UGC NET English, Paper 2: Unit-wise Revision Notes

The Paper at a Glance

The National Testing Agency conducts the test in computer based mode, usually in a June and a December cycle. Paper 1 and Paper 2 are taken in a single sitting of three hours with no break between them, so time saved on Paper 1 is time available for Paper 2.

Because there is no negative marking, no question should ever be left unattempted. Eliminate two options, then choose. Since June 2024 the result declares three categories: qualified for Junior Research Fellowship together with Assistant Professor and admission to a doctoral programme; qualified for Assistant Professor and doctoral admission; and qualified for doctoral admission only. Roughly the top six per cent of candidates who appear in a subject are declared qualified overall.

• Paper 1: 50 questions, 100 marks, on teaching and research aptitude, common to all subjects.
• Paper 2: 100 questions, 200 marks, on English. Total 150 questions and 300 marks in three hours.
• Two marks per correct answer and no deduction for a wrong answer.
• The ten units are: I Drama; II Poetry; III Fiction and Short Story; IV Non-Fictional Prose; V Language, basic concepts, theories and pedagogy, and English in use; VI English in India, history, evolution and futures; VII Cultural Studies; VIII Literary Criticism; IX Literary Theory post World War Two; X Research Methods and Materials in English.
• Units I to IV are additionally tested through comprehension passages that check close reading rather than recall, so practise reading an unseen passage under time.
• Units VIII and IX are the highest scoring per hour of revision because the material is finite and factual: a critic, a text, a date and a coined term.

Units I to IV: The Chronological Spine

Most questions on the first four units reduce to placing a work, an author or a movement correctly in time, or to matching a coinage with the person who made it. Revise by period, and for each period fix three things: the historical marker that opens it, four or five representative works with dates, and the term the period is known by.

• Old and Middle English: Beowulf in the Nowell Codex; the Norman Conquest of 1066; Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde; Langland's Piers Plowman; Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, printed by Caxton in 1485; the morality play Everyman.
• Renaissance and Elizabethan drama: Ralph Roister Doister by Nicholas Udall as the first regular English comedy; Gorboduc of 1561 by Sackville and Norton as the first English tragedy in blank verse; the University Wits; Marlowe's mighty line; Ben Jonson's comedy of humours; Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy as the model revenge play.
• Metaphysical and Jacobean: Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Vaughan and Crashaw. The label metaphysical poets comes from Samuel Johnson in his Life of Cowley, following a remark of Dryden's. The metaphysical conceit is the extended, learned and startling comparison.
• Restoration and eighteenth century: Dryden's An Essay of Dramatic Poesy of 1668; the comedy of manners, with Congreve's The Way of the World of 1700 and Sheridan's The School for Scandal of 1777; the rise of the novel, with Defoe's Robinson Crusoe of 1719, Richardson's Pamela of 1740, Fielding's Tom Jones of 1749 and Sterne's Tristram Shandy; the periodical essay of Addison and Steele.
• Romantic: Lyrical Ballads of 1798, with the critical Preface added in 1800, where Wordsworth defines poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings and as emotion recollected in tranquillity; Coleridge's Biographia Literaria of 1817, with primary imagination, secondary imagination and fancy, and the willing suspension of disbelief; Keats on negative capability; Shelley's A Defence of Poetry.
• Victorian: Tennyson, Browning and the dramatic monologue; Arnold's The Study of Poetry of 1880 and the touchstone method; the Pre-Raphaelites; the realist novel of Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray and Hardy; Wilde and aestheticism.
• Modernism: The Waste Land of 1922, dedicated to Ezra Pound; Joyce's Ulysses of the same year; Woolf's Mrs Dalloway of 1925 and To the Lighthouse of 1927; Imagism; the term stream of consciousness is from William James in The Principles of Psychology of 1890 and was applied to fiction by May Sinclair.
• Post-war British drama: Osborne's Look Back in Anger of 1956 and the Angry Young Men; kitchen sink realism; Beckett's Waiting for Godot; the phrase Theatre of the Absurd was coined by Martin Esslin in 1961; Pinter and the comedy of menace.

Units VIII and IX: Criticism and Theory

Fix each critic to one primary text and one term. Almost every question in these two units is a match of that kind, or a chronology question asking which came first.

• Classical: Aristotle's Poetics gives the six parts of tragedy, plot, character, thought, diction, melody and spectacle, and the terms mimesis, hamartia, peripeteia, anagnorisis and catharsis. Longinus wrote On the Sublime and Horace the Ars Poetica.
• English tradition: Sidney's An Apology for Poetry of 1595; Dryden on the ancients and the moderns; Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare; Arnold's high seriousness.
• Eliot: Tradition and the Individual Talent of 1919 gives the impersonal theory of poetry; Hamlet and His Problems of the same year gives the objective correlative; The Metaphysical Poets of 1921 gives the dissociation of sensibility.
• Practical criticism and the New Criticism: Richards wrote Principles of Literary Criticism in 1924 and Practical Criticism in 1929; Wimsatt and Beardsley published The Intentional Fallacy in 1946 and The Affective Fallacy in 1949; Cleanth Brooks wrote The Well Wrought Urn in 1947 and named the heresy of paraphrase; Frye's Anatomy of Criticism of 1957 sets out archetypal criticism.
• Structuralism: Saussure's Course in General Linguistics separates langue from parole and the signifier from the signified, and insists that the sign is arbitrary; Levi-Strauss applied the method to myth; Genette's Narrative Discourse formalised narratology; Bakhtin gave dialogism, heteroglossia, the carnivalesque and the chronotope.
• Poststructuralism: Derrida's paper Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences was delivered in 1966 and Of Grammatology appeared in 1967, giving deconstruction, differance and logocentrism; Barthes published The Death of the Author in 1967 and S slash Z in 1970; Foucault asked What Is an Author and analysed power and discourse; Lacan reread Freud through language.
• Marxist and cultural: Raymond Williams wrote Culture and Society in 1958 and gave dominant, residual and emergent culture; Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy of 1957 and the founding of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1964; Stuart Hall's encoding and decoding model; Althusser's ideological state apparatuses; Gramsci's hegemony.
• Feminist: Woolf's A Room of One's Own of 1929; Beauvoir's The Second Sex; Showalter's A Literature of Their Own of 1977 and the term gynocriticism; Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic of 1979; Millett's Sexual Politics.
• Postcolonial: Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth; Said's Orientalism of 1978; Spivak's Can the Subaltern Speak; Bhabha's The Location of Culture of 1994 with hybridity, mimicry and the third space; Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin's The Empire Writes Back of 1989.
• New Historicism and after: Greenblatt and cultural poetics; ecocriticism and the work of Cheryl Glotfelty; queer theory and Judith Butler's Gender Trouble of 1990 with gender as performative.

Units V, VI, VII and X

These four units are often neglected and they are precisely where a candidate on the borderline gains or loses a rank. The material is small enough to be finished in a few sittings.

• Language and linguistics: the phoneme as the smallest contrastive sound unit and the morpheme as the smallest meaningful unit; phonetics against phonology; the International Phonetic Alphabet; Received Pronunciation; syntax, semantics and pragmatics; Chomsky on competence and performance and on deep and surface structure; Hymes on communicative competence; Austin and Searle on speech acts; Grice's cooperative principle and its maxims.
• English language teaching: the grammar translation method, the direct method, the audio-lingual method, the structural approach and communicative language teaching; the distinction between English as a second language and English as a foreign language; Kachru's three circles model of world Englishes, the inner, outer and expanding circles.
• English in India: Charles Grant and the Charter Act of 1813; Macaulay's Minute on Indian Education of 1835 and the policy of creating a class Indian in blood and colour but English in taste; the Bengal Renaissance and Derozio; Gauri Viswanathan's Masks of Conquest of 1989 on the colonial origins of English studies; Indian English writing from Toru Dutt and Sarojini Naidu through Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand and R. K. Narayan to Rushdie, Ghosh, Roy and Desai; Bhasha literature in translation.
• Cultural studies: high culture against popular culture; the culture industry of Adorno and Horkheimer; subculture and Dick Hebdige; representation, identity and the media; the public sphere of Habermas; globalisation and diaspora.
• Research methods: primary and secondary sources; the difference between a bibliography and a works cited list; the MLA Handbook, now in its ninth edition, and the container system of citation; the hypothesis, the research question and the literature review; plagiarism and academic integrity; interdisciplinary and archival research; the components of a thesis from abstract to appendix.

Revision Method and Common Traps

In the last month, coverage matters more than depth. Every unit carries questions, and a unit left untouched is a guaranteed loss of marks that no amount of extra reading in Units I to III will recover.

• Build one page per unit of only the facts that carry a date, a coinage or an attribution. Revise those pages daily rather than rereading chapters.
• Practise matching questions and assertion and reason questions specifically. They form a large share of Paper 2 and they punish half-knowledge more than direct questions do.
• Trap: confusing the year of a work with the year of its preface or second edition. Lyrical Ballads is 1798 and the Preface is 1800; Paradise Lost is 1667 in ten books and 1674 in twelve.
• Trap: attributing a term to the wrong critic. The objective correlative is Eliot, not Richards; the heresy of paraphrase is Brooks, not Wimsatt; gynocriticism is Showalter, not Gilbert and Gubar.
• Trap: in chronology questions, arrange by date of publication and not by the period the work describes.
• Attempt every question. With no negative marking, a considered guess after eliminating two options has an expected value well above zero.
• Give the last twenty minutes of the sitting to the questions you flagged, not to rechecking answers you were confident about.

Key Terms

Objective correlative

T. S. Eliot's term, from the essay Hamlet and His Problems of 1919, for a set of objects, a situation or a chain of events that serves as the formula for a particular emotion, so that the emotion is evoked rather than stated.

Gynocriticism

Elaine Showalter's term for a feminist criticism that studies women as writers, examining the history, styles, themes and structures of writing by women, as opposed to the feminist critique of male-authored texts.

Heteroglossia

Mikhail Bakhtin's term for the coexistence of many distinct social voices and languages within a single work, which he held to be the defining condition of the novel as against poetry.

Three circles model

Braj Kachru's description of the spread of English as an inner circle of native norm-providing countries, an outer circle of institutionalised second-language countries such as India, and an expanding circle where English is a foreign language.

Practice Quiz — 20 Questions

1. How many questions and marks does Paper 2 of the UGC NET in English carry?

   • A.50 questions and 100 marks
   • B.100 questions and 200 marks
   • C.100 questions and 100 marks
   • D.150 questions and 300 marks
   B. 100 questions and 200 marks — Paper 2 has 100 questions of two marks each, that is 200 marks. Paper 1 adds 50 questions and 100 marks for a combined 300.

2. Which of the following is NOT one of the ten units of the English Paper 2 syllabus?

   • A.Cultural Studies
   • B.Research Methods and Materials in English
   • C.Teaching and Research Aptitude
   • D.English in India, history, evolution and futures
   C. Teaching and Research Aptitude — Teaching and Research Aptitude is the content of Paper 1, which is common to all subjects, not a unit of the English Paper 2.

3. The term dissociation of sensibility was introduced by T. S. Eliot in which essay?

   • A.Tradition and the Individual Talent
   • B.The Metaphysical Poets
   • C.Hamlet and His Problems
   • D.The Function of Criticism
   B. The Metaphysical Poets — Eliot used it in The Metaphysical Poets of 1921 to describe a split between thought and feeling that he dated to the seventeenth century.

4. The Intentional Fallacy was written by:

   • A.Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren
   • B.W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley
   • C.I. A. Richards and C. K. Ogden
   • D.John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate
   B. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley — Wimsatt and Beardsley published The Intentional Fallacy in 1946 and The Affective Fallacy in 1949.

5. The phrase willing suspension of disbelief comes from:

   • A.Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads
   • B.Coleridge's Biographia Literaria
   • C.Shelley's A Defence of Poetry
   • D.Keats's letters
   B. Coleridge's Biographia Literaria — Coleridge uses it in Biographia Literaria of 1817 when describing his own share in the Lyrical Ballads project.

6. Anatomy of Criticism, which sets out an archetypal and systematic account of literature, was published in 1957 by:

   • A.Northrop Frye
   • B.Kenneth Burke
   • C.R. S. Crane
   • D.Wayne Booth
   A. Northrop Frye — Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism organises literature by modes, symbols, myths and genres.

7. Which pair of terms is central to Saussure's account of language?

   • A.Competence and performance
   • B.Langue and parole
   • C.Dominant and emergent
   • D.Mimesis and diegesis
   B. Langue and parole — Saussure separates langue, the shared system, from parole, the individual act of speech. Competence and performance is Chomsky's later pair.

8. The Death of the Author, published in 1967, is by:

   • A.Michel Foucault
   • B.Roland Barthes
   • C.Jacques Derrida
   • D.Jacques Lacan
   B. Roland Barthes — Barthes argued that the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author. Foucault replied with What Is an Author.

9. Orientalism of 1978 was written by:

   • A.Homi Bhabha
   • B.Gayatri Spivak
   • C.Edward Said
   • D.Frantz Fanon
   C. Edward Said — Edward Said's Orientalism analyses how European scholarship constructed the Orient as its other, and it founds much of postcolonial studies.

10. Hybridity, mimicry and the third space are associated with:

    • A.Homi Bhabha
    • B.Edward Said
    • C.Aijaz Ahmad
    • D.Ngugi wa Thiong'o
    A. Homi Bhabha — These are the central terms of Homi Bhabha's The Location of Culture of 1994.

11. Gender Trouble, which argues that gender is performative, was published in 1990 by:

    • A.Elaine Showalter
    • B.Judith Butler
    • C.Helene Cixous
    • D.Julia Kristeva
    B. Judith Butler — Judith Butler's Gender Trouble is the founding text of queer theory in the syllabus.

12. The Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was founded in:

    • A.1948
    • B.1957
    • C.1964
    • D.1972
    C. 1964 — It was founded at the University of Birmingham in 1964, with Richard Hoggart as its first director.

13. Macaulay's Minute on Indian Education, which shaped the teaching of English in India, was written in:

    • A.1813
    • B.1835
    • C.1857
    • D.1882
    B. 1835 — Thomas Babington Macaulay's Minute of 1835 directed government funds towards English education in India.

14. Masks of Conquest, on the colonial origins of English literary study in India, is by:

    • A.Gauri Viswanathan
    • B.Meenakshi Mukherjee
    • C.Susie Tharu
    • D.Harish Trivedi
    A. Gauri Viswanathan — Gauri Viswanathan published Masks of Conquest in 1989.

15. In Kachru's three circles model, India belongs to the:

    • A.Inner circle
    • B.Outer circle
    • C.Expanding circle
    • D.Peripheral circle
    B. Outer circle — The outer circle covers countries where English is institutionalised as a second language through colonial history, such as India, Nigeria and Singapore.

16. The cooperative principle and its maxims of quantity, quality, relation and manner were proposed by:

    • A.J. L. Austin
    • B.John Searle
    • C.H. P. Grice
    • D.Noam Chomsky
    C. H. P. Grice — Paul Grice set out the cooperative principle in his work on conversational implicature.

17. The phrase Theatre of the Absurd was coined in 1961 by:

    • A.Martin Esslin
    • B.Raymond Williams
    • C.Eric Bentley
    • D.Kenneth Tynan
    A. Martin Esslin — Martin Esslin used it as the title of his study of Beckett, Ionesco, Genet and Adamov.

18. Which of these was published first?

    • A.Practical Criticism by I. A. Richards
    • B.The Well Wrought Urn by Cleanth Brooks
    • C.Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye
    • D.Orientalism by Edward Said
    A. Practical Criticism by I. A. Richards — Practical Criticism appeared in 1929, The Well Wrought Urn in 1947, Anatomy of Criticism in 1957 and Orientalism in 1978.

19. The current edition of the MLA Handbook prescribed for research writing is the:

    • A.Seventh edition
    • B.Eighth edition
    • C.Ninth edition
    • D.Tenth edition
    C. Ninth edition — The ninth edition, which continues the container based system of citation introduced in the eighth, is the current standard.

20. Regarding marking in the UGC NET, which statement is correct?

    • A.One quarter mark is deducted for each wrong answer
    • B.There is no negative marking, so every question should be attempted
    • C.Unattempted questions carry a penalty
    • D.Only Paper 2 carries negative marking
    B. There is no negative marking, so every question should be attempted — Neither paper has negative marking, so a considered guess after eliminating options is always better than leaving a blank.

References

• National Testing Agency, UGC NET official portal — https://ugcnet.nta.ac.in/
• University Grants Commission, NET subject syllabus for English — https://www.ugc.gov.in/
• UGC NET English syllabus, unit-wise breakdown and exam pattern — https://www.pw.live/ugc-net/exams/ugc-net-english-syllabus
• M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham, A Glossary of Literary Terms — https://www.cengage.com/c/a-glossary-of-literary-terms-11e-abrams/
• MLA Handbook, ninth edition, Modern Language Association — https://style.mla.org/mla-handbook-ninth-edition/