VHSC 2013

VHSC- 2013

Solved PSC Question Paper

1. Which of the following is not a character in Chaucer's 
   “Canterbury Tales”?
   (A) The Scholar             (B) The Sailor
   (C) The Doctor              (D) The Princess
   Answer: D
2. Author of the poem “Ode to St. Cecilia's Day”
   (A) Keats                       (B) Shelley
   (C) Dryden                    (D) Pope
   Answer: C

        Read the poem here A Song for St. Cecilia's Day, 1687

1. “Ay, but to die, and go we know not where
   To lie in cold obstruction and to rot,
   This sensible warm motion to become
   A kneaded clod” - Who is the author of the text from which these 
   lines are taken?
   (A) Collins                  (B) Sidney
   (C) Keats                    (D) Shakespeare
   Answer: D (Measure for Measure)
2. What is 'octet'?
   (A) A song sung in October               (B) The eight power of a million
   (C) The first eight lines of a sonnet   (D) An eight footed animal
   Answer: C
3. A representative writer of the Middle Ages in England
   (A) King Arthur                   (B) Geoffrey Chaucer
   (C) Beowulf                         (D) Cowper
   Answer: B
4. The author of “Religio Medici”
   (A) Bacon                           (B) Milton
   (C) Sir Thomas Brown       (D) Pope
   Answer: C
5. Who among the following is not known as a satirist?
   (A) Dryden                   (B) Swift
   (C) Collins                    (D) Pope
   Answer: C
6. Who among the following is not known as an essayist?
   (A) Addison         (B) Cowper
   (C) Steel              (D) Hazlitt
   Answer: B
7. A 'sestet' is a stanza of _____ lines.
   (A) Sixteen             (B) Seven
   (C) Eight                (D) Six
   Answer: D
8. What is 'oceanid'?
   (A) Wealth from ocean
   (B) A longing for something vast and eternal
   (C) Any of the daughters of the sea god Oceanus
   (D) A native of Oceania
   Answer: C
9. A metaphysical poet:
   (A) Donne               (B) Eliot
   (C) Gray                 (D) Pope
   Answer: A
10. The criticism that dominated the literary criticism in the United States from the 1930s to the 1970s:
    (A) Feminism            (B) New Historicism
    (C) Post modernism  (D) New Criticism
    Answer: D
11. What is 'Hellenism'?
    (A) Upholding Greek Literature
    (B) Study of Helen of Troy
    (C) Literature of Holland
    (D) Intellectual and emotional attitudes expressed in the civilization of ancient Greece.
    Answer: A
12. Who is acclaimed as the greatest Greek hero who participated in the Trojan war?
    (A) Ulysses                (B) Achilles
    (C) Menelaus             (D) Hector
    Answer: B
13. 'Astrophel and Stella' is a work by:
    (A) Edmund Spenser (B) Thomas DeQuincy
    (C) Philip Sidney       (D) Alexander Pope
    Answer: C
14. Which of the following is a work by Chaucer?
    (A) The Legend of Good Women   (B) Allenoem
    (C) Vox Clamantis                         (D) Traite
    Answer: A
15. The period in which the philosopher Immanuel Kant lived?
    (A) 17^th C                           (B) 18^th C
    (C) 19^th C                           (D) 20^th C
    Answer: B
16. Which British institution was the first to introduce English as an academic subject in England?
    (A) Oxford University            (B) Cambridge University
    (C) Queens College,London   (D) University College, London
    Answer: D Reference
     
17. The nation in which the writer T.S Eliot was born?
    (A) America           (B) England
    (C) Ireland             (D) France
    Answer: A
18. Who among the following come under the category 'Dalit Writers'?
    (A) Parthasarathi    (B) Akamahadevi
    (C) Homi Bhabha    (D) Bhama
    Answer: D (Bama (born: 1958), also known as Bama Faustina Soosairaj, is a Tamil novelist. She rose to fame with her autobiographical novel Karukku (1992), which chronicles the joys and sorrows experienced by Dalit Christian women in Tamil Nadu. She subsequently wrote two more novels, Sangati (1994) and Vanmam (2002) along with two collections of short stories: Kusumbukkaran (1996) and Oru Tattvum Erumaiyum (2003)
19. “To be alive, to be man alive, to be whole man alive: that is the point”. Whose words are these?
    (A) Dickens                    (B) Charles Lamb
    (C) D.H Lawrence          (D) Marlowe    
    Answer: C (In his essay 'Why the Novel Matters')

22. What are the twin concomitants of paradox according to Cleanth Brookes?
    (A) Humour and laughter    (B) Irony and wonder
    (C) Tragedy and tears         (D) Adventure and excitement
    Answer: B
23. Who is Myanmar's opposition leader?
    (A) Daw Khin Yi               (B) Aung San Suu Kyi
    (C) Chow in Le                 (D) Kim II Sung
    Answer: B
24. The writer who won the 1948 Nobel Prize for Literature.
    (A) T.S Eliot                  (B) Esme Valerie Fletcher
    (C) W.B Yeats                (D) Ezra Pound
    Answer: A
25. Author of the book 'Wings of Fire'?
    (A) Kiran Desai           (B) M.F Hussain
    (C) Amiri Baraka        (D) A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
    Answer: D
26. Which is the correct expression?
    (A) What do you usually eat for a breakfast?
    (B) What do you usually eat for the breakfast?
    (C ) What do you usually eat for breakfast?
    (D) None of these.
    Answer: C
27. A word formed from the initial letters or parts of other words:
    (A) Homonym           (B) Acronym
    (C) Synonym             (D) Assoance
    Answer: B
28. When was Edward Said's Orientalism published?
    (A) 1978                   (B) 1798
    (C) 1879                   (D) 1789
    Answer: A
29. Full named of Tolstoy:
    (A) Leo Vronsky Tolstoy           (B) Alexi Tolstoy
    (C) Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy     (D) Leo Tolstoy
    Answer: C (Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy also know as Leo Tolstoy)
30. The nationality of the writer who won 2011 Booker Prize?
    (A) Britain                (B) India
    (C) China                  (D) Africa
    Answer: A
31. Which company developed MS Word?
    (A) Microsoft                       (B) Google
    (C) Apple                             (D) None of these
    Answer: A
32. Each of two or more alternative forms of a morpheme:
    (A) Allomorph                   (B) Morphology
    (C) Allophone                    (D) Dimorph
    Answer: A
33. A character in Joseph Corad's 'Heart of Darkeness'
    (A) Kitty                      (B) Henry Conrad
    (C) Kumali                  (D) Mistah Curtz
    Answer: D
34. A play by Wole Soyinka.
    (A) No Sugar             (B) The Dutchman
    (C) Someday              (D) The Lion and the Jewel
    Answer: D
35. The last play of Shakespeare.
    (A) The Tempest           (B) The Winters Tale
    (C) Twelfth Night         (D) Much Ado About Nothing
    Answer: A
36. Who is considered as the first Indo-Anglian poet?
    (A) Toru Dutt             (B) Michael Madhusudan Dutt
    (C) Henry Derozio     (D) Sarojini Naidu
    Answer: C
37. Which of the following is a city frequently seen in Jayanta Mahapatra's poetry?
    (A) Culcutta          (B) Dhakka
    (C) Puri                 (D) Nasik
    Answer: C
38. Bitterness of tone or manner:
    (A) Acrimony         (B) Parsimony
    (C) Homonym        (D) Alimony
    Answer: A
39. Who coined the term “gynocritics”?
    (A) Helen Cixous      (B) Alice Walker
    (C) Mary Powel        (D) Elaine Showalter
    Answer: D
40. Who translated to English the works of Mahaswetha Devi?
    (A) Akamahadevi      (B) Elizabeth Boyle
    (C) Elizabeth Bayly   (D) Gayatri Spivak
    Answer: D
41. “Aunt Jennifer's Tigers” is a poem written by:
    (A) Alice Walker     (B) Mary Wolstencraft
    (C) Adrienne Rich   (D) Jamaica Kincaid
    Answer: C
42. The author of 'Radhika Swantanam':
    (A) Mudduppalani      (B) Ravisankar
    (C) Ramdev                (D) Irayimman Thampi
    Answer: A
43. The African language in which Ngugi wa Thiongo wrote:
    (A) Cree                 (B) Kiswahili
    (C) Gikuyu             (D) Creole
    Answer: C
44. The writer associated with 'negritude':
    (A) Aimi' Cesaire        (B) Jaques Lacan
    (C) Antonio Gramsci  (D) Wilson Harris
    Answer: A
45. It was _________ who interrogated first how language works.
    (A) Levi Strauss     (B) Achebe
    (C) Saussure          (D) Schlegel
    Answer: C
46. _________ developed anthropological structuralism:
    (A) Vladimir Propp           (B) Douglas
    (C) Claude Levi Strauss   (D) Jakobson
    Answer: C
47. The author of the text 'Mythologies':
    (A) Julia Kristeva       (B) Roland Barthes
    (C) Baudlaire             (D) Prouste
    Answer: B
48. Who coined the term 'semiology'?
    (A) Saussure        (B) Barthes
    (C) Foucault         (D) Jakobson
    Answer: A
49. Who authored 'Feminine Mystique'?
    (A) Kate Millet         (B) Betty Friedan
    (C) Audrey Lorde    (D) Sara Mills
    Answer: B
50. Who among the following is a Black American Feminist writer?
    (A) Bell Hooks        (B) Elaine Showalter
    (C) Helen Cixous    (D) Rita Mae Brown
    Answer: A
51. “The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author”. Whose argument is this?
    (A) Michael Foucault      (B) Roland Barthes
    (C) Leah Fritz                 (D) Jaques Lacan
    Answer: B
52. The action of Shakespeare's Othello is located in:
    (A) Venice           (B) Cypress
    (C) Athens           (D) Scotland
    Answer: B
53. Who authored The Grammar of the Decameron?
    (A) Roland Barthes         (B) Michael Foucault
    (C) Tzevatan Todorov     (D) Romain Roland
    Answer: C
54. The James Bond film that was released in 2012:
    (A) Diamonds are Forever     (B) Skyfall
    (C) Casino Royale                  (D) Quantum of Solace
    Answer: B
55. Who among the following is a Hollywood film director?
    (A) James Cameron           (B) Danielle Radcliff
    (C) Rupert Grint                (D) Arnold Schwarzenegger
    Answer: A
56. The 2012 Oscar for the 'best picture' award winning film:
    (A) The Titanic           (B) Avatar
    (C) Anaconda             (D) The Artist
    Answer: D
57. The year in which V.S Naipaul won the Nobel Prize:
    (A) 2000                   (B) 2001
    (C) 2005                   (D) 2003
    Answer: B
58. Which of the following texts is written by Tony Morrison?
    (A) Mistress                       (B) Life and Times of Michael K
    (C) Tar Baby                      (D) Second Sex
    Answer: C
59. Which of the following is written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez?
    (A) A Room of One's Own                (B) Lucknow Boy
    (C) One Hundred Years of Solitude (D) Time Machine
    Answer: C
60. Where is Mother Theresa University located?
    (A) Bangalore                   (B) Ooty
    (C) Kodaikanal                 (D) Trichy
    Answer: C
61. Who among the following is an existentialist philosopher?
    (A) Marquez             (B) Satre
    (C) Kurusova            (D) Engels
    Answer: B
62. Which is the first Malayalam newspaper to launch an internet edition?
    (A) Deepika             (B) Malayala Manorama
    (C) Mathrubhumi    (D) Desabhimani
    Answer: A
63. The author of the book Wolf Hall:
    (A) Vikram Seth           (B) Barak Obama
    (C) Hilary Mantel         (D) Vivien Paterson
    Answer: C
64. Which is the first Indian owned English newspaper published from India?
    (A) Times of India       (B) Bengal Gazette
    (C) India Today           (D) The Hindu
    Answer: D
65. The Satellite of India launched for educational purpose:
    (A) Apple             (B) Insat I A
    (C) Insat I D        (D) Edusat
    Answer: D
66. The Mayor of Casterbridge is written by:
    (A) Charles Dickens      (B) Walter Scott
    (C) Thomas Hardy        (D) Jane Austen
    Answer: C
67. Who wrote the book Tatwamasi?
    (A) Upamanyu Chatterjee   (B) Kalidasa
    (C) Sukumar Azhikode        (D) A.P.J Abdul Kalam
    Answer: C
68. The author of the novel The Old Man and the Sea:
    (A) Hemingway           (B) Faulkner
    (C) Viriginia Woolf      (D) George Meridith
    Answer: A
69. Who among the following has won the Phalke award?
    (A) G. Aravindan      (B) Adoor Gopalakrishnan
    (C) Girish Karnad    (D) Amitabh Bachchan
    Answer: B
70. Which text is considered as a prequel to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre?
    (A) Wuthuring Heights      (B) Emma
    (C) Mansfield Park            (D) Wide Sargasso Sea
    Answer: D       Reference 
71. “As Flies to wanton boys
    Are we to the gods
    They kill us for their sport”
    Which play contain these lines?
    (A) Othello             (B) Macbeth
    (C) Hamlet             (D) King Lear
    Answer: D
72. Who among the following writers had lived longer?
    (A) Shelley            (B) Keats
    (C) Blake              (D) Wordsworth
    Answer: D
73. With reference to metaphysical poets, who had said that “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together”?
    (A) Donne            (B) Cleaveland
    (C) Cowley           (D) Dr. Johnson
    Answer: D
74. “Adieu the fancy cannot cheat so well
    As she is famed to do, deceiving elf.”
    From which writer is the above given lines taken?
    (A) Shakespeare            (B) Shelley
    (C) Keats                        (D) Coleridge
    Answer: C (Ode to Nightingale)
75. In which play of Shakespeare Titania, the queen of fairies appears as a character?
    (A) As You Like It             (B) A Midsummer Night's Dream
    (C) A Winter's Tale           (D) Love's Labour's Lost
    Answer: B
76. The hero of Homer's Odyssey?
    (A) Achilles                  (B) Ulysses
    (C) Pyrrhus                  (D) Hector
    Answer: B
77. Who wrote under the pen-name 'George Eliot'?
    (A) Currer Bell                   (B) Lucille Dupin
    (C) Mary Wollestencraft    (D) Marry Ann Evans
    Answer: D
78. Who among the following is a comic dramatist of ancient Greece?
    (A) Euripides                (B) Sophocles
    (C) Aeschylus               (D) Aristophanes
    Answer: D
79. Which among the following is not an epistolary novel?
    (A) Clarissa                   (B) Pamela
    (C) The Color Purple     (D) Sundogs
    Answer: D
80. Maories are the native people of :
    (A) Canada                     (B) Australia
    (C) America                    (D) New Zealand
    Answer: D
81. Lee Maracle is a native writer of :
    (A) Canada              (B) America
    (C) Australia            (D) Africa
    Answer: A
82. Who among the following is not a Canadian writer?
    (A) Margaret Atwood         (B) Margaret Lawrence
    (C) Alice Munroe                (D) Toni Morrison
    Answer: D
83. Who filed a case against Arundhati Roy with regard to her novel, God of Small Things?
    (A) Advocate Sabu Thomas    (B) Inspector Thomas Mathew
    (C) Thomas Cyriac                  (D) Ramkumar
    Answer: A
84. What is the concept used by A.J. Greimas to refer to the six different forces that we can encounter in the basic matrix of all narratives?
    (A) Plot                         (B) Objects
    (C) Acteurs                   (D) Actors
    Answer: C (The actantial model, developed by A.J. Greimas, allows us to break an action down into six facets, or actants (acteurs): (1) The subject (for example, the Prince) is what wants or does not want to be joined to (2) an object (the rescued Princess, for example). (3) The sender (for example, the King) is what instigates the action, while the (4) receiver (for example, the King, the Princess, the Prince) is what benefits from it. Lastly, (5) a helper (for example, the magic sword, the horse, the Prince's courage) helps to accomplish the action, while (6) an opponent (the witch, the dragon, the Prince's fatigue or a suspicion of terror) hinders it.)
85. Who among the following is associated with 'narratology'?
    (A) Gerard Gennette             (B) Peter Steiner
    (C) Tony Bennet                    (D) Viktor Erlich
    Answer: A
86. “Bliss was it to be alive on that day,
    But to be young is very heaven”- Whose words are these?
    (A) Shakespeare                 (B) Dryden
    (C) Keats                             (D) Wordsworth
    Answer: D
87. Enobarbus is a character in:
    (A) Antony and Cleopatra          (B) Merchant of Venice
    (C) Julius Caesar                        (D) Much Ado About Nothing
    Answer: A
88. Who among the following has not written texts on narratology?
    (A) Dorrit Cohn                     (B) Shlomith Rimmon Kenan
    (C) Wallace Martin                (D) I.A Richards
    Answer: D
89. The writer Chinua Achebe belongs to :
    (A) Nigeria                              (B) Ghana
    (C) Guyana                              (D) South Africa
    Answer: A
90. The Intellectual source of the concept 'subaltern' :
    (A) Gayatri Spivak              (B) Antonio Gramsci
    (C) Ranajit Guha                 (D) Gyanendra Pandey
    Answer: B
91. Julia Kristeva is a ______ feminist writer.
    (A) Russian                      (B) American
    (C) French                       (D) German
    Answer: C
92. Who originally developed the study of discourse?
    (A) Derrida                  (B) Foucault
    (C) Barthes                  (D) Spivak
    Answer: A
93. A text is not usually cited as an example of colonial discourse:
    (A) Jane Eyre             (B) Frankenstein
    (C) Persuasion           (D) Heart of Darkness
    Answer: B
94. The 'Holy Trio' in post-colonial writings:
    (A) Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak
    (B) Ngugi, Fanon, Edward Said
    (C)Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin
    (D) Patrick Williams, Laura Chrisman, Robert Young
    Answer: A
95. V.S Naipaul is :
    (A) Nigerian             (B) Ghanaen
    (C) Guyanese            (D)Trinidadian
    Answer: D
96. Who among the following does not belong to the group of writers known as Bronte Sisters?
    (A) Charlotte            (B) Emily
    (C) Anne                   (D) Mary
    Answer: D
97. Pemmican Publications is based in:
    (A) India                     (B) Britain
    (C) Canada                 (D) America
    Answer: C
98. Which writer is associated with the concept of “Objective Correlative”?
    (A) W.B Yeats                         (B) T.S Eliot
    (C) Auden                              (D) Donne
    Answer: B
99. The Ring and the Book is a collection of poems by:
    (A) Browning                      (B) Tennyson
    (C) Anthony Trollope          (D) Elizabeth Gaskel
    Answer: A
100. Who introduced 'Sonnet' into English?
     (A)Earl of Surrey                (B) Thomas Wyatt
     (C) Nicholar Udall              (D) Shakespeare
     Answer: B