ENGLISH I

Candidates should answer THREE questions

1. Old English literature. Do those three words really fit writing from England before 1066? 2. How Christian is Beowulf? 3. Was Chaucer new? 4. What should we do with the different texts of Piers Ploughman? 5. Is there something that should be called Ricardian literature? 6. What makes chivalry a good subject for literary exploration? 7. Discuss ANY body of writing which you regard as courtly. 8. Should we pay more attention to songs written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? 9. Did Shakespeare write to be read or to be performed? 10. Was the invention of printing the most significant event in English literary history? 11. What were the literary consequences of forming professional theatrical companies? 12. How useful is he word republican to the historian of early modern literature? 13. Are sermons able to transcend their immediate occasions? 14. Is Milton sublime? 15. How Augustan is Pope? 16. Discuss rewriting in eighteenth-century literature. 17. What made Ossian popular? 18. Is the eighteenth-century novel picaresque? 19. Discuss parody and romantic poetry. 20. Did Tristram Shandy have ancestors? 21. Discuss nonsense writing in the nineteenth century. 22. Discuss the relationship between drama and the novel in novelist or playwright.
ANY ONE

nineteenth-century

[OVER]

23. What could the Browning Society have been talking about? 24. If Woolf, Joyce and Lawrence were all modernists, what does modernism mean? 25. Has Becketts influence been a useful one? 26. Has postmodernism begun? 27. Has there been a great poet in England since T.S. Eliot? 28. Has ANY critic in the twentieth century also been an artist? 29. Discuss the self-representations of ANY writer or writers. 30. Discuss the use of kitsch in ANY ONE writer or writers. 31. Discuss the relationship between argument and performance in the work of poets. 32. Describe the use of the book as object in ANY ONE writer. 33. Explore the impact of theological controversy on the work of ANY writer. 34. Explore the stagecraft of ANY dramatist or dramatists. 35. Discuss the literary representation of ONE of the following, in ONE OR MORE WRITERS: animals; beds; colour; dialogue; ecstasy; form; graves; homosexuality; illustrations; Jesuits; kindness; lines; magic; novelty; oligarchs; pathetic fallacy; quotation; reason; style indirect libre; time; uncles; vertigo; wit; xenophobia; yearning; zeugma.
ANY

poet or

September 2007

All Souls College

ENGLISH II
Candidates should answer SECTION A and TWO QUESTIONS from SECTION B

SECTION A 1. Give a close critical account of the following poem: On the Death of Dr Robert Levet Condemnd to hopes delusive mine, As on we toil from day to day, By sudden blasts, or slow decline, Our social comforts drop away. Well tried through many a varying year, See Levet to the grave descend; Officious, innocent, sincere, Of evry friendless name the friend. Yet still he fills affections eye, Obscurely wise, and coarsely kind; Nor, letterd arrogance, deny Thy praise to merit unrefind. When fainting nature calld for aid, And hovring death prepard the blow, His vigrous remedy displayd The power of art without the show. In miserys darkest caverns known, His useful care was ever nigh, Where hopeless anguish pourd his groan, And lonely want retird to die. No summons mockd by chill delay, No petty gain disdaind by pride, The modest wants of evry day The toil of evry day supplied. His virtues walkd their narrow round, Nor made a pause, nor left a void; And sure thEternal Master found The single talent well employed.
25 5

10

15

20

[OVER]

The busy day, the peaceful night, Unfelt, uncounted, glided by; His frame was firm, his powers were bright, Tho now his eightieth year was nigh. Then with no throbbing fiery pain, No cold gradations of decay, Death broke at once the vital chain, And freed his soul the nearest way.

30

35

[END OF SECTION A]

SECTION B
Candidates should answer TWO questions

1. Do we need to divide literary history into periods? 2. Is it always reductive to read literature politically? 3. At what point do variations between different texts of the same work become critically significant? 4. Did the copyright act of 1709 change the way people wrote? 5. Do we need genres? 6. What is the value of narratology? 7. What would be lost if the novel had never been invented? 8. How important is the sound of literature? 9. Is it important for writers to write sense? 10. Can you describe the literature of an alien culture? 11. Can the study of literature be international? 12. Is canonicity as bad as they say? 13. Does writing by women have a distinctive character? 14. Does race matter? 15. What part should philology play in literary study? 16. Is there such a thing as a late style? 17. What is style? 18. What is an avant garde? 19. What can an awareness of regional variation bring to the study of literature? 20. In what way is the novel a European genre?

[OVER]

21. Is the art of the novel anything other than the art of detail? 22. Is the distinction between the romantic and the classical a useful one? 23. What happened to the heroic couplet? 24. Is there an art of biography? 25. Are translations literature? 26. What was new about magic realism? 27. Is good drama dramatic? 28. Is a novel just a long short story? 29. Is every writers criticism self-interested?

September 2007

Fellowship Examination All Souls College

ENGLISH I
Candidates should answer THREE questions

1. Consider the role of EITHER religion OR riddles in any pre-conquest literature. 2. How do ethical and formal questions interact in romance? 3. Why didnt Chaucer write allegory? Or did he? 4. How radical is Piers Plowman? 5. Describe how you would resolve a particular editorial problem in any medieval or Renaissance text. 6. What is distinctive about the literature of the Henrician period? 7. Is imaginary audition the best way to experience Shakespeare? 8. Why does Ben Jonson matter? 9. How does any one or more poet use EITHER a) genre; OR b) argument? 10. What damage did Milton do to English poets and poetry? 11. Explore the effects on literature of any one or more development in scientific thinking. 12. Why does mock-heroic emerge when it does? 13. Write an essay on the relationship between aggression and rationality in any eighteenth century writer or writers. 14. Is there a period in which you could argue for the emergence of a distinctive female literary sensibility? 15. How do earlier eighteenth century novels relate to their readers? 16. What can a literary critic make of the philosophical prose of the eighteenth century, and is it worth the effort? 17. Discuss the representation of place in the work of any eighteenth or nineteenth century writers. 18. Where does epic go after 1750? 19. Should we resist simple equations between Romanticism and rebelliousness? 20. Does writing by women treat friendship in distinctive ways? 21. Is Jane Austen political?

[OVER]

22. Are historical novels escapist? 23. Describe in detail how any two or more dramatic monologues work on their readers. 24. Did much less change in the literature of the first half of the twentieth century than is generally claimed? 25. When and why did labelled literary movements become important? Were any of them as significant as they claimed to be? 26. Consider relations between literature and the market-place in any period and in any way that strikes you as interesting. 27. Discuss any relationship between TWO writers (e.g. Wordsworth and Coleridge, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Eliot and Pound, Hughes and Plath). 28. Discuss any aspect of the influence of America or Americans on English writing of the twentieth century. 29. Does contemporary writing for film or television validate the clich that these are the media a modern Shakespeare would be writing for? 30. Discuss any literary responses to any major change in religious thought. 31. Discuss one of the following in relation to the literature of any period or periods: animals; birds; children; dogs; epistolarity; facts; generalizations; hatred; influence; jokes; killing; leave-taking; melancholy; nobility; optimism; polemic; queerness; revision; statues; time; unimaginability; verisimilitude; walks; xenophilia; zero.

September 2008

Fellowship Examination All Souls College

ENGLISH II
Candidates should answer SECTION A and TWO QUESTIONS from SECTION B

SECTION A 1. Write a close critical account of the following poem: The sunlight on the garden Hardens and grows cold, We cannot cage the minute Within its nets of gold, When all is told We cannot beg for pardon. Our freedom as free lances Advances towards its end; The earth compels, upon it Sonnets and birds descend; And soon, my friend, We shall have no time for dances. The sky was good for flying Defying the church bells And every evil iron Siren and what it tells: The earth compels, We are dying, Egypt, dying And not expecting pardon, Hardened in heart anew, But glad to have sat under Thunder and rain with you, And grateful too For sunlight on the garden.

10

15

20

[OVER]

SECTION B
Candidates should answer TWO questions

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Is poetry translatable? Do texts have an unconscious? Discuss the literary merits of censorship or self-censorship. Why do we want to know who wrote what we read? Should women who write try to avoid sounding like men? What is philology and does it matter? Is the novel a genre? Is literary history possible? What responsibilities do critics have? Write a short critique of modern practices of textual editing. Are modern editions best? Are literary works explicable? What is a classic? Can one study literature and not be a humanist? Should literary critics sound less like historians than they presently do? How does rhythm work? Where has satire gone? Write a short historical critique of the concept of originality. What is the value of performance history? Do we presently underestimate the effects of language on the senses? What conflicts have you found between expressions of local and of national identity in any literature in English? Has English writing ever really been European? How can ONE of the following assist a literary critic? a) pragmatics; b) Russian formalism; c) neuroscience.

September 2008

Fellowship Examination All Souls College

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

What should be the relationship between literary criticism and the culture within which it takes place? Does it show that most contemporary British novelists have been through British English literature departments? Is there a gay literature before the twentieth century? Is commonwealth fiction as much of an amiable delusion as the commonwealth itself? Is it time we stopped using the term post-colonial? Describe boiling an egg in one of the styles of James Joyce. Write an essay describing what you think the significance of any one twentieth-century critic will be in the twenty-second century. Imagine that NASA have decided that the work of one living poet should be put on a spaceship so that it might be read by aliens. Whose works should they select, and why? And whose would they in fact choose, and why?

September 2008

Fellowship Examination All Souls College

ENGLISH I
Candidates should answer THREE questions

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Explore some differences and/or similarities between pre- and post- conquest writing in these islands. How European was Chaucer? How would you present the texts of Piers Plowman to a modern readership? Discuss relationships between allegory and realism in any period. How close is the relationship between Tudor literature and the nature of Tudor government? Consider some literary consequences of methods of rhetorical training. There is an upstart crow beautified with our feathers that, with his tigers heart wrapped in a players hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; being an absolute Johannes Factotum, in his conceit the only shakescene in a country [ROBERT GREENE]. Discuss Shakespeares relations to his contemporaries in the light of this quotation. How do the practicalities of theatre (e.g. rehearsal, audiences, stage-craft, cues, company size, dimension of the stage) influence early modern drama? I envie no mans nightingale or spring; | Nor let them punish me with losse of rime, | Who plainly say, My God, My King [GEORGE HERBERT]. Discuss. Show the value or otherwise of dividing seventeenth-century poetry into schools (metaphysicals, Cavaliers, Spenserians, Republicans). Discuss the relationship between religious controversy and literature in any way that seems interesting to you. I did not live until this time | Crowned my felicity, | When I could say without a crime, | I am not thine, but thee [KATHERINE PHILLIPS]. In the light of this quotation discuss representations of female friendship in any period or any author. I am sick of hearing of the sublimity of Milton [MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT]. Discuss. The Antients may be considered as a rich Common, where every Person who hath the smallest Tenement in Parnassus hath a free Right to fatten his Muse [HENRY FIELDING]. Discuss. So well-bred spaniels civilly delight | In mumbling of the game they dare not bite [ALEXANDER POPE]. Discuss.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15.

[OVER]

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

Consider some ways in which the practicalities of book production (technologies, economics, physical layout) shape literary content in any period. Make a case for valuing an author who concentrates on small things. What critical insights come from discussing a writers own revisions to his or her work? (You may limit your discussion to a single writer if you wish.) At that moment she felt that to be mistress of Pemberley might be something! [JANE AUSTEN]. Discuss. I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind, and endowed with the will and power to effect purposes of horror, such as the deed which he had now done, nearly in the light of my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to me [MARY SHELLEY]. Discuss the relationship between creativity and fear in any author or authors. Rosamond was arranging her hair before dinner, and the reflection of her head in the glass showed no change in its loveliness except a little turning aside of the long neck. Lydgate had been moving about with his hands in his pockets, and now paused near her, as if he awaited some assurance [GEORGE ELIOT]. In the light of this quotation discuss representations of relationships between men and women in one or more Victorian writers. First he said: | It is the woman in us | That makes us write | Let us acknowledge it | Men would be silent [WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS]. Discuss. Write about a twentieth-century author whom you think has transformed the novel in historically significant ways. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry [MATTHEW ARNOLD]. Discuss. Write an obituary of Harold Pinter. Make a case for the special importance of any particular decade in literary history. Relate any writer or writers in English from EITHER a) the Indian subcontinent OR b) the Caribbean to the literary traditions or political realities of their own nation. The time will come | when, with elation, | you will greet yourself arriving | at your own door, in your own mirror [DEREK WALCOTT]. In the light of this quotation discuss representations of selfhood in any period or author. Discuss ONE of the following in relation to the literature of any period: apocalypse, Biblicism, commemoration, dialect, enclosure, fortune, geriatrics, homoeroticism, imprisonment, justice, kingdoms, letters, manners, notions, options, pain, questions, republicanism, stupidity, testaments, unimaginability, verisimilitude, wealth, X-Men, youth, zillionaires.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

September 2009

Fellowship Examination All Souls College

ENGLISH II
Candidates should answer Section A and TWO other questions from Section B [Note that Section A is compulsory]

SECTION A

1.

Make a critical comparison of the following two poems: a) Methought I saw my late espoused saint Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave, Whom Joves great son to her glad husband gave, Rescued from death by force though pale and faint. Mine as whom washed from spot of childbed taint, 5 Purification in the old Law did save, And such, as yet once more I trust to have Full sight of her in heaven without restraint, Came vested all in white, pure as her mind: Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight, 10 Love, sweetness, goodness in her person shined So clear, as in no face with more delight. But O as to embrace me she inclined I waked, she fled, and day brought back my night. I dreamt he drove me back to the asylum Straight after lunch; we stood then at one end, A sort of cafeteria behind, my friend Behind me, nuts in groups about the room; A dumbwaiter with five shelves was waiting (somethings missing here) to take me upI bend And lift a quart of milk to hide and tend, Take with me. Everybody is watching, dumb. I try to put it first among some wormshot volumes of the N.E.D. I had On the top shelfthen somewhere else ... slowly Lise comes up in a matrons uniform And with a look (I saw once) infinitely sad In her grey eyes takes it away from me.

b)

10

[OVER]

SECTION B
2. 3. Can anything be learned from classical literary theory? Philological criticism is to criticism, in the proper sense of the term, what anatomy is to psychology. The scalpel, which lays bare every nerve and artery in the mechanism of the body, reveals nothing further [CHURTON COLLINS]. Discuss. What is allusion? Is there a new formalism, or is it just the old formalism in disguise? Is historicism history? Literature is not a mere Science, to be studied, but an Art, to be practised [ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH]. Discuss. What would environmentally sensitive fiction look like? Why do we feel the need to find social realities behind fiction? Take a single punctuation-mark and explain why it matters. What is the point of comparative literary study? As for modern journalism, it is not my business to defend it. It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest. I have merely to do with literature [OSCAR WILDE]. Discuss. Is European literary criticism inevitably Eurocentric? Do national literatures have characters? Versification and numbers are the greatest pleasures of poetry [JOHN DRYDEN]. Discuss. Is there any kind of relationship between gender and genre? You may limit your discussion to one gender and one genre if you wish, but are allowed to discuss up to three of each. Is criticism really about being self-critical? Valry is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valry [JEAN-PAUL SARTRE]. Discuss. A noble author would not be pursued too close by a translator. We lose his spirit when we think to take his body [JOHN DRYDEN]. Discuss. Should an intelligent person try to avoid using the term tragedy? Which contemporary writers do you think will become part of the literary canon, and why?
Fellowship Examination All Souls College

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

September 2009

22. 23. 24. 25.

Has evaluation had its day? What is bad about bad language? What comes after postmodernism?

[from The Manga Hamlet]. Do graphic novels reduce everything to visual clich? 26. 27. What do you think the long-term effects of the blogosphere will be on literary activity? Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven [MATTHEW, 18:3]. What could literary critics learn from this?

September 2009

Fellowship Examination All Souls College

ENGLISH LITERATURE I
Candidates should answer THREE questions

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Should we think of Chaucer as the product of a pre-capitalist market economy? Have medievalists focussed too much attention on the late fourteenth century? What varieties of heroism are found in the writing of the later medieval period? e forme to e fynisment foldez ful selden [Sir Gawain and the Green Knight]. Discuss. Renaissance or early modern? What harm did humanism do? Was the Reformation as bad as its now fashionable to say it was? What was popular about the Elizabethan stage? Discuss the effects of censorship on any author or authors. The senses are too gross, and hell contrive A sixth, to contradict the other five, And before certain instinct, will prefer Reason, which fifty times for one does err; Reason, an ignis fatuus of the mind [JOHN WILMOT, EARL OF ROCHESTER]. Discuss. flours and thir fruit Mans nourishment, by gradual scale sublimd To vital Spirits aspire, to animal, To intellectual, give both life and sense, Fansie and understanding, whence the Soule Reason receives, and reason is her being [JOHN MILTON] What does this passage tell us about Miltons view of the universe? Why should satire be particularly popular at some periods and not at others? In reality, true nature is as difficult to be met with in authors, as the Bayonne ham, or Bologna sausage, is to be found in the shops [HENRY FIELDING]. Discuss. (You need not comment on the availability of ham or sausages unless you wish to do so). At least we moderns, our attention less, Beyond th example of our sires, digress, And claim a right to scamper and run wide, Wherever chance, caprice, or fancy guide. [WILLIAM COWPER]. Is scampering a good thing?

11.

12. 13.

14.

[OVER]

15. 16.

Sense and sensibility: what is there in Jane Austen apart from those two concepts? I write, Honora, on the sparkling sand!The envious waves forbid the trace to stay: Honoras name again adorns the strand! Again the waters bear their prize away! [ANNA SEWARD]. Discuss. There are in our existence spots of time, That with distinct pre-eminence retain A renovating virtue [WILLIAM WORDSWORTH]. Discuss. I am a part of all that I have met; Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades For ever and for ever when I move. [ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON]. Discuss. Discuss any author or work that you consider to be under-rated. His eyes glittered, and as if with malignant desire. She shrank and became blind. She was like a bird being beaten down. A sort of swoon of helplessness came over her. She was of another order than he, she had no defence against him. [D.H. LAWRENCE]. Discuss representations of relations between the sexes in any author or period in the light of this quotation. Was T.S. Eliot anti-semitic? Is post-modernity interesting any more? I like her to be naked and to kneel. Tame. My motionless, my living doll. Mute. And afterwards I like her not to tell. [CAROL ANN DUFFY]. Discuss. Discuss the relationship between science and literature in any author or authors. Is there a contemporary novelist whom you think will be read in a hundred years time? Discuss one of the following in relation to the literature of any period: anagrams; beasts; conceit; dialect; expectation; freedom; graffiti; hospitality; introspection; jigs; killing; literacy; monuments; neutrality; orality; penmanship; questions; relativity; stasis; truculence; ugliness; virginity; wariness; Xeroxes; years; zeugma.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26.

September 2010

Examination Fellowship All Souls College

ENGLISH LITERATURE II
Candidates should answer Section A and TWO other questions from Section B
Note that Section A is compulsory. In Section B you may answer in relation to literatures other than English if you wish

SECTION A
1. Make a critical comparison of the following two poems: a) What if this present were the worlds last night? Marke in my heart, O Soule, where thou dost dwell, The picture of Christ crucified, and tell Whether that countenance can thee affright, Teares in his eyes quench the amasing light, 5 Blood fills his frownes, which from his piercd head fell. And can that tongue adjudge thee unto hell, Which prayd forgiveness for his foes fierce spite? No, no; but as in my idolatrie I said to all my profane mistresses, 10 Beauty, of pitty, foulnesse onely is A signe of rigour: so I say to thee, To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assignd, This beauteous forme assures a piteous mind. What is there in my heart that you should sue so fiercely for its love? What kind of care brings you as though a stranger to my door through the long night and in the icy dew seeking the heart that will not harbour you, that keeps itself religiously secure? At this dark solstice filled with frost and fire your passions ancient wounds must bleed anew. So many nights the angel of my house has fed such urgent comfort through a dream, whispered your lord is coming, he is close that I have drowsed half-faithful for a time bathed in pure tones of promise and remorse: tomorrow I shall wake to welcome him. 5

b)

10

[OVER]

SECTION B
2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. A beginning might well be a necessary fiction [EDWARD SAID]. Discuss. The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning [FOUCAULT]. Discuss. What are the benefits of ignoring the original context of a poem? Define romance. Why cant novels be short? All that matters is, that in the end the voices should be heard in harmony: and, as I have said, I doubt whether in any real poem only one voice is audible [T.S. ELIOT]. Discuss. A true philological reading is active; it involves getting inside the process of language already going on in words and making it disclose what may be hidden or distorted in any text we may have before us [EDWARD SAID]. Discuss. It is not that we are connoisseurs of chaos, but that we are surrounded by it, and equipped for co-existence with it only by our fictive powers [FRANK KERMODE]. Should editors worry about intentions? So right, yer buggers, then. Well occupy | your lousy, leasehold poetry [TONY HARRISON]. Discuss. Is literary biography perniciously middlebrow? The great beauty of Poetry is, that it makes every thing every place interesting [JOHN KEATS]. Discuss. Poetic form can try to avoid the ear by hiding more and more in its visual areas [JOHN HOLLANDER]. Discuss. What can literature learn from film? It is certainly beyond question that the figure of address is recurrent in lyric poetry, to the point of constituting the generic definition of, at the very least, the ode (which can, in its turn, be seen as paradigmatic for poetry in general) [PAUL DE MAN]. Discuss. Tragedy, in traditionalist eyes, is supposed to disclose the presence of a cosmic order, but ends up all too often showing just how appallingly unjust the world is [TERRY EAGLETON]. Discuss. Are ideas of nationhood bad for literature? England is sick, and English literature must save it. The Churches having failed, and social remedies being slow, English literature has now a triple function: still, I suppose,
Examination Fellowship All Souls College

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

September 2010

to delight and instruct us, but also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the state [from GEORGE GORDONs inaugural lecture as Professor of English Literature at Oxford in 1869]. Discuss. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. Discuss literary representations of middle age in as many or as few works as you like. Literature and the news do not mix. Discuss. I mostly enjoy parallel passages and sources, though this can clearly be overdone [CHRISTOPHER RICKS]. Discuss. Explore some relationships between literature and the visual arts. Can prejudice be a good thing in literature? A feminine language would undo the unique meaning, the proper meaning of words, of nouns: which still regulates all discourse [LUCE IRIGARAY]. Would it, and would we want it to? It is a truth universally acknowledged that the beginning of a work of literature must be in need of an end, and that the edges of literary works are places where their artifice is particularly in evidence [ALISON SHARROCK]. Discuss.

26.

September 2010

Examination Fellowship All Souls College

ENGLISH LITERATURE I
Candidates should answer THREE questions 1. 2. 3. 4. Fiery dragons were seen flying in the air [Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the year 793]. How should literary historians interpret accounts of supposedly historical events? Discuss any ways in which medieval writers negotiated the anxiety of influence. Should we think of Chaucer as a Renaissance writer? Not a separate aesthetic sphere, but part of the material organization of public life [SARAH BECKWITH on medieval drama]. Discuss in relation to drama or any other medieval genre. Why is romance such an enduring genre in English literature? Why are there so few epics in English literature? The Courtly figure Allegoria is when we speake one thing and thinke another, and that our wordes and our meanings meete not. The vse of this figure is so large, and has vertue of so great efficacie as it is supposed no man can pleasantly vtter and perswade without it. [GEORGE PUTTENHAM]. Discuss. Should we think of Shakespeare as a Renaissance writer? Why did the emergence of professional theatrical companies matter? The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries have been described as a period in which the genius of the language broke new ways, now and then even with some violence, to supply its increasing wants [ALEXANDER SCHMIDT, Preface to A Shakespeare Lexicon, 1874]. Discuss. Miltons delight was to sport in the wide regions of possibility; reality was a scene too narrow for his mind. [SAMUEL JOHNSON]. Discuss any work or works directly inspired by religious controversy. Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybodys face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so few are offended with it [JONATHAN SWIFT]. Discuss. It is estimated that in the last decades of the eighteenth century 40% of novels published were by women, 30% by men, and 30% were anonymous. What might we make of this information? Supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handywork, horror-stricken. [MARY SHELLEY] Discuss in relation to any author or authors.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

[OVER]

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

No man reads a book of science from pure inclination [JAMES BOSWELL]. Discuss. Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful [ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON]. Is the problem with Victorian poetry that it doesnt really describe anything? What is provincial about Middlemarch? What has antiquarianism contributed to English literature? Is decadence a useful critical term? I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness. [JAMES JOYCE, on Dubliners]. His dream monologue was over, of cause, but his drama parapolylogic had yet to be, affact. [JAMES JOYCE, Finnegans Wake]. Should he have stuck to the meanness? evidence hovers like biotic soup, all | transposable, all like. [J. H. PRYNNE]. Will this kind of thing last? If not, what will? Should the contemporary novel try less hard to be like the novels of earlier generations? Discuss the characteristics of any English work by someone who is not a native English speaker. Discuss the work of any English writer whom you think it makes sense to describe as European. Why were Anglo-American literary relations so rich in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Should childrens literature be taken seriously, or would that spoil it? Discuss any ONE of the following in relation to any author or authors: Anagrams, Babel, Character, Dirt, Ellipsis, Franchises, Gambling, Hell, Interest, Jerusalem, Kings, London, Massacres, Neologisms, Options, Prettiness, Queerness, Relativity, Simulacra, Triviality, Upper-classes, Verisimilitude, Welcomes, X-Chromosomes, Yielding, Zigzags.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

September 2011

Examination Fellowship All Souls College

ENGLISH LITERATURE II
Candidates should answer Section A and TWO other questions from Section B
Note that Section A is compulsory. In Section B you may answer in relation to literatures other than English if you wish

SECTION A

1. Write a critical comparison of the following two poems: a) The Windhover To Christ our Lord I CAUGHT this morning mornings minion, kingdom of daylights dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skates heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird,the achieve of; the mastery of the thing! Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

10

No wonder of it: sher pld makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion. [GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS] b) Meadowlark Country Speaking of the skylark in a New England Classroom nonbird, upward twirler, Old-World hyperbole I thought how the likewise ground-nesting Western meadowlark, rather than soar unsupported out over the cattle range at daylight, takes up its post on a fencepost. I heard them out there, once, by the hundreds, one after another: a liquid millennium arising from the still eastward-looking venue of the dark like the still-evolving venue of the young, the faces eastward-looking, bright with a mute, estranged, ancestral puzzlement.

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[AMY CLAMPITT]

[OVER]

SECTION B

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Where should we look for standard English, but to the words of a standard man? [HENRY THOREAU, 1849]. Discuss any aspect of this question. Wheresoever manners and fashion are corrupted, language is. [BEN JONSON]. Is this always true, or never? Did the coming of print change literary activity? The traditional, Aristotelian or Aristotelian-based, assumption that tragedy and comedy are opposites is false, and pernicious. [M. J. SILK] Discuss. Burlesque consists in a disproportion between the stile and the sentiments It therefore, like all bodies compounded of heterogeneous parts, contains in it a principle of corruption [SAMUEL JOHNSON]. Discuss. I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, long poem, is simply a flat contradiction in terms. [EDGAR ALLAN POE]. Discuss. What are the distinctive problems and values of historical fiction? What is a style? Are there any ways in which fiction has to resemble life? Tell me a story (it had better be good). Does literature think? Are periods useful concepts? What can the history of copyright tell us about the history of literature? Was the rise of the novel brought about by any single cause? Discuss how any work of literature has contributed to the formation of a national identity. Is lyric a useful category? Bewitchment [lenvoutement] is always the effect of a representation, pictorial or scriptural, capturing, captivating the form of the other, par excellence his face, countenance, word and look, mouth and eye, nose and ears: the vultus. [JACQUES DERRIDA]. Elucidate. Those who are only aware of beauty in the female sex and are hardly or not at all affected by beauty in our sex, have little innate feeling for beauty in art in a general and vital sense. [JOHANN JOACHIM WINCKELMANN]. Discuss. Is rhythm the soul of verse, or just something that is very hard to describe?

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

September 2011

Examination Fellowship All Souls College

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Is the notion of a private poem a paradox? Why should we care who wrote any given work? Is literature a manifestation of ideology? Can there be a satisfactory literary representation of God? Why should those who cannot create take upon themselves to estimate the value of creative work? What can they know about it? [OSCAR WILDE]. Discuss. Is it useful to think of literature as a kind of speech act? Discuss this cartoon:

September 2011

Examination Fellowship All Souls College