TOPIC 1: James Joyce — A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Unit I)
Q1. What is the significance of the opening line 'Once upon a time and a very good time it was'?
Answer: The opening line mimics a traditional fairy tale. It captures Stephen's earliest infantile sensory consciousness.
Q2. What is the significance of the two brushes of Dante?
Answer: Dante keeps two brushes in her press. The green brush represents Parnell and the maroon brush represents Michael Davitt.
Q3. What does the 'moocow' symbolise in the opening scene?
Answer: The moocow represents motherly warmth and early childhood perception. It symbolizes Ireland's pastoral and maternal myth.
Q4. Why does Father Dolan punish Stephen at Clongowes Wood College?
Answer: Father Dolan pandies Stephen with a cane for broken glasses. He wrongly accuses Stephen of idling and deceit.
Q5. What is an 'epiphany' according to James Joyce?
Answer: An epiphany means a sudden spiritual manifestation. The inner essence of an object shines forth vividly to the observer.
Q6. What is the significance of the bird-girl scene on the seashore?
Answer: Stephen sees a beautiful girl resembling a seabird in the water. This vision inspires his ultimate commitment to earthly beauty and art.
Q7. What are 'static' and 'kinetic' emotions according to Stephen's aesthetic theory?
Answer: Kinetic emotions induce physical desire or loathing in the beholder. Static emotions arrest the mind in purely contemplative aesthetic joy.
Q8. What are the three Thomistic qualities of beauty mentioned by Stephen?
Answer: Stephen defines beauty through three Latin terms from Thomas Aquinas: 'integritas' (wholeness), 'consonantia' (harmony), and 'claritas' (radiance).
Q9. What does Stephen mean by the phrase 'silence, exile, and cunning'?
Answer: Stephen uses these three weapons to defend his artistic independence. He escapes the restrictive nets of nationality, language, and religion.
Q10. What does the mythical figure of Daedalus symbolize in the novel?
Answer: Daedalus represents the fabulous Greek artificer and maze-builder. Stephen adopts him as his spiritual patron to forge artistic wings.
TOPIC 2: Bernard Shaw — Candida (Unit I)
Q1. What is 'Prossy's complaint' in Shaw's Candida?
Answer: Prossy's complaint denotes unexpressed romantic infatuation. Miss Proserpine Garnett secretly loves her employer, Reverend James Mavor Morell.
Q2. Why does Eugene Marchbanks despise Morell's sermons and public speeches?
Answer: Eugene considers Morell's socialist lectures mere rhetorical platitudes. He believes Morell offers Candida mechanical preaching instead of poetic passion.
Q3. What does Eugene mean when he demands 'tiny little wings' for Candida?
Answer: Eugene imagines Candida as an ethereal, poetic goddess. He rejects Morell's mundane domestic view of clipping her wings with household chores.
Q4. What triggers the famous 'Auction Scene' in Act III?
Answer: Reverend Morell asks Candida to choose between him and Eugene. Both men present their claims and bid for Candida's devotion.
Q5. What does Morell bid for Candida in the auction scene?
Answer: Morell bids his honesty, authority, position, and protective masculine care. He presents himself as her established worldly protector.
Q6. What does Eugene Marchbanks bid for Candida?
Answer: Eugene bids his weakness, desolation, heart's need, and poetic loneliness. He offers pure emotional necessity without social power.
Q7. Why does Candida choose Morell over Marchbanks?
Answer: Candida chooses Morell because he is actually the weaker man. She knows Eugene's poetic soul can endure solitary independence.
Q8. What is the secret inside the poet's heart at the end of the play?
Answer: Eugene realizes that a poet does not need domestic comfort or romantic coddling. He embraces the lonely night and his artistic destiny.
Q9. How does Shaw characterize Burgess in the play?
Answer: Mr. Burgess represents a vulgar, hypocritical capitalist employer. He exploits workers while pretending friendship toward socialist Morell.
Q10. Why does Shaw call Candida 'A Mystery' in the subtitle?
Answer: The subtitle points to the psychological mystery of Candida's inner self. It highlights the mystery of romantic illusions versus marital realities.
TOPIC 3: W.B. Yeats — Selected Poems ('The Wild Swans at Coole' & 'An Acre of Grass') (Unit II)
Q1. Where is the poem 'The Wild Swans at Coole' set, and how many swans does the poet count?
Answer: The poem is set at Lady Gregory's Coole Park estate. The poet counts nine-and-fifty (59) swans upon the twilight water.
Q2. Why does Yeats say 'The nineteenth autumn has come upon me'?
Answer: Yeats first counted the swans at Coole Park nineteen years earlier in 1897. The phrase highlights his advancing age and personal decline.
Q3. How do the swans contrast with the aging poet in 'The Wild Swans at Coole'?
Answer: The swans remain unwearied, passionate, and perpetually youthful. In contrast, the aging poet suffers heart-sickness, loneliness, and decay.
Q4. What do the swans symbolize in 'The Wild Swans at Coole'?
Answer: The swans symbolize eternal beauty, companionable love, and artistic permanence. They defy time, seasonal change, and human mortality.
Q5. Where does the speaker sit in 'An Acre of Grass'?
Answer: The speaker sits inside a quiet room beside an acre of green grass. He contemplates old age in a secluded house under midnight stars.
Q6. What does the speaker mean by 'Picture and book remain, / An old man's eagle mind'?
Answer: Quiet reading and contemplation satisfy comfortable domesticity. However, the aging poet rejects this passive state and desires dynamic creative vision.
Q7. Why does Yeats pray for 'an old man's frenzy' in 'An Acre of Grass'?
Answer: Yeats rejects peaceful physical decay and mental stagnation. He demands creative frenzy to produce fierce, visionary, and immortal art.
Q8. Name the three historical/cultural figures mentioned in 'An Acre of Grass'.
Answer: Yeats invokes William Shakespeare's King Lear, the painter Michael Angelo, and the English poet William Blake.
Q9. What is the significance of Timon and Lear in 'An Acre of Grass'?
Answer: Timon and Lear represent furious, passionate old men who pierce human illusions. Yeats seeks their wild tragic frenzy in his later years.
Q10. How does Michael Angelo's mind 'shake the dead in their shrouds'?
Answer: Michelangelo possessed a sublime artistic fury that conquered mortality. His painted figures in the Sistine Chapel animate the dead with divine energy.
TOPIC 4: T.S. Eliot — 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' (Unit II)
Q1. Explain the metaphysical conceit 'patient etherised upon a table' in the opening stanza.
Answer: Eliot compares the tranquil evening sky to a paralyzed patient under ether. It vividly symbolizes modern spiritual paralysis and moral decay.
Q2. Who are the women who 'come and go / Talking of Michelangelo'?
Answer: Superficial bourgeois women wander through fashionable salon tea parties. They utter pretentious, rehearsed remarks about Renaissance fine art.
Q3. Explain the extended metaphor of the yellow fog in the poem.
Answer: Eliot personifies the yellow industrial fog as a sluggish feline street cat. The cat rubs its muzzle and curls asleep around suburban houses.
Q4. Mention two explicit biblical allusions used in 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'.
Answer: Eliot refers to John the Baptist brought in upon a platter, and to Lazarus coming forth from the dead.
Q5. Why does Prufrock say 'I have measured out my life with coffee spoons'?
Answer: Prufrock summarizes his mundane, trivial, and repetitive social routine. He lacks heroic courage and lives in measured, inconsequential increments.
Q6. Who is the 'Eternal Footman' and why does he snicker?
Answer: The Eternal Footman personifies mocking death and inescapable mortality. He snickers at Prufrock's petty vanity, hesitation, and cowardice.
Q7. Why does Prufrock claim 'I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be'?
Answer: Prufrock acknowledges his unheroic status and lack of tragic grandeur. He sees himself as an awkward attendant lord like Polonius.
Q8. What do the mermaids symbolize in the closing stanzas of the poem?
Answer: The mermaids symbolize mythical beauty, poetic romance, and unattainable freedom. They sing to one another but ignore the aging Prufrock.
Q9. Explain the closing line: 'Till human voices wake us, and we drown.'
Answer: Harsh mundane realities shatter Prufrock's delicate daydream world. The speaker drowns in societal triviality and spiritual despair.
Q10. What is the significance of the Dante epigraph from the Inferno?
Answer: The epigraph from Guido da Montefeltro establishes the poem as a private confession. Prufrock reveals his secret paralysis because no auditor will escape.
TOPIC 5: Virginia Woolf — 'Street Haunting: A London Adventure' (Unit II)
Q1. When and why does the narrator leave her house in 'Street Haunting'?
Answer: The narrator leaves her house on a cold winter evening between four and six. She uses the excuse of buying a simple lead pencil.
Q2. Why does the narrator need an excuse (the lead pencil) to go out?
Answer: The excuse provides a practical pretext for solitary urban wandering. It allows her to escape domestic confines without arousing social suspicion.
Q3. What is the concept of the 'flâneur' in the context of this essay?
Answer: A flâneur is a detached spectator who wanders city streets observing life. Woolf adopts this modernist persona to experience urban anonymity.
Q4. How does Woolf distinguish between the 'eye' and the 'brain'?
Answer: The eye floats smoothly upon the bright visual surface of urban phenomena. In contrast, the brain pauses to construct deep psychological narratives.
Q5. What does Woolf mean by the 'protective shell' of domesticity?
Answer: Home furnishings and private possessions form a rigid shell that locks one's identity. Street walking shatters this shell and liberates the self.
Q6. Describe the dwarf woman whom the narrator observes in the shoe shop.
Answer: The dwarf woman has a deformed torso but exquisite, graceful feet. Buying fashionable shoes restores her pride and transforms her appearance.
Q7. What contrast does Woolf draw outside the shoe shop?
Answer: Woolf contrasts the proud dwarf woman with two severely blind and destitute street mendicants. This juxtaposes private vanity with raw social tragedy.
Q8. What is the significance of the secondhand bookshop in Charing Cross Road?
Answer: The secondhand bookshop acts as a sanctuary for forgotten human minds and eccentric memories. Woolf browses obsolete travel books and poetry.
Q9. How does the quarrel between the stationer and his wife affect the purchase of the pencil?
Answer: The domestic argument brings the narrator back to ordinary domestic realism. She buys her lead pencil and concludes her street voyage.
Q10. Explain the closing thought: 'Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way.'
Answer: The narrator celebrates the imaginative fluidity of modern identity. A wandering observer briefly inhabits other souls before returning safely home.
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