List of top English Questions asked in GATE Humanities and Social Sciences- English

"We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; [...]. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his works may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously."
Which of the following options is/are implied by this excerpt?

"Although feminist philosophers have traditionally sought to show how the body is figured as feminine, or how women have been associated with materiality (whether inert – always already dead – or fecund – ever-living and procreative) where men have been associated with the principle of rational mastery, Irigaray wants to argue that in fact the feminine is precisely what is excluded in and by such a binary opposition. In this sense, when and where women are represented within this economy is precisely the site of their erasure."
Which of the following options is/are implied by this passage? 

Which factor(s) led to the rise and popularity of the novel in England?

"I like a look of Agony,
Because I know it's true
Men do not sham Convulsion, 
Nor simulate, a Throe
The eyes glaze once - and that is Death
Impossible to feign 
The Beads upon the Forehead 
By homely Anguish strung." 
Which of the following options is/are implied by this poem?

Politics --by William Butler Yeats
'In our time the destiny of man presents its meanings in political terms.' --Thomas Mann
"How can I, that girl standing there, 
My attention fix 
On Roman or on Russian 
Or on Spanish politics, 
Yet here's a travelled man that knows 
What he talks about, 
And there's a politician 
That has both read and thought, 
And maybe what they say is true 
Of war and war's alarms, 
But O that I were young again 
And 
held her in my arms." Which of the following options is/are implied by this poem?

"Lear cries out 'you are men of stones' as Cordelia hangs from a broken wall.
I step out into Chandni Chowk, a street once strewn with jasmine flowers for the Empress and the royal women who bought perfumes from Isfahan, fabrics from Dacca, essence from Kabul, glass bangles from Agra. 
Beggars now live here in tombs of unknown nobles and forgotten saints while hawkers sell combs and mirrors outside a Sikh temple. Across the street, a theater is showing a Bombay spectacular. 
I think of Zafar, poet and Emperor, being led through this street 2024 by British soldiers, his feet in chains, to watch his sons hanged. 
In exile he wrote: 'Unfortunate Zafar spent half his life in hope, the other half waiting. He begs for two yards of Delhi for burial.' 
He was exiled to Burma, buried in Rangoon." 
Which of the following ideas is/are conveyed by this poem?

"What if, in order to save some humans lost in their language, in order to deliver the humans themselves, at the expense of their language, it was better to renounce the language, at least to renounce the best conditions for survival ‘at all costs' for the idiom? And what if some humans were more worth saving than their language, under circumstances where, alas, one needed to choose between them? For we are living in a period in which the question at times arises. Today, on this earth of humans, certain people must yield to the homo-hegemony of dominant languages. They must learn the language of the masters, of capital and machines; they must lose their idiom in order to survive or live better."
On the basis of this passage, which of the following options is/are correct? 

Which of the following statements is/are true of these novels:
Anna Karenina, Dead Souls, Crime and Punishment, Fathers and Sons.

"[...] in so far as the academic discourse of history - that is, 'history' as a discourse produced at the institutional site of the university – is concerned, ‘Europe' remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call 'Indian," Chinese,' Kenyan,' and so on. There is a peculiar way in which all these other histories tend to become variations on a master narrative that could be called 'the history of Europe.' In this sense, 'Indian' history itself is in a position of subalternity; one can only articulate subaltern subject positions in the name of this history."
Which of the following options is/are implied by the passage above? 

Which of the following statements about The Scarlet Letter is/are correct?

"[...] I mean negative capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason [...]."
Based on this statement, which of the following options is/are correct? 
Negative capability is the ability to_____.

Virginia Woolf wrote in "Professions for Women":
"You have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned by men. You are able, though not without great labour and effort, to pay the rent. You are earning your five hundred pounds a year. But this freedom is only a beginning; the room is your own, but it is still bare. It has to be furnished; it has to be decorated; it has to be shared. How are you going to furnish it, how are you going to decorate it? With whom are you going to share it, and upon what terms?" 
Based on this passage, which of the following inferences is/are correct?

Which of the following statements is/are correct?

___wrote ‘Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of ___.’
Fill in the blanks with the correct pair:

Match the texts with the language they were originally written in:

a	Waiting for a Visa	i	Hindi
b	The Prisons we Broke	ii	English
c	The Revenue Stamp: An Autobiography	iii	Marathi
d	Joothan: A Dalit's Life	iv	Punjabi

Match each fictional character with the author who created him:

a	Uriah Heep	i	James Joyce
b	Stephen Dedalus	ii	Ivan Turgenev
c	Bazarov	iii	Fyodor Dostoevsky
d	Raskolnikov	iv	Charles Dickens

What do the following works have in common?
Andha Yug, The Second Turn, Parva, Sarpa Satra 

Match the excerpts with the texts they have been taken from:

a	"A son who will never be older than his i motherland - neither older nor younger. There shall be two heads - but you will only see one - there will be knees and a nose, a nose and knees."	i	A Suitable Boy
b	"That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much."	ii	Midnight's Children
c	"She had dispersed. She was the garden at Prem Niwas (soon to be entered into the annual Flower Show), she was Veena's love of music, Pran's asthma, Maan's generosity, [...] temperament of Bhaskar's grandchildren. Indeed, for all the Minister of Revenue's impatience with her, she was his regret."	iii	The God of Small Things
d	"Two or three years after the 1947 Partition, it occurred to the governments of India and Pakistan to exchange their lunatics in the same manner as they had exchanged their criminals. The Muslim lunatics in India were to be sent over to Pakistan and the Hindu and Sikh lunatics in Pakistan asylums were to be handed over to India."	iv	"Toba Tek Singh"

A widely used narrative technique, it allows narrators to temporarily inhabit the consciousness of any of their characters. It is called____.

Which of the following statements is true of Magic Realism?

Which of the following is/are NOT based on a play by William Shakespeare?

Which of the following options is NOT the title of a play?

Which of the following is/are NOT composed by Kalidasa?

Which of these writers is/are associated with the Progressive Writers Association?

Which of the following novels is/are written by African-American women?