MA English Literature 2 ā Questions and Answers
Question 1: What literary movement is characterized by an interest in the unconscious mind, dreams, and irrational elements?
- Naturalism
- Surrealism (Correct answer)
- Realism
- Romanticism
Correct answer: Surrealism
Surrealism, emerging in the 1920s, sought to channel the irrational, unconscious, and dreamlike imagery to challenge rational thought.
Question 2: What is the primary concern of New Criticism as a school of literary theory?
- The author's biographical context
- Close reading of the text itself, without outside context (Correct answer)
- The historical and political conditions of a work
- Reader response and interpretation
Correct answer: Close reading of the text itself, without outside context
New Criticism focuses on close reading and the intrinsic qualities of a literary work, treating the text as a self-contained object independent of authorial intent or history.
Question 3: Which of the following best describes an 'unreliable narrator'?
- A narrator who only relates third-person events
- A narrator whose credibility is compromised, leading readers to question the account (Correct answer)
- A narrator who withholds key information until the end
- A narrator who speaks directly to the audience
Correct answer: A narrator whose credibility is compromised, leading readers to question the account
An unreliable narrator is one whose account of events cannot be fully trusted due to mental state, limited knowledge, or deliberate deception.
Question 4: The Harlem Renaissance was primarily a:
- European modernist literary movement
- African American cultural and artistic movement centered in New York in the 1920sā30s (Correct answer)
- Post-Civil War Southern literary revival
- 1960s Black Power literary collective
Correct answer: African American cultural and artistic movement centered in New York in the 1920sā30s
The Harlem Renaissance was a flourishing of African American intellectual, artistic, and literary culture centered in Harlem, New York, during the 1920s and 1930s.
Question 5: Which term describes a novel that follows a protagonist's moral and psychological growth from youth to adulthood?
- Picaresque novel
- Epistolary novel
- Bildungsroman (Correct answer)
- Roman Ć clef
Correct answer: Bildungsroman
A bildungsroman is a coming-of-age novel tracing the psychological and moral development of the protagonist from youth to adulthood.
Question 6: In Toni Morrison's Beloved, what does the character Beloved primarily represent?
- The promise of freedom in the North
- The haunting trauma and memory of slavery (Correct answer)
- The ideal of a reconstructed Southern identity
- The legacy of Native American dispossession
Correct answer: The haunting trauma and memory of slavery
Beloved represents the embodied trauma of slavery ā specifically the ghost of Sethe's murdered infant daughter who returns as a physical manifestation of repressed memory.
MA English Literature 2
What literary movement is characterized by an interest in the unconscious mind, dreams, and irrational elements?