WBCS Main English Optional Question Paper: (2018 to 2023)

Contents

WBCS Main Optional Question Paper – 2023

PAPER – I (Time-3 Hours Full Marks-200)

SECTION-A

Write an essay on any one of the following: 40×1=40

(a) Literature has a greater outreach since the advent of digitization.

(b) Literature and reality shape each other

SECTION-B

Answer any two of the following: 40×2=80

2. (a) Compare Lady Macbeth and Rosalind as dynamic female characters in Macbeth and As You Like It.

Or,

(b) What role do the Greek allusions play in Edward II?

(d) Why is ‘Dejection’ a ‘quit without a pang’? Explain with reference to ‘Dejection: an Ode’.

(e) Examine ‘The Last Ride Together’ as a poem of conclusion

(f) ‘How Do I Love Thee’ makes a statement about love, choice and freedom. Discuss.

(g) How does Pope use the mockheroic genre to satirize society in the Rape of the Lock?

SECTION-C

3. Answer any two of the following questions: 40×2=80

(a) What is Jane Austen’s attitude to class in ‘Pride and Prejudice’?

(b) Write a critical analysis of the character of Michael Henchard in The Mayor of CasterBridge.

(d) How is social class shown to be significant in ‘Wuthering Heights’?

(e) Why isn’t Frankenstein’s monster given a name?

PAPER – II (Time-3 Hours Full Marks-200)

SECTION-A

Attempt a critical appreciation of the following poem: 50

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said : “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

stand in the desert… Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things.

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed :

And on the pedestal these words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings :

Look on my works, ye Mighty and despair!’

Nothing beside them remains, Round the decay

of that colossal work, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

SECTION-B

2. Attempt any one of the following questions: 50

(a) Examine ‘Easter 1916’ as a political poem.

(b) Comment on ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ as a document of literary modernism.

(d) What aspects of motherhood are present in the poem ‘Nick and the Candlestick’?

(e) Attempt a critical analysis of ‘To India-My Native Land’.

3. Answer any one question from the following: 50

(a) What is Jimmy’s anger directed at in ‘Look Back in Anger’?

(b) What is the significance of the title of the play ‘Waiting for Godot’?

(d) What points does Woolf make about women and writing in ‘ A Room of Ones Own’?

4. Answer any one question from the following: 50

(a) Examine the themes of discontentment and self-realization in The Rainbow.

(b) Discuss the portrayal of women in Kanthapura.

(d) What is the context of Tagore’s speech ‘Crisis in Civilisation’?

WBCS Main Optional Question Paper – 2022

PAPER – I (Time-3 Hours Full Marks-200)

GROUP-A

Write an essay on any one of the following topics: 40×1=40

(a) Connecting cultures through the power of language

(b) Psychological approach in literature

(d) Contemporary Indian English Poetry

GROUP-B

2. Answer any two of the following questions: 40×2=80

(a) Consider Edward II as a play of the irony of kingship.

(b) Explain how the ‘carpe diem’ theme is expressed in Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’.

(d) How does John Keats suggest that the nightingale’s realm may simply be an illusory way of alleviating human suffering?

(e) Critically evaluate the toilet scene of Belinda in The Rape of the Lock.

(f) What is Browning’s attitude to life as revealed in the poem ‘The Last Ride Together’?

GROUP-C

3. Answer any two of the following questions: 40×2=80

(a) Why do you think Pride and Prejudice has such moving force for so many readers?

(b) Explain irony in the title of the novel Great Expectations.

(d) Discuss the relationship between gender and power in Wuthering Heights.

PAPER – II (Time-3 Hours Full Marks-200)

GROUP-A

Critically evaluate the following poem: 50×1=50

How difficult it is to leave

the home, one it is fixed to

your name, your roles, your bed.

All small and big things are

remembered, and stored

in the heart’s mystery

A slow act of withdrawal, renewing

Itself each day’s end the same way

as on the previous day, you move on

The choice is difficult

when mind is amorphous

spaces are not defined

It’s an open game you play

like seasons and rivers flowing

deep in uncertain hearts.

You play ‘Home’.

Your kids imitate you.

Life grows on trees, green faces.

GROUP-B

2. Answer any one question from the following: 50×1=50

(a) What is the historical context of ‘Easter, 1916’? What features of modernist poetry can be found in the poem, ‘Easter,1916’?

(b) Consider ‘An introduction’ by Kamala Das as a confessional poem.

(d) What is the theme of the poem, ‘In memory of W.B. Yeats’ by W.H. Auden? Give an over view of the symbols used in the poem.

3. Answer any one of the following: 50×1=50

(a) Explain Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot as a tragicomedy.

(b) Describe the relationship between Jimmy and his wife, Alison in Look Back in Anger.

(d) What role does the poet see for himself with regard to his country in ‘To India My Native Land’?

GROUP-C

4. Answer any one of the following: 50×1=50

(a) What is Raja Rao’s style in Kanthapura? Discuss subalternity in the novel.

(b) The Rainbow is a bitter condemnation of the industrial society. Is this true? Discuss with references to the text.

(d) What is the narrator’s point of view and what values are important to the narrator in Things Fall Apart?

WBCS Main Optional Question Paper – 2021

PAPER – I (Time-3 Hours Full Marks-200)

GROUP-A

Write an essay on any one of the following topics: 40×1=40

(a) Literature can give us access to a more holistic understanding of our past than the official texts of history

(b) Social media can be more damaging than beneficial to a society

GROUP-B

2. Answer any two of the following questions: 40×2

(a) Give two ways in which a tragedy is different from that of a comedy. Discuss with reference to Shakespeare’s plays Macbeth and As You Like It.

(b) What is ‘Metaphysical’ about John Donne’s poetry? Explain with reference to the poems you have read.

(c) Give one feature of Wordsworth’s poetry that may be said to be an influence of the French Revolution. Illustrate with reference to the poems you have read.

(d) What qualities of the West Wind does Shelley want to make his own? How do the images of nature indicate Shelley’s political views?

(e) What are the differences between Ulysses and Telemachus? Would you agree with the argument that both of them have the qualities of a hero? Give a reasoned answer.

(f) ‘So, one day more am I deified. Who knows but the world may end tonight?’

Explain the lines. How do these lines reflect the spirit of the Victorian Age?

GROUP-C

3. Answer any two of the following questions: 40×2

(a) Discuss briefly the economic condition of any four characters as portrayed in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

(b) How does Thomas hardy portray the conflict of the old and the new in The Mayor of Casterbridge? Write a brief note relating the novel to the social context of the age.

(d) Why have several critics accused Mark Twain of confirming rather than challenging the radial stereotypes in his portrayal of Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?

(e) Would you agree with the view that in her novel Frankenstein Mary Shelley questions the pursuit of knowledge within the context of the industrial age? Give reasons for your answer.

PAPER – II (Time-3 Hours Full Marks-200)

Attempt a critical appreciation of the following poem: 50

Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour

England hath need of thee: she is a fen

Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,

Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,

Have forfeited their ancient English dower

Of inward happiness. We are selfish men:

Oh! Raise us up, return to us again:

And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power

Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:

Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:

Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,

So didst thou travel on life’s common way.

In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart

The lowliest duties on herself did lay

2. Answer any two of the following questions: 40×2

(a) Would you consider W. B. Yeats’s ‘Leela and the Swan’ to be a disguised narrative for the progress of Western Civilization? Critically analyze the poem to justify your stand.

(b) Compare and contrast the poems ‘Journey of the Magi’ and ‘Burnt Norton’ by T. S. Eliot as mediations on time and religious devotion.

(d) In the poem ‘Introduction’ Kamala Das is able to “successfully marshal diverse and tangential themes in one controlled poem” (Daruwalla). Comment with close textual references.

3. Answer any two of the following questions: 40×2

(a) “The impact Osborne had on British theatre is incalculable. With Look Back in Anger be brought class as an issue before British audiences.” Critically examine this view with close reference to the play.

(b) Would you agree with the view that Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is primarily about hope? Argue with close textual references.

(c) According to Joyce’s celebrated biographer, Richard Ellman, Joyce hoped that his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young man would be an autobiographical novel, “turning his life into fiction.” Discuss the statement with textual references.

(d) Comment on how Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’ illustrates the history of women’s literary writing in patriarchal society.

4. Answer any two of the following questions: 40×2

(a) Bring out the complexity of Ghosh’s narrative technique in his novel The Shadow Lines.

(b) Do you consider Okonkwo as the tragic protagonist of Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart? Discuss with suitable examples from the text.

(c) How did Tagore conceptualize ‘civilization’ in his speech ‘Crisis in Civilization’? Substantiate following the writer’s argument, why human civilization was deeply threatened.

(d) Can Raja Rao’s Kanthapura be regarded as a postcolonial novel? Justify your argument with reference to the novel.

WBCS Main Optional Question Paper – 2020

PAPER – I (Time-3 Hours Full Marks-200)

GROUP-A

Write an essay on any one of the following topics: 40×1=40

(a) Poetry is the criticism of life

(b) Art for Art’s Sake

(d) Literary value of Travelogue

(e) Feminism in Literature

GROUP-B

2. Answer any two of the following questions: 40×2

(a) Bring out the complexities of Lady Macbeth’s character in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Or,

Do you consider Marlowe present the character of Edward-I, qualifies Edward as Renaissance tragic hero? Substantiate your answer.

(b) Critically analyse John Donne as a Metaphysical love poet with special reference to ‘The Good Morrow’.

(d) Give a character sketch of Belinda as Pope presented her in the heroic-comical poem The Rape of the Lock.

(e) ‘If winter comes, can spring be far behind?’ Analyse Shelley’s revolutionary idealism in ‘The Ode to the West Wind’ in the light of the above lines.

(f) What is a ‘dramatic monologue’? Will you consider ‘The last Ride Together’ to be a successful dramatic monologue? Give reasons for your answer.

GROUP-C

3. Answer any two of the following questions: 40×2=80

(a) Analyse Pip’s growth and education in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations.

(b) Justify the title of Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice.

(c) Write an essay on hardy’s tragic philosophy as revealed through his use of chances and coincidences in The Mayor of Casterbridge.

(d) Analyse the psychological complexities in the character of Heathcliff in Emiley Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.

(e) Write with close reference to the text on Mark Twain’s use of humor and pathos in The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn.

PAPER – II (Time-3 Hours Full Marks-200)

Critically evaluate the following Poem: 50

And it grows, the vain

Summer,

Even for us with our

Bright green sins:

Behold the dry

Wind,

As it stirs up quarrels

Among magnolia boughs

And plays its serene

Tune on

The prows of all the leaves

And then is gone,

Leaving the leaves

Still there,

The tree still green, but breaking

The heart of the air.

2. Answer any one of the following questions: 50

(a) Explain how Yeats explores his thoughts and musings on immortality, art and life in “Sailing to Byzantium”. Justify your answer with close textual references.

(b) Do you think that Eliot’s “The Song of J.Alfred Prufrock” is a modernist poem? Justify your answer with references from the text.

(d) How would you justify Auden’s contention that “once an artist creates his art, the art develops its own autonomy and life and is not limited by the artist or his intentions”? Answer with references to his Poem “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”.

3. Answer any one of the following: 50

(a) How is the theme of change represented in Yeats’s “Easter 1916”? What is the “Terrible beauty” referred to here? Answer with close textual references.

(b) How is the notion of the angry young man skillfully depicted in Osborne’s portrayal of the protagonist in the play Look Back in Anger?

(c) In what ways is the play Waiting for Godot relevant in our time? In what sense is the word ‘waiting’ significant? Justify your answer.

(d) Do you think that Sylvia Plath in “Nick and the Candklestick” has successfully depicted the creation of life and the masterful merging of metaphor and reality? Give a reasoned answer with references from the text.

4. Answer any one of the following: 50

(a) Show how the problem of untouchability, poverty, sexual exploitation and caste-society is depicted skillfully in the context of the novel Kanathapura. Answer critically.

(b) Show how Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Shadow Lines deals with the issues of partition, identity, freedom and cross-cultural interactions in the backdrop of communal violence. Give a detailed answer.

(c) The conflict in Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart centres on the cultural clashes that emerge as traditional Igbo society is slowly transformed by the colonizing British administrators and missionaries. How would you justify the theme of the text? Give a reasoned answer.

(d) In what ways is Virginia Woolf’s A Room Of One’s Own a feminist critical Text focusing on the theme of freedom and confident of women in a patriarchal society? Answer critically.

WBCS Main Optional Question Paper – 2019

PAPER – I (Time-3 Hours Full Marks-200)

GROUP-A

Write an essay on any one of the following topics: 40

(a) Literature and violence.

(b) Literature and ecological awareness.

(d) “For poetry makes nothing happen, it survives… a way of happening, a mouth.”

(e) Literature and popular culture.

GROUP-B

2. Answer any two of the following questions: 40×2

(a) Consider how the theme of appearance and reality shapes the tragedy of Macbeth.

(b) In what way does the sexual politics of English history shape the tragedy of Marlowe’s Edward II?

(c) Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden” attempts to achieve a balance between a sensuous and an intellectual view of nature. Do you agree? Give reasons for your answer.

(d) Discuss “Lycidas” as a pastoral elegy.

(e) Would you agree with the view that memory and desire constitute the major themes of Wordsworth’s poetry. Answer with reference to the poems in your syllabus.

(f) Analyse the structure of “Ode to the West Wind” as a prayer to a superior power.

(g) Show how Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s use of the sonnet form contributes to the expression of her desire and devotion to her beloved in “How Do I Love Thee!”

GROUP-C

3. Answer any two of the following questions: 40×2

(a) Jane Austen’s artistic mastery overcomes the limitations of subject matter and the poverty of spiritual profundity in her fiction. Do you agree? Give reasons for your answer with reference to Pride and Prejudice.

(b) Comment on the validity of the ending of Dicken’s Great Expectations.

(d) Examine how the theme of death and rebirth structures the narrative of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

(e) Consider Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a Gothic novel.

PAPER – II (Time-3 Hours Full Marks-200)

Critically evaluate the following poem: 50

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,

On a white heal-all, holding up a moth

Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth —

Assorted characters of death and blight

Mixed ready to begin the morning right,

Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth —

A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,

And dead wings carried like a paper Kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,

The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?

What brought the Kindred spider to that height,

Then steered the white moth thither in the night?

What but design of darkness to appall? —

If design govern in a thing so small.

2. Answer any one of the following: 50

(a) Why does Yeats champion art as superior to nature in “Sailing to Byzantium”? Discuss with close textual reference.

(b) In what ways are the images used by T. S. Eliot in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” modern? Explain with close reference to the text.

(d) Explain how W. H. Auden demonstrates a Confrontation between love and war in “The Shield of Achilles”.

3. Answer any one of the following: 50

(a) how does Derozio envisage a better future for India in “To India My Native land’? Discuss.

(b) Explain the significance of Helena’s role in the plot structure of Look Back in Anger.

(d) Comment on the title of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mirror”. How effectively does it project the theme of the poem.

4. Answer any one of the following: 50

(a) Discuss the relationship between memory and story telling as demonstrated by Amitav Ghosh in The Shadow Lines.

(b) Comment on Chinua Achebe’s representation of the conflict between tradition and change in a colonial Igbo Society.

(d) How does Virginia Woolf complicate the notion of ‘truth’ in A Room of One’s Own? Discuss.

WBCS Main Optional Question Paper – 2018

PAPER – I (Time-3 Hours Full Marks-200)

GROUP-A

Write an essay on any one of the following topics: 40

(a) The social value of literature.

(b) Literature and film

(d) The cultural value of biography and autobiography

(e) The role of literary theory in reading literary texts.

GROUP-B

2. Answer any two of the following questions: 40×2

(a) how would you assess Macbeth – as a villain or as a doomed hero? Give reasons for your answer.

(b) Critically consider Donne’s use of metaphysical conceits in the poems on your syllabus.

(c) What is the function and importance of epic similes in Paradise Lost Book I? Answer with close reference to two epic similes in Book I.

(d) Discuss Pope’s use of supernatural elements in The Rape of the Lock.

(e) Consider Keat’s ‘Ode to Nightingale’ and ‘Ode on a Gracian Urn’ as meditations on life and death.

(f) Show how Jennyson reflects on the many uncertainties of the Victorian Age in ‘Ulysses’ and ‘Tithonus’.

GROUP-C

3. Answer any two of the following questions: 40×2

(a) How apt is the title ‘Pride and Prejudice’ for Jane Austen’s novel? Give reasons for your answer.

(b) Critically consider the importance of the rustic characters in The Mayor of Casterbridge of Hardy.

(d) Examine Mark Twain’s hurdling of the issues of race, humanity and identity in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

(e) How would you read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – as science fiction or as a novel of social commentary or as both?

PAPER – II (Time-3 Hours Full Marks-200)

Critically evaluate the following poem: 50

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveller, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that, the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence;

Two roads diverged in wood and I –

I took the one less travelled by,

And that has made all the difference.

2. Answer any one of the following: 50

(a) Do you regard Yeat’s ‘Easter 1916’ as a “public poem”? Justify your answer with close textual reference.

(b) Critically analyse the images used in Eliot’s ‘The Journey of the Magi’.

(c) Would you call Kamala Das’s poem ‘An introduction’ eccentric or sex-centric or iconoclastic? Give reasons for your answer.

(d) What is the message that Sylvia Plath’s ‘Mirror’ gives to the wary reader? Answer with close textual references.

3. Answer any one of the following: 50

(a) Estimate the achievement of patriotic Derozio as a sonneteer in ‘To India – My Native Land’.

(b) Discuss the problem of alienation in Osborne’s angry young man as it is evident in Look Back in Anger.

(d) As for Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ wherein does the heart of the poem lie? Give a critical answer.

4. Answer any one of the following: 50

(a) Consider the role of regionalism in Kanthapura. Would you call this work the first evocation of the Gandhian age in Indo-Anglian fiction? Give reasons for your answer.

(b) Is it possible to look upon Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow as a kind of Bible, recalling its readers to a religious vision of the world? Answer critically.

(c) Elaborate on the scriptural significance of the name of the protagonist in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man?

(d) how far is Tagore’s trust in man (as enounced in Crisis in Civilisation) an embodiment of his love and fear, faith and philosophy?