BA EST 431 Literary Theory End Sem Model Question Paper

END SEMESTER EXAMINATION MARCH: 2011

IV SEMESTER

Programme: BA (PSEng, JPE, CEP) Max Marks: 100

Course: Literary Theory Duration: 3 Hrs

Code: EST 431

Answer Any Five of the Following. (5x20=100)

Note:

i. The questions are designed to bring out your positions viz-a-viz the theories you have studied. Please ensure that while clarifying your positions you locate them within or around the theories you have studied. A personal take or a personal narrative not located within the theories you have studied may not be treated as an answer.

1. Would Eagleton’s position that literature is an ideological apparatus, be acceptable to you? Give theoretically sound agruments for you position.

2. Between Plato and Aristotle, whose position is more acceptable to you? Explain with reasons.

3. How does Saussure’s conception of language complicate the idea of language you have inherited. Explain.

4. What structuralist notions of language and ‘reality’ does Derrida complicate? How does he do that? Elucidate.

5. What are the differing ideas of the subject  do Freud and Lacan inaugurate? Explain.

6. Discuss the possibilities and limitations of poststructuralist feminist thought for you as a student of English studies, and Psychology, who mostly lives and studies on parental support and has a different social history that determines your present subjecthood than that of Europe and North America.

7. How does Judith Butler problematise ‘gender and sexuality as categories of essence’? In doing so what new insights does she give into Freud’s thought? Explain.

8. How does Foucault show the relationship between discourse and power/knowledge? Does Foucault affect the way you looked at the social? Elucidate.

9. If we accept Said’s arguments on Orientalism, what political agenda does it set for you as a young undergraduate at the beginning of the twenty first century? Explain with reasons.

10. On what grounds would you argue that the condition you exist is postmodern. Delineate your argument using ideas of different postmodern thinkers you have studied.