of discursive formulation

(B) Is one of the founding texts of Postcolonial theory

(C) Makes use of Barthes’s concept of writerly text

(D) Utilises the Gramscian notion of hegemony

39. Thomas Love Peacock classified poetry into 4 periods. They are :

(A) carbon, gold, silver and brass

(B) brass, silver, gold and diamond

(C) iron, gold, silver and brass

(D) gold, platinum, silver and diamond

40. Which among the following novels has more than one ending ?

(A) Lucky Jim

(B) The Prime of Jean Brodie

(C) The French Lieutenant’s Woman

(D) The Clockwork Orange

41. “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was

made a man” is an example of

(A) Bathos

(B) Epistrophe

(C) Chiasmus

(D) Anti-climax

42. Which of the following statements is NOT correct ?

(A) Chaucer used the rhyme royal, a stanzaic form in some of his major poems.

(B) Chaucer was the author of The Legend of Good Women.

(C) Chaucer wrote in English when the court poetry of his day was written in Anglo-Norman and Latin.

(D) Chaucer wrote The Book Named the Governor

43. Material feminism studies inequality in terms of

(A) only gender

(B) only class

(C) both class and gender

(D) only patriarchy

44. Who among the following is not an Irish writer ?

(A) Oscar Wilde

(B) Oliver Goldsmith

(C) Edmund Burke

(D) Thomas Gray

45. Entries in The Diary of Samuel Pepys begins after

(A) The Restoration

(B) The Glorious Revolution

(C) The Reformation

(D) The French Revolution

46. In a poem, a line may either be endstopped or

(A) rhymed

(B) broken

(C) accented

(D) run-on

47. Which of the following poets wrote the essay “Naipaul’s India and Mine” ?

(A) Kamala Das

(B) R. Parthasarthy

(C) A. K. Ramanujam

(D) Nissim Ezekiel

48. Match the following :

I. James Joyce                         1. Peter Ackroyd

II. T. S. Eliot                             2. James Boswell

III. Life of Johnson                   3. Samuel Johnson

IV. Lives of 4. Poets                 4. Richard Ellman

(A) I-3, II-4, III-1, IV-2

(B) I-4, II-1, III-2, IV-3

(C) I-1, II-2, III-3, IV-4

(D) I-2, II-3, III-1, IV-4

49. “The pen is mightier than the sword” is an example of

(A) simile

(B) image

(C) conceit

(D) metonymy

50. An epilogue is

(A) prefixed to a text which it introduces.

(B) suffixed to a text which it sums up or extends.

(C) a piece of writing or speech that formally begins a book.

(D) a piece of writing or speech that bears no relation to the text at hand.