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UGC NET ENGLISH (Code 30) - PAPER 2

Model Question Paper (100 MCQs x 2 Marks = 200 Marks)

Choose the correct option.

Unit 1: Drama

1. The phrase "memory of the offence" is central to which Shakespearean tragedy? (A) Othello (B) King Lear (C) Hamlet (D) Macbeth

2. The term "comedy of menace" is best applied to the early plays of (A) Tom Stoppard (B) Harold Pinter (C) Joe Orton (D) Caryl Churchill

3. The character of Eilif appears in Brecht's (A) The Good Person of Szechwan (B) Mother Courage and Her Children (C) The Caucasian Chalk Circle (D) Galileo

4. The play Silence! The Court is in Session was written by (A) Badal Sircar (B) Mohan Rakesh (C) Vijay Tendulkar (D) Girish Karnad

5. Who among the following wrote the classical Sanskrit play Mrichchhakatika (The Little Clay Cart)? (A) Kalidasa (B) Bhasa (C) Shudraka (D) Bhavabhuti

6. In Beckett's Waiting for Godot, the character Lucky delivers a long, seemingly nonsensical monologue. This speech is a parody of (A) Political rhetoric (B) Academic and philosophical discourse (C) Religious sermons (D) Romantic love poetry

7. The character of Volpone in Ben Jonson's play is a (A) Miser (B) Usurer (C) Conman who feigns illness (D) Jealous husband

8. The term "fourth wall" refers to (A) The back wall of the stage (B) The imaginary wall between actors and audience (C) The division between acts (D) The wall separating tragedy from comedy

Unit 2: Poetry

9. "The sea is calm tonight. / The tide is full, the moon lies fair" - these are the opening lines of (A) "The Waste Land" (B) "Dover Beach" (C) "Ode to a Nightingale" (D) "Ulysses"

10. The rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet is (A) ABBA ABBA CDE CDE (B) ABAB BCBC CDCD EE (C) ABAB CDCD EFEF GG (D) AABB CCDD EEFF GG

11. The phrase "the still, sad music of humanity" occurs in Wordsworth's (A) "Tintern Abbey" (B) "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" (C) The Prelude (D) "The Solitary Reaper"

12. Who wrote the poem "The Road Not Taken"? (A) Walt Whitman (B) Emily Dickinson (C) Robert Frost (D) Wallace Stevens

13. Philip Larkin's "Church Going" ends with the line (A) "A serious house on serious earth it is" (B) "What will survive of us is love" (C) "The deep and primal lead" (D) "Never such innocence again"

14. The poem "Lady Lazarus" is by (A) Adrienne Rich (B) Sylvia Plath (C) Anne Sexton (D) Kamala Das

15. The Indian English poet who wrote The Exact Name and Hymns in Darkness is (A) Nissim Ezekiel (B) A.K. Ramanujan (C) Jayanta Mahapatra (D) Dom Moraes

Unit 3: Fiction, Short Story & Graphic Narratives

16. The novel The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles is a notable example of (A) Magical realism (B) Stream of consciousness (C) Historiographic metafiction (D) Epistolary novel

17. Who among the following wrote the novel The Bluest Eye? (A) Alice Walker (B) Toni Morrison (C) Zora Neale Hurston (D) Maya Angelou

18. The phrase "only connect" is the epigraph to E.M. Forster's (A) A Passage to India (B) Howards End (C) A Room with a View (D) Maurice

19. The short story "The Lottery", a chilling tale of ritualistic violence in a small town, was written by (A) Shirley Jackson (B) Flannery O'Connor (C) Katherine Mansfield (D) Eudora Welty

20. In Maus by Art Spiegelman, the mice represent (A) Germans (B) Poles (C) Jews (D) Americans

21. The narrative technique of Wuthering Heights is characterized by (A) An omniscient third-person narrator (B) A first-person narrator with no frame story (C) Nested narratives with Lockwood and Nelly Dean (D) Stream of consciousness

22. The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga uses the form of (A) A diary (B) A series of letters to the Chinese Premier (C) An oral history (D) A third-person political satire

23. The novel The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro is narrated by (A) A young artist (B) An aging butler (C) A clone (D) A World War II spy

Unit 4: Non-Fictional Prose

24. "I have a dream" is a famous speech delivered by (A) Mahatma Gandhi (B) Martin Luther King Jr. (C) Abraham Lincoln (D) Nelson Mandela

25. The Essays of Elia begins with the essay (A) "Dream Children" (B) "The Superannuated Man" (C) "The South-Sea House" (D) "A Dissertation upon Roast Pig"

26. Francis Bacon's essay "Of Truth" opens with (A) "What is truth? said jesting Pilate..." (B) "Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark..." (C) "Revenge is a kind of wild justice..." (D) "He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune..."

27. Unto This Last, a critique of capitalist economics, was written by (A) Thomas Carlyle (B) Matthew Arnold (C) John Ruskin (D) William Morris

28. The biography The Life of Samuel Johnson was written by (A) Oliver Goldsmith (B) Edmund Burke (C) James Boswell (D) Hester Thrale

29. The Communist Manifesto (1848) was authored by (A) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (B) Vladimir Lenin (C) Leon Trotsky (D) Karl Marx alone

Unit 5: Language & Linguistics

30. The process of word formation in which a word of one grammatical class is used as another without any change in form (e.g., 'email' as noun → verb) is called (A) Back-formation (B) Conversion (C) Clipping (D) Compounding

31. The study of the physical properties of speech sounds is (A) Articulatory phonetics (B) Acoustic phonetics (C) Auditory phonetics (D) Applied phonetics

32. Which of the following is a voiceless dental fricative? (A) /s/ (B) /z/ (C) /θ/ (D) /ð/

33. In Chomsky's transformational-generative grammar, deep structure refers to (A) The superficial arrangement of words (B) The phonetic representation (C) The underlying abstract syntactic representation of meaning (D) The final spoken form

34. The term "isogloss" is used in (A) Semantics (B) Dialectology (C) Phonology (D) Pragmatics

35. The co-existence of two distinct varieties of a language in a speech community, one for formal use (H) and one for informal use (L), is called (A) Bilingualism (B) Code-switching (C) Diglossia (D) Pidginization

36. The loss of the middle syllable in "library" → "libry" is an example of (A) Aphesis (B) Syncope (C) Apocope (D) Epenthesis

37. The term "etymology" is the study of (A) Speech sounds (B) Word origins and history (C) Sentence structure (D) Meaning in context

Unit 6: English in India

38. The first book of poems in English by an Indian, Poems (1827), was published by (A) Henry Derozio (B) Kashiprasad Ghosh (C) Michael Madhusudan Dutt (D) Toru Dutt

39. R.K. Narayan's novel The Guide is primarily about (A) A tour guide who becomes a revolutionary (B) A railway guide who transforms into a spiritual guide (C) A political guide during the freedom movement (D) A cricket coach

40. The God of Small Things is set in (A) Delhi (B) Calcutta (C) Ayemenem, Kerala (D) Bombay

41. Mahatma Gandhi's The Story of My Experiments with Truth was originally written in (A) Hindi (B) Gujarati (C) English (D) Marathi

42. The Sahitya Akademi Award-winning novel That Long Silence was written by (A) Anita Desai (B) Shashi Deshpande (C) Githa Hariharan (D) Kamala Markandaya

43. The poet who translated the Sangam classical Tamil poems into English in The Interior Landscape is (A) A.K. Ramanujan (B) R. Parthasarathy (C) Keki N. Daruwalla (D) Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

44. The first official demand for English education in India was made through (A) The Charter Act of 1813 (B) Macaulay's Minute of 1835 (C) Wood's Despatch of 1854 (D) The Indian Education Commission of 1882

Unit 7: Cultural Studies

45. Raymond Williams' Culture and Society (1958) traces the development of the idea of culture from (A) 1780 to 1950 (B) The Renaissance to the Victorian age (C) Classical Greece to the present (D) 1800 to 1900

46. The concept of "Orientalism" as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient is argued in a book by (A) Frantz Fanon (B) Homi Bhabha (C) Edward Said (D) Gayatri Spivak

47. Who among the following is NOT a key figure in the Frankfurt School? (A) Theodor Adorno (B) Max Horkheimer (C) Herbert Marcuse (D) Raymond Williams

48. The term "interpellation" (the process by which ideology constitutes individuals as subjects) was introduced by (A) Antonio Gramsci (B) Louis Althusser (C) Pierre Bourdieu (D) Michel Foucault

49. The essay "Encoding/Decoding" in television discourse is by (A) John Fiske (B) Stuart Hall (C) Marshall McLuhan (D) Jean Baudrillard

50. The History of Sexuality, a multi-volume work examining the relationship between power, knowledge, and sexuality, is by (A) Roland Barthes (B) Jacques Lacan (C) Michel Foucault (D) Judith Butler

51. "The medium is the message" is a famous phrase coined by (A) Roland Barthes (B) Marshall McLuhan (C) Walter Benjamin (D) Umberto Eco

Unit 8: Literary Criticism

52. The concept of "hamartia" in Aristotle's Poetics refers to (A) The hero's excessive pride (B) An error of judgment or tragic flaw (C) The reversal of fortune (D) The moment of recognition

53. John Dryden's An Essay of Dramatic Poesy presents a debate among four speakers. The speaker who defends the superiority of modern English drama over classical French drama is (A) Crites (B) Eugenius (C) Lisideius (D) Neander

54. The phrase "touchstone method" was used by Matthew Arnold to (A) Evaluate the moral seriousness of a poem (B) Identify genuine high poetic quality by comparing with lines from great masters (C) Examine the historical context of a work (D) Analyze dramatic unities

55. Which of the following is NOT a concept associated with New Criticism? (A) Intentional fallacy (B) Affective fallacy (C) Heresy of paraphrase (D) Defamiliarization

56. William Wordsworth's famous statement that "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity" appears in (A) The Prelude (B) Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800) (C) Biographia Literaria (D) The Excursion

57. Longinus identifies the principal source of the sublime as (A) Grandeur of thought (B) Powerful emotion (C) Skillful arrangement of figures (D) Nobility of diction

58. T.S. Eliot's theory of "impersonality" of poetry is elaborated in (A) "The Metaphysical Poets" (B) "Hamlet and His Problems" (C) "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (D) "The Function of Criticism"

Unit 9: Literary Theory

59. The term "signified" in Saussurean linguistics refers to (A) The sound-image (B) The concept or meaning (C) The actual object in the world (D) The written word

60. Roland Barthes' Mythologies is primarily concerned with (A) Classical Greek myths (B) The semiological analysis of contemporary bourgeois culture (C) Structural analysis of folk tales (D) Archetypal patterns in literature

61. The concept of the "chronotope" (the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships in narrative) was developed by (A) Mikhail Bakhtin (B) Gérard Genette (C) Tzvetan Todorov (D) Vladimir Propp

62. The Laugh of the Medusa, which advocates "écriture féminine", is by (A) Simone de Beauvoir (B) Hélène Cixous (C) Julia Kristeva (D) Luce Irigaray

63. "There is nothing outside the text" (Il n'y a pas de hors-texte) is a famous proposition by (A) Michel Foucault (B) Jacques Derrida (C) Roland Barthes (D) Paul de Man

64. Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism characterizes postmodernism as (A) The return to realism (B) The cultural dominant of multinational capitalism (C) A form of romantic revival (D) The end of ideology

65. Judith Butler's concept of gender performativity suggests that gender is (A) A biological fact (B) An innate inner truth (C) A social construct produced through repeated stylized acts (D) A psychological archetype

66. The Empire Writes Back (1989), a seminal text in postcolonial studies, was authored by (A) Edward Said (B) Homi Bhabha (C) Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (D) Gayatri Spivak and Ranajit Guha

Unit 10: Research Methods

67. The abbreviation "et al." is used in citations to indicate (A) The work is anonymous (B) There are multiple authors, and only the first is named followed by "et al." (C) The source is a journal article (D) The year of publication is unknown

68. In research, a "variable" is defined as (A) A consistent finding (B) A characteristic or attribute that can assume different values (C) The central argument of a thesis (D) A fixed theory

69. Which of the following is a qualitative method? (A) Survey with numerical scales (B) Experimental research (C) In-depth interview (D) Statistical hypothesis testing

70. The section of a research paper that interprets the findings and links them to the research question is (A) Abstract (B) Methodology (C) Results (D) Discussion

Mixed/Cross-Unit Questions

71. Which of the following pairs is correctly matched? (A) The Wasteland - W.B. Yeats (B) Ulysses - James Joyce (C) The Waste Land - Virginia Woolf (D) A Passage to India - George Orwell

72. Identify the correct chronological order of publication (A) Lyrical Ballads, In Memoriam, The Waste Land, Birthday Letters (B) In Memoriam, Lyrical Ballads, The Waste Land, Birthday Letters (C) The Waste Land, Lyrical Ballads, In Memoriam, Birthday Letters (D) Lyrical Ballads, The Waste Land, In Memoriam, Birthday Letters

73. "Sweetness and light" is a phrase Matthew Arnold took from (A) John Ruskin (B) Jonathan Swift (C) Thomas Carlyle (D) Thomas Babington Macaulay

74. Which literary theory is most concerned with the reader's active role in creating meaning? (A) New Criticism (B) Reader-Response theory (C) Structuralism (D) New Historicism

75. The term "metaphysical conceit" is best exemplified by (A) A comparison of two highly dissimilar things using elaborate logic (B) A simple simile drawn from nature (C) A direct address to an inanimate object (D) A recurring mythological allusion

76. The statement "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" opens (A) Capital (B) The German Ideology (C) The Communist Manifesto (D) The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

77. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" examines the practice of (A) Widow remarriage in colonial India (B) Sati (widow immolation) and colonial discourse (C) The Indian freedom movement (D) Linguistic nationalism in India

78. The aesthetic principle "art for art's sake" is associated with (A) The Pre-Raphaelites (B) The Aesthetic Movement (Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde) (C) The Romantic poets (D) The Metaphysical poets

79. The figure of speech in which a part represents the whole is (A) Metaphor (B) Metonymy (C) Synecdoche (D) Irony

80. The Bhagavad Gita forms a part of the larger epic (A) Ramayana (B) Mahabharata (C) Silappadikaram (D) Manimekalai

81. The term "diaspora" refers to (A) A utopian society (B) The dispersion of a people from their original homeland (C) A literary genre (D) A linguistic register

82. Who among the following is the author of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? (A) Oscar Wilde (B) H.G. Wells (C) Robert Louis Stevenson (D) Bram Stoker

83. The "Graveyard Poets" include (A) Thomas Gray and Edward Young (B) William Blake and Robert Burns (C) John Dryden and Alexander Pope (D) William Wordsworth and S.T. Coleridge

84. The term "aporia" in deconstruction means (A) A moment of authorial inspiration (B) An irresolvable internal contradiction in a text (C) A figure of speech involving repetition (D) The emotional climax of a narrative

85. The statement "For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love" is the opening line of (A) "The Good-Morrow" (B) "The Canonization" (C) "The Flea" (D) "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"

86. Amitav Ghosh's The Glass Palace is set against the backdrop of (A) The Partition of India (B) The Burmese invasion and British colonialism in Southeast Asia (C) The Kargil War (D) The Green Revolution

87. The protagonist of Things Fall Apart is (A) Obi Okonkwo (B) Ezeulu (C) Okonkwo (D) Ikemefuna

88. The figure of speech that involves a direct address to an absent person or abstract entity is (A) Apostrophe (B) Personification (C) Hyperbole (D) Alliteration

89. The New Critics considered a poem as (A) An expression of the author's emotions (B) A historical document (C) A self-contained, autonomous verbal object (D) A political statement

90. Which novel by Thomas Hardy ends with the protagonist hanged for murder? (A) Far from the Madding Crowd (B) The Mayor of Casterbridge (C) Tess of the d'Urbervilles (D) Jude the Obscure

91. The concept of "heteroglossia" (the diversity of voices and social languages in the novel) is associated with (A) Roland Barthes (B) Mikhail Bakhtin (C) Julia Kristeva (D) Northrop Frye

92. The poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" begins with an epigraph from (A) The Bible (B) Shakespeare (C) Dante's Inferno (D) Homer's Odyssey

93. The phrase "willing suspension of disbelief" was introduced in the context of (A) The reader's engagement with drama (B) The poet's use of supernatural characters in Lyrical Ballads (C) The writing of prose fiction (D) The performance of Shakespearean tragedy

94. The critical approach that emphasizes how a literary text reflects or reinforces patriarchal ideology is (A) Psychoanalytic criticism (B) Feminist criticism (C) Marxist criticism (D) Archetypal criticism

95. The novel The Inheritance of Loss won the Man Booker Prize in (A) 2005 (B) 2006 (C) 2007 (D) 2008

96. The term "phoneme" is defined as (A) The smallest unit of meaning (B) The smallest unit of sound that distinguishes meaning (C) A group of letters (D) A sentence pattern

97. Which of the following is a postmodern novel by Julian Barnes? (A) Midnight's Children (B) Flaubert's Parrot (C) Remains of the Day (D) The French Lieutenant's Woman

98. "Nature never did betray / The heart that loved her" is a line from (A) "Tintern Abbey" (B) "Ode to a Nightingale" (C) "The Prelude" (D) "Dover Beach"

99. The author of the collection of short stories Interpreter of Maladies is (A) Rohinton Mistry (B) Jhumpa Lahiri (C) Aravind Adiga (D) Kiran Desai

100. The MLA citation format for a book with one author includes (A) Author's last name, first name. Title. Publisher, Year. (B) Author's last name, first name. Title, Publisher, Year. (C) Author's first name, last name. Title. Publisher, Year. (D) Author. Title. Year. Publisher.

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ANSWER KEY

| Q | Ans | Q | Ans | Q | Ans | Q | Ans | Q | Ans | |---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---| | 1 | C | 21 | C | 41 | B | 61 | A | 81 | B | | 2 | B | 22 | B | 42 | B | 62 | B | 82 | C | | 3 | B | 23 | B | 43 | A | 63 | B | 83 | A | | 4 | C | 24 | B | 44 | A | 64 | B | 84 | B | | 5 | C | 25 | C | 45 | A | 65 | C | 85 | B | | 6 | B | 26 | A | 46 | C | 66 | C | 86 | B | | 7 | C | 27 | C | 47 | D | 67 | B | 87 | C | | 8 | B | 28 | C | 48 | B | 68 | B | 88 | A | | 9 | B | 29 | A | 49 | B | 69 | C | 89 | C | | 10 | C | 30 | B | 50 | C | 70 | D | 90 | C | | 11 | A | 31 | B | 51 | B | 71 | B | 91 | B | | 12 | C | 32 | C | 52 | B | 72 | A | 92 | C | | 13 | A | 33 | C | 53 | D | 73 | B | 93 | B | | 14 | B | 34 | B | 54 | B | 74 | B | 94 | B | | 15 | A | 35 | C | 55 | D | 75 | A | 95 | B | | 16 | C | 36 | B | 56 | B | 76 | C | 96 | B | | 17 | B | 37 | B | 57 | A | 77 | B | 97 | B | | 18 | B | 38 | A | 58 | C | 78 | B | 98 | A | | 19 | A | 39 | B | 59 | B | 79 | C | 99 | B | | 20 | C | 40 | C | 60 | B | 80 | B | 100 | A |

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ANALYSIS: Patterns from 20 Years of UGC NET English Papers

This 100-question mock test reflects the deeply repetitive and patterned nature of the UGC NET English exam. Here's what a careful analysis of the last two decades reveals -- and how this paper embodies those trends.

1. Author-Work Matching Dominates

Roughly 40-45% of any paper consists of direct "Who wrote what?" or "Which work contains this line?" questions. The test covers the core canon:

• Drama: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Congreve, Pinter, Beckett, Tendulkar
• Poetry: Wordsworth, Keats, Yeats, Eliot, Plath, Ezekiel, Frost
• Fiction: Austen, Hardy, Forster, Morrison, Rushdie, Roy, Ishiguro
• Prose: Bacon, Lamb, Ruskin, Boswell
• Theory: Marx, Derrida, Said, Foucault, Althusser, Butler

You must know first lines, famous lines, epigraphs, and characters' names (see Q1, Q9, Q11, Q13, Q18, Q26, Q85, Q92).

2. Critical Concepts and Terminology

Nearly 25-30% of questions ask for definitions, coiners of terms, or explanation of critical phrases.

• Hamartia, catharsis, negative capability, objective correlative, dissociation of sensibility, intentional fallacy, écriture féminine, différance, heteroglossia, magic realism, stream of consciousness, gynocriticism, etc.

These are thoroughly tested (Q52, Q55, Q58, Q61, Q62, Q63, Q64, Q65, Q75, Q84, Q91). Knowing who coined the term and what it means is non-negotiable.

3. Historical Facts, Dates, and Sequence

Years, chronological orders, and historical events appear consistently (Q44, Q45, Q72, Q95). You should memorize:

• Macaulay's Minute (1835), Wood's Despatch (1854)
• Publication dates of major works: Lyrical Ballads (1798), The Waste Land (1922), Midnight's Children (1981)
• Booker winners (e.g., The Inheritance of Loss - 2006; The God of Small Things - 1997)

4. Language & Linguistics: Predictable and High-Scoring

Linguistics questions rarely deviate from:

• Phonetics: classification of speech sounds (bilabial, velar, fricatives) - Q32
• Morphology: morphemes, conversion, syncope - Q30, Q36
• Saussure and Chomsky's basic distinctions - Q33, Q59
• Sociolinguistics: diglossia, register, pidgin/creole - Q34, Q35

This section can be mastered with a standard introductory textbook.

5. Theory and Cultural Studies: Increased Weightage

Over the last 10 years, questions from Units 7 and 9 have risen to about 15-20%. The focus is on:

• Identification of theorists with core ideas (Barthes - death of the author, Althusser - ISA, Butler - performativity, Bakhtin - carnivalesque/chronotope)
• Key postcolonial terms: hybridity, subaltern, Orientalism
• Frankfurt School and Cultural Studies pioneers (Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall)

Questions 45-51 and 59-66 are representative.

6. Indian English Literature: A Fixed Slot

Every paper has at least 5-7 questions from Unit 6. The same names recur:

• Derozio, Tagore, Narayan, Anand, Ezekiel, Ramanujan, Kamala Das, Spivak, Bhabha, Rushdie, Roy, Ghosh, Adiga, Lahiri, Deshpande
• Historical context: Macaulay, Gandhi, Ambedkar

Questions 38-44 sample this.

How to Use This Test for Maximum Benefit

• Attempt the paper in one sitting (2 hours).
• For every question you get wrong, write down the correct author-work-concept triplet in a notebook.
• Notice cross-references: a poet who is also a critic (Arnold, Eliot, Wordsworth) is often tested from both angles.
• Revise all terms in their exact wording; the exam tests precision ("metonymy" vs. "synecdoche", "syncope" vs. "aphesis").

Consistent practice with such themed papers, combined with rigorous memorization of the canon, will give you a decisive edge. Good luck!