NTA UGC NET - English
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Study Material, Daily Questions, Past Papers Analysis, Important Links, Audio Lectures for UGC CBSE NET - English Literature

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Frantz Fanon (1925 - 1961)
Frantz Fanon (1925 -1961) was a psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and writer from the French colony of Martinique, whose works are influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and Marxism.

Works:
1. Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
○ Fanon psychoanalyzes the oppressed Black person who is perceived to have to be a lesser creature in the White world that they live in, and studies how they navigate the world through a performance of White-ness.
○ He talks about how the black person's use of a colonizer's language is seen by the colonizer as predatory, and not transformative, which in turn may create insecurity in the black's consciousness
○ Ultimately, he concludes that "mastery of language [of the white/colonizer] for the sake of recognition as white reflects a dependency that subordinates the black's humanity"

2. A Dying Colonialism (1959)
○ Year Five of the Algerian Revolution, later republished as Sociology of a Revolution and later still as A Dying Colonialism).
○ Fanon's original title was "Reality of a Nation"; however, the publisher refused to accept this title.

3. The Wretched of the Earth(1961)
○ Preface by Jean-Paul Sartre
○ In it Fanon analyzes the role of class, race, national culture and violence in the struggle for national liberation. The book includes an article which focuses on the ideas of violence and decolonization. He claims that decolonization is inherently a violent process, because the relationship between the settler and the native is a binary of opposites.
○ Ngũgĩ wa Thiango argues in Decolonizing the Mind (1992) that it is "impossible to understand what informs African writing" without reading Fanon's Wretched of the Earth.

4. Toward the African Revolution (1964)


Aimé Césaire
was a particularly significant influence in Fanon's life. Césaire, a leader of the Négritude movement, was teacher and mentor to Fanon on the island of Martinique.[27] Fanon was first introduced to Négritude during his lycée days in Martinique when Césaire coined the term and presented his ideas in La Revue Tropique, the journal that he edited with his wife,
#Literary Term of the Day

Lumpenproletariat

Coined by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 1840s, they used it to refer to the "unthinking" lower strata of society exploited by reactionary and counter-revolutionary forces

Definition: "the lowest stratum of the proletariat. Used originally in Marxist theory to describe those members of the proletariat, especially criminals, vagrants, and the unemployed, who lacked awareness of their collective interest as an oppressed class."
The term was popularized in the West by Frantz Fanon in the 1960s and has been adopted as a sociological term. However, its vagueness and its history as a term of abuse has led to some criticism. Some radical groups, most notably the Black Panthers and the Young Lords, have sought to mobilize the lumpenproletariat.
Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)

• was a Francophone and French poet, author and politician from Martinique. He was "one of the founders of the négritude movement in Francophone literature".
He wrote such works as Une Tempête, a response to Shakespeare's play The Tempest, and Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism), an essay describing the strife between the colonizers and the colonized. His works have been translated into many languages.
#AfricanLiterature
Ayi Kwei Armah (1939 -

is a Ghanaian writer. Best known for his novels, including

1. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968),

○ The unnamed protagonist, referred to as "the man", works at a railway station and is approached with a bribe; when he refuses, his wife is furious and he can't help feeling guilty despite his innocence. The action takes place between 1965's Passion Week and 25 February 1966 – the day after the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president.
2. Two Thousand Seasons (1973)
3. The Healers (1979)

#AfricanLiterature
#LiteraryTermofTheDay

Négritude
1. Negritude, French Négritude, literary movement of the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s that began among French-speaking African and Caribbean writers living in Paris as a protest against French colonial rule and the policy of assimilation.
2. Its leading figure was Léopold Sédar Senghor (elected first president of the Republic of Senegal in 1960), who, along with Aimé Césaire from Martinique and Léon Damas from French Guiana
3. Négritude intellectuals disavowed colonialism, and argued for the importance of a Pan-African racial identity among people of African descent worldwide.
The Negritude movement was influenced by the Harlem Renaissance, a literary and artistic flowering that emerged among a group of black thinkers and artists (including novelists and poets) in the United States, in New York City, during the 1920s.
Hi Guys. Rakshabandhan Special 🎯 Try and complete these authors tomorrow along with your usual to-do list. Will put up a 20 question quiz tomorrow at 22.00.
Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov
#RussianLiterature

Master of the modern short story.

Notable works
1. “The Seagull” - 1896
a. The Seagull is a study of the clash between the
b. older and younger generations as it affects two actresses and two writers, some of the details having been suggested by episodes in the lives of Chekhov’s friends
c. Tennessee Williams adapted The Seagull as The Notebook of Trigorin.

2. “The Cherry Orchard” -
a. “a comedy, in places even a farce - Chekov
b. Madame Ranevskaya returns to Russia from Paris after 5 years with debt.
c. Decides to dispose of family estate which has a cherry orchard
d. Coarse, wealthy merchant Ermolai Lopakhin suggerst to develop the land
e. Eventually Ermolai buys the land and sound of saws can be heard

3. “Ward Number Six”

4. “Uncle Vanya”
a. drama in four acts
b. a study of aimlessness and hopelessness.
c. Ivan Voynitsky called Uncle Vanya - devoted life for managing the country estate of his brother in law Serebryakov. Sonya Serebryakov's daughter endures her love for local physician.. Neither of them can leave the work at the end.

5. “Three Sisters”
a. Olga (the eldest sister) , - teacher
b. Masha The middle sister
c. Irina the youngest

Other Works:
“The Black Monk”
“Ivanov”
“A Dreary Story”
“Peasants”
“Wood Demon”
#QUIZ 1

1) Who wrote the 1859 novel Oblomov, whose lazy, daydreaming titular character satirizes the contemporary Russian nobility?
A. Andrey Bely
B. Ivan Goncharov ⬅️
C. Ivan Bunin
D. Vladimir Mayakovsky

2) What is the famous opening line of Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina?
E. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
F. All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.⬅️
G. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
H. Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

3) What novel written by Nikolai Gogol traces the adventures of the landless social-climbing Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a dismissed civil servant out to seek his fortune?
1. Dead Souls⬅️
2. Nevsky Prospect
3. The Overcoat
4. The Government Inspector


4) Which of the following Vladimir Nabokov works was originally written in his native Russian?
1. Bend Sinister
2. Invitation to a Beheading⬅️
3. Pale Fire
4. Pnin


5) What is the name of the central character in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment?
1. Rodion Raskolnikov⬅️
2. Fyodor Karamazov
3. Prince Myshkin
4. Porfiry Petrovich


6) Which of the following is not a play written by famed Russian dramatist Anton Chekhov?
1. The Cherry Orchard
2. Uncle Vanya
3. Three Sisters
4. The Lower Depths⬅️


7) One of the few outspoken writers to survive Stalin’s regime, which poet was nevertheless prevented by the Soviet government from publishing any work from 1923 to 1940?
1. Anna Akhmatova⬅️
2. Boris Pasternak
3. Osip Mandelstam
4. Marina Tsvetayeva


8) Which 19th-century poet, novelist, and playwright is widely considered the father of modern Russian literature?
1. Aleksandr Ostrovsky
2. Ivan Goncharov
3. Aleksandr Pushkin⬅️
4. Mikhail Lermontov


9) Which historical pair are the subjects of the novel that “the Master” is writing in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita?
1. Pontius Pilate and Jesus⬅️
2. Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky
3. Mark Antony and Cleopatra
4. Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn


10) When was The Gulag Archipelago published?
A. 1973
B. 1958⬅️
C. 1968
D. 1974

11) Who refused the Nobel Prize for Literature for a work that was banned in the USSR?
A. Tatyana Yesenina
B. Andrei Zarin
C. Boris Pasternak⬅️
D. Vladimir Lenin

12) How many real brothers are there in The Brothers Karamazov?
A. 3⬅️
B. 5
C. 2
D. 9

13) Which poet and prose writer is known as Russia's national poet.
A. Pushkin⬅️
B. Lermontov
C. Minaev
D. Mandelshtam

14) Which writer spent time in a Siberian prison in the 19th century?
A. Babel
B. Dostoyevsky⬅️
C. Mandelshtam
D. Solzhenitsyn

15) Yuri Zivago was a
A. Poet
B. Chemist and Poet
C. Physicist and Poet⬅️
D. Mathematician

#RussianLiterature
Hope you're done with the Russians. Next on the menu are the French. The list is not exhaustive, will share more writers once we are done with these. #FrenchLiterature
Honoré de Balzac
#FrenchLiterature
1. La Comédie Humaine (The Human Comedy) -magnum opus
○ The Comédie humaine consists of 91 finished works (stories, novels or analytical essays) and 46 unfinished works
○ multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the Restoration (1815-1830) and the July Monarchy (1830–1848)
○ a panoramic portrait of "all aspects of society"
○ originally called it Etudes des Mœurs ( literally 'Studies of manners', or 'The Ways of the World '
○ Selected Works:
§ Les Chouans (1829)
§ Sarrasine (1830) - (Roland Barthes' blow-by-blow analysis of the text in his book S/Z(1970). Barthes dissects the text in accordance with five "codes" (hermeneutic, semic, symbolic, proairetic and cultural).
§ La Peau de chagrin (1831) - (The Wild Ass's Skin or The Magic Skin)
§ Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu (1831)
§ Le Colonel Chabert (1832)
§ Eugénie Grandet, (1833) his first best-seller.
§ Le Père Goriot (Old Father Goriot, 1835) - transposes the story of King Lear to 1820s Paris in order to rage at a society bereft of all love save the love of money.
2. Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature
3. "What a man he would have been had he known how to write! - Flaubert
4. W. H. Helm calls one "the French Dickens" - and Dickens "the English Balzac"