Jan Kott dismisses the romantic notion of the play and opines that A Midsummer Night’s Dream has a sinister undercurrent. Do you agree with him? Elaborate.

Though William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is considered a happy play with the main theme of love and marriage; it is not exactly a romantic play. Love is there but not presented in a conventional way. From the beginning to the end, love is presented in a sinister way; somewhere forcible and somewhere to resolve problems of others. It is an ‘anti-romantic’ drama than a romantic one.  

Jan Kott, a very well known Polish critic completely disagrees this play to be a romantic one. For him, there are some reasons which are quite supportive.

Jan Kott says that, the idea of love is presented in a brutal way. In fact, love is presented in a way which is a kind of violence of sexual fantasies. The marriage between Duke Theseus and queen Hippolyta is not of love rather it’s a forcible implication of violence in war field which ultimately turns into sexual fantasy after the marriage.

Secondly, he says that, the idea of love has been debased. Indeed, love is not presented in that way what should have been. Love between ‘Lysander-Hermia’ and ‘Demetrius-Helena’ is presented through the spell of fairies. Fairies made the course of love to follow mistakenly. What should have happened in a natural way; happened in a very odd or awkward way. The power of love is made so shallow that idea of it is debased.

Again, the way of love is presented in a humiliated way. Due to the misspell and spell on both Lysander and Demetrius, they fall in love with the same lady, Helena. In this way Helena is humiliated and also humiliation attacks Hermia in the way of jealousy. In fact, the idea of love has been debased and mocked. Even, between the fairy king Oberon and queen Titania, love has been humiliated where Oberon tricks over Titania with magic spell. In the course, Bottom is humiliated to be in love with Titania having donkey head.

In love making, more than male characters, female characters are made to suffer and humiliated which is surely not a trait of romantic drama.

Through the course of love and marriage, male characters are made supreme to have fulfillment of their will in the end. Female characters kept humiliated in the way. For a romance or love, equilibrium is necessary but it is not there.

So, even though this play is considered as a romantic play only few occasions and forest landscape can be taken as a trait of romantic elements. It is far more an ‘anti-romantic’ play under the sinister ways of presentation of love. So, I would like to agree with Jan Kott that this play is an ‘anti-romantic’ play. 

JU English BA Hons. Part IV 2013 Questions

To download word file: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2wy4cc4eirzwub8/Questions%20of%20BA%20Part%20IV%202013.doc

Department of English | Jahangirnagar University

BA (Hons.) Part IV Examination 2013

Course Title: Twentieth Century English Poetry

Course: E401 | Full Marks: 35 | Time: 150 minutes

Attempt all parts

Part A

Answer any three of the following questions: [10x3=30]

1.     Discuss Yeats as a romantic poet in the light of your reading of his poems.

2.     Analyze the final part of Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land. Would you consider him as a realist or utopian?

3.     Compare and Contrast the two worlds that are referred to in Auden’s poem “The Shield of Achilles.”

4.     Discuss Dylan Thomas’ “After the Funeral” as an elegy.

5.     Evaluate Ted Hughes’ attitude to violence with reference to his poems.

6.     Attempt a comparative Study between W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney in terms of their treatment of Irish nationalism.

Part B

7.     Explain any one of the following: [5x1=5]

a)     “In the nightmare of the dark

All the dogs of Europe bark,

And the living nations wait,

Each sequestered in its hate.”   

b)    “In the room women come and go

  Talking of Michelangelo.” 

Department of English | Jahangirnagar University

BA (Hons.) Part IV Examination 2013

Course Title: Twentieth Century English Novel

Course: E402 | Full Marks: 70 | Time: 4 hours

Attempt all parts

Part A

Answer any three of the following questions: [20x3=60]

1.     Establish the relevance of the title of Heart of Darkness to the theme of the

novel.   

2.     Comment on the significance of the episode of the Marabar Caves in A Passage to India.

3.      The making of an exile determines the structure of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Discuss

4.      Woolf said Mrs. Dalloway was a study of  “the world seen by the sane and the insane, side by side.” Elucidate

5.     Critically analyze Paul’s relationships with women in Sons and Lovers.

6.     Do you think that the modern English novelists are critical of British colonialism? Answer with reference to at least two novels you have read in this course.

Part B

7.     Attempt any two of the following: [5x2=10]

a)     Write a short note on the “faithless pilgrims.”

b)    What are the effects of Father Arnall’s sermons on Stephen?

c)     Write a short note on Stream of Consciousness technique.

d)    Explain with reference to the context: “Then you are an oriental.”          

   

Department of English | Jahangirnagar University

BA (Hons.) Part IV Examination 2013

Course Title: Twentieth Century English Drama

Course: E403 | Full Marks: 70 | Time: 4 hours

Attempt all parts

Part A

Answer any three of the following questions: [20x3=60]

1.     Comment on the triangular relationship between Jimmy, Alison and Helen.

2.     Evaluate Waiting for Godot as an absurd drama.

3.     Do you think Christy Mohan as an anti-hero? Justify your stance.

4.     Discuss how the notion of gambling plays an important role in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

5.     Compare The Caretaker with Waiting for Godot in terms of characters and themes.

6.     Do you think if Saint Joan had been a man, she would still be executed? Justify your answer.

Part B

7.     Write short notes on any of the two of the following topics: [5x2=10]

a)     The epilogue in Saint Joan

b)    Existentialism

c)     The theme of isolation in The Caretaker

d)    “Anger” in Look Back in Anger

e)     The bear-squirrel play

  

Department of English | Jahangirnagar University

BA (Hons.) Part IV Examination 2013

Course Title: Twentieth Century American Poetry & Drama

Course: E404 | Full Marks: 70 | Time: 4 hours

Attempt all parts

Part A

Answer any two of the following questions: [20x2=40]

1.     In Robert Frost’s vision of life, which belief dominates human nature more—the fear of tragic experiences of life, or the forbearance to face the “rough zones” of life? Discuss.

2.     In modern poetry experiments with expression of modern experiences of life, William Carlos Williams’ poems are of enormous significance. Do you agree?  

3.      Longs Day’s Journey into the Night is about O’Neill’s quest in search of the answers to the many questions that practically seemed to have defined in entire life. Elucidate.

4.      Is Willy Loman’s last act, i.e. suicide, repetition or the end of his pursuit of the American Dream? Justify your answer.

5.     Evaluate Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath as Confessional Poets.

Part B

6.     Answer  any two of the following: [10x2=20]

a)     Sylvia Plath in “Daddy” attempts to recreate her identity, which suffocates her. Discuss

b)    Why does Robert Lowell end the poem “Skunk Hour” with the image “Only skunks that search/ in the moonlight night for a bite to eat?”

c)     According to Howl, who are the “best minds” of Allen Ginsberg’s time?

d)    Explain: “Who and Who and WHO who who Whoooo and

                    Whoooooooooooooooooooo!”

Part C

7.     Answer any two of the following: [5x2=10]

a)     “For Horn” in Long Day’s Journey into Night.

b)    Ka’Ba

c)     Moloch

d)    “Dying/Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.” Explain.  

Department of English | Jahangirnagar University

BA (Hons.) Part IV Examination 2013

Course Title: Twentieth Century American Novel and Prose

Course: E405 | Full Marks: 35 | Time: 150 minutes

Attempt all parts

Part A

Answer any two of the following questions: [15x1=15]

1.     What is cubism? How As I lay Dying a cubist novel? Discuss.

2.     Harry, Tommy Wilhelm and Jay Gatsby—all are the victims of the distorted American Dream, but the effects are different on each of these characters. Discuss.

3.     “Rape was the only form of expression for Cholly to show that he loved his daughter.” Discuss

Part B

4.     Answer  any three of the following questions: [5x3=15]

a)     Why does the old waiter appreciate the deaf and drunk customer in the café? How are they similar?

b)    Why does Tommy Wilhelm burst into tears at the funeral of stranger? What does this signify?

c)     Why does Claudia MacTeer disfigure her white dolls?

d)    What was so “great” about Jay Gatsby? Why did he throw extravagant parties on Saturday nights?

e)     Why is Dewey Dell not bothered about her mother’s death like the rest of her siblings?

f)      Do you find any similarities between Dr. Tamkin and Soaphead Church?

 Part C

5.     Answer any two of the following: [5x2=10]

a)     Jazz Age.

b)    Yoknapatawpha

c)     Polly

d)    Hotel Gloriana

Department of English | Jahangirnagar University

BA (Hons.) Part IV Examination 2013

Course Title: Postcolonial Literature: Australian, Canadian and Indian

Course: E406 | Full Marks: 70 | Time: 4 hours

Attempt all parts

Part A

Answer any three of the following questions: [15x3=45]

1.     Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children moves beyond critical commonplaces and works as a media technology which reconstructs a story from the derivatives of the national unconscious. Discuss

2.     “The ‘primitive setting’ in A Fringe of Leaves is far more political than it apparently looks like.” Elucidate    

3.     How does Ondaatje’s The English Patient transcend nationally and ethnicity in its textual space?  

4.     “In The Shadow Lines, the memory is shackled with thousand invisible lines.” Discuss

5.     Comment on the title of Narayan’s novel Waiting for the Mahatma.

6.     How do the Indian poets treat theme of alienation in the poems you have read?

Part B

7.     Answer  any three of the following: [5x3=15]

a)     What do “The Silver Spittoon” and “Perforated Sheet” signify in Midnight’s Children?

b)    What does the impotency of Mr. Roxburgh symbolize in A Fringe of Leaves?

c)     Do you think Kamala Das is confessional in her poems?

d)    How does Narayan in Waiting for the Mahatma, present the necessity of non-violence in a form of protest?

e)     Comment on the religious conflict depicted in The Shadow Lines.  

f)      Comment on the character of Kip in The English Patient.

Part C

8.     Write short notes on any two of the following : [5x2=10]

a)     Knees and Nose

b)    Charka

c)     The Atomic Bomb

d)    The Mirror  

 

Department of English | Jahangirnagar University

BA (Hons.) Part IV Examination 2013

Course Title: Introduction to Critical Theory

Course: E407 | Full Marks: 70 | Time: 4 hours

Attempt all parts

Part A

Answer any two of the following questions: [15x2=30]

1.     What does Northrop Frye mean by mythoi? Discuss in detail archetypal criticism.

2.     What is ideology? Trace the evolution of Marxism’s troubling relation with the ideologies.

3.     Discuss, with particular focus on Millett and Showalter, Anglo-American feminism’s contribution to the development of the Second Wave of feminism.

4.     What are the basic tenets and major schools of Psychoanalytic Criticism? Discuss the effectiveness of using Freudian and / or Lacanian psychoanalysis in literary texts.  

5.     Evaluate, with reference to contemporary media and / or popular culture, Foucault’s ‘power/knowledge’ schema.

Part B

Attempt any one of the following: [20x1=20]

6.     Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is acclaimed as a Renaissance individual who transgresses human boundaries and intends to reach the ultimate a human can. However, his treatment of and attitude to the bourgeoisie and the proletariat betray classism. Do you think that Doctor Faustus, with its iconoclastic spirit, fails to critique classism and corresponding power relations? If so, do you think the ‘Pope Scene’ raises some problem?  

7.     Adopting Todorov’s ‘grammar of narrative, attempt a structuralist reading of R K Narayan’s Waiting for the Mahatma or Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.  

8.     Attempt a postcolonial reading of E M Forster’s A Passage to India.

Part C

9.     Write short notes on any two of the following: [5x2=10]

a)     Defamiliarization

b)    Ecriture féminine

c)     ‘Culture’ in Cultural Studies

d)     Affective fallacy and intentional fallacy

e)      Postmodernity

Part D

Attempt any one of the following: [10x1=10]

10.    What does ‘red’ signify? (i) in the traffic light, (ii) in a flag raised in a political meeting, (iii) as a literary motif, (iv) in a rose, and (v) in a saree worn by a bride? Do you think that the decoding of ‘red’ is context-dependent? How may then can the sign be deconstructed?

11.    Read last four stanzas of Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Lady Lazarus” and answer the questions that follow:

Ash, ash—

You poke and stir,

Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—

A cake of soap,

A wedding ring,

A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer,

Beware

Beware.

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air.

a)     Gerald Prince differentiates ‘reader’ from ‘naratee.’ Who is the ‘narratee’ of the poem? And, do the ‘narratee’ and ‘virtual reader’ coincide in this case?

 

b) Iser argues that extra-literary norms, values and experience of the ‘actual reader’ lead him/her to “concretize” the text. Do you think that this poem communicates differently with a woman and a man?
c) The German word “Herr” (used to address a man, e.g. Herr Hitler) is used to refer to God and Lucifer. Comment on the significance of the coupling of Herr, God, and Lucifer.   
 d)       Do you think that the poem (a part of which is extracted here) is a feminist- deconstruction of Lazarus? Focus on the title as well as the images of “ash,” “red hair” and eating men “like air” in the last stanza.

 12. Attempt a close reading of the poem, “The pool Players: Seven at the Golden Shovel.”

           

           We real cool. We

           Left School. We

          Lurk hate. We

          Strike straight. We

          Sing sin. We

          Thin gin. We

          Jazz June. We

          Die soon.

Department of English | Jahangirnagar University

BA (Hons.) Part IV Examination 2013

Course Title: Professional Communication and Research Methodology

Course: E408 | Full Marks: 70 | Time: 4 Hours

Attempt all parts

Part A

Answer Question number 5 and two others: [5+ (15x2)]

1.     What are the major types of business report? Discuss the truths that a writer has to consider while preparing a business report.

2.     Prepare a report, addressed to friend, on a class discussion. Use made-up names to identify the instructor and students. Try to show how ideas took shape and what conclusions resulted from the discussion.

3.     Your boss, Mr. M. M. Chowdhury, is in charge of relationships with company-owned restaurants in Dhaka city. He has asked you to draft a memo announcing that Pepsi is out and Coke is in.

4.     Define job application. Prepare a sample job application for the post of a Lecturer in English at a public university.

5.     Write brief notes on any one of the following:

a)     A well-written résumé

b)    A complaint letter

c)     Book review

Part B

Answer question number 10 and two others: [5+ (15x2)]

6.     What are literary and second language researches? Discuss the different types of research on applied linguistics and second language learning / teaching, or literary studies.

7.     Define research paper. Differentiate between a research proposal, an article and a thesis.

8.     What is material evolution? Why is material evaluation necessary for doing a successful research? Discuss different ways of evaluating materials.

9.     What is an outline of a dissertation? Explicate when, why and how an outline is prepared.

10.             Write how the following are documented in either MLA or APA style in the “works cited” section of a research article:

a)     An article in an online journal.

b)    A book published in a second edition

c)     A book written by a single author and edited by editor.

d)    A book by two authors.

e)     A newspaper article written by more than three writers.