St. Joseph’s College of Commerce (Autonomous)

End Semester Examination – October 2015

B.B.A. – I Semester

M1 15 1AE : Additional English

Duration: 3 Hrs                                                                                            Max Marks: 100

 

Note:   1.Exceeding the paragraph limit will result in loss of marks.

2. Each paragraph should contain about six sentences.

 

PART -A

I  Answer the following question in a paragraph of about 80 words.             (3×5=15)

1. The two essays ‘Art of Controversy’ and ‘Free Man’s Worship’, provokes a person to be sceptic about the dogmas. Is there any idea from the essays where you contested? Give opinions to support your answer.
2. “The dream of my girlhood is over. I felt lonely and desolate.” What made Harriet Jacobs say that, her girlhood has come to an end?
3. In the essay ‘Free Man’s Worship’, how is worship correlated with power?

 

 

PART – B

Joaquín Font, El Reposo Mental Health Clinic, Camino Desierto de los Leones, on the outskirts of Mexico City DF, January 1977.

There are books for when you’re bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you’re calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you’re sad. And there are books for when you’re happy. There are books for when you’re thirsty for knowledge. And there are books for when you’re desperate. The latter are the kind of books Ulises Lima and Belano wanted to write. A serious mistake, as we’ll soon see. Let’s take, for example, an average reader, a cool-headed, mature, educated man leading a more or less healthy life. A man who buys books and literary magazines. So there you have him. This man can read things that are written for when you’re calm, but he can also read any other kind of book with a critical eye, dispassionately, without absurd or regrettable complicity. That’s how I see it. I hope I’m not offending anyone. Now let’s take the desperate reader, who is presumably the audience for the literature of desperation. What do we see? First: the reader is an adolescent or an immature adult, insecure, all nerves. He’s the kind of fucking idiot (pardon my language) who committed suicide after reading Werther. Second: he’s a limited reader. Why limited? That’s easy: because he can only read the literature of

desperation, or books for the desperate, which amounts to the same thing, the kind of person or freak who’s unable to read all the way through In Search of Lost Time, for example, or The Magic Mountain (a paradigm of calm, serene, complete literature, in my humble opinion), or for that matter, Les Misérables or War and Peace. Am I making myself clear? Good. So I talked to them, told them, warned them, alerted them to the dangers they were facing. It was like talking to a wall. Furthermore: desperate readers are like the California gold mines. Sooner or later they’re exhausted! Why? It’s obvious! One can’t live one’s whole life in desperation. In the end the body rebels, the pain becomes unbearable, lucidity gushes out in great cold spurts. The desperate reader (and especially the desperate poetry reader, who is insufferable, believe me) ends up by turning away from books. Inevitably he ends up becoming just plain desperate. Or he’s cured! And then, as part of the regenerative process, he returns slowly—as if wrapped in swaddling clothes, as if under a rain of dissolved sedatives—he returns, as I was saying, to a literature written for cool, serene readers, with their heads set firmly on their shoulders. This is what’s called (by me, if nobody else) the passage from adolescence to adulthood. And by that I don’t mean that once someone has become a coolheaded reader he no longer reads books written for desperate readers. Of course he reads them! Especially if they’re good or decent or recommended by a friend. But ultimately, they bore him! Ultimately, that literature of resentment, full of sharp instruments and lynched messiahs,

Doesn’t pierce his heart the way a calm page, a carefully thought-out page, a technically

Perfect page does. I told them so. I warned them. I showed them the technically perfect page. I alerted them to the dangers. Don’t exhaust the vein! Humility! Seek oneself, lose oneself in strange lands! But with a guiding line, with bread crumbs or white pebbles! And yet I was mad, driven mad by them, by my daughters, by Laura Damián, and so they didn’t listen.”

 

II    Answer all the THREE questions in a paragraph of about 80 words.        (3×5=15)

 

5. In the above passage how many kinds of readers you encounter? How are they different from each other?
6. The writer of the passage talks about different kinds books available for all kinds of emotions. Is there any particular of genre you read, for a particular emotion? Why?
7. Comment on the tones used by the writer of the passage and Mario Vargas Llossa, in“The Premature Obituary of the Book. Why Literature?”

 

NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS.

I WAS born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot County, Maryland. I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant. I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday. They seldom come nearer to it than planting-time, harvest-time, cherry-time, spring-time, or fall-time. A want of information concerning my own was a source of unhappiness to me even during childhood. The white children could tell their ages. I could not tell why I ought to be deprived of the same privilege. I was not allowed to make any inquiries of my master concerning it. He deemed all such inquiries on the part of a slave improper and impertinent, and evidence of a restless spirit. The nearest estimate I can give makes me now between twenty-seven and twenty-eight years of age. I come to this, from hearing my master say, sometime during 1835, I was about seventeen years old.

I have had two masters. My first master’s name was Anthony. I do not remember his first name. He was generally called Captain Anthony—a title which, I presume, he acquired by sailing a craft on the Chesapeake Bay. He was not considered a rich slaveholder. He owned two or three farms, and about thirty slaves. His farms and slaves were under the care of an overseer. The overseer’s name was Plummer. Mr. Plummer was a miserable drunkard, a profane swearer, and a savage monster. He always went armed with a cowskin and a heavy cudgel. I have known him to cut and slash the women’s heads so horribly, that even master would be enraged at his cruelty, and would threaten to whip him if he did not mind himself. Master, however, was not a humane slaveholder. It required extraordinary barbarity on the part of an overseer to affect him. He was a cruel man, hardened by a long life of slaveholding. He would at times seem to take great pleasure in whipping a slave. I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose. The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin. I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I never shall forget it whilst I remember anything. It was the first of a long series of such outrages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and a participant. It struck me with awful force. It was the bloodstained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it.

III. Answer the following questions in a paragraph of about 80 words.      (2×5=10)

8. What is your opinion on reading auto-biographical narratives from any other form of narratives?
9. Both Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass write about being victims of societies’. What are the other similarities you find in their narratives?

IV    Answer the following questions in not more than two paragraphs.   (2×10=20)

10. What is Mario Vargas Llossa’s view about Literature in the essay “The Premature Obituary of the Book. Why Literature?” What opinions does he give on people who don’t read literature? Andwhat kind of changes has technologies brought, in the felid of literature?
11. In the essay India the wounded civilization, what is the wound, Naipaul is talking about? Has the nation recovered from its wounds? Naipaul looks the Indian society from reading R K Narayan’s Mr. Sampath, can a society be read from reading a work of fiction?

 

PART – C

History as mythology?                                                           The Hindu April24, 2015  

History, they say is always written by winners. But could this be by even winners of election? So it would seem from the workings of India’s premier institute of historical research and funding, the Indian council of Historical research, which sees a reshuffle of people and priorities every time there is a regime-change in New Delhi. S Bhattacharya who recently resigned as the Chief Editor of Indian Historical Review said, “I doubt whether you would find instances of persons nominated by the government in power regarding their position pro tem as a franchise to fantasies about history.” The comments of this reputed historians reinforce the concerns that many professional historians have warned of namely the dressing up myth and religious belief as history.

V       Answer the following question in not more than three paragraphs     (2×15=30)

12. The above article is about what are the changes does a new regime bring to the nation. Can a state alter history according to their whims and fancies? Support your argument from reading Romila Thapar’s ‘The past and the present’.
13. In ‘Ooru Keri’ Siddalingaiah, narrates about his unusual and daring experience of graveyard stay. Narrate an incident where you have done something unusual and daring.
14. Answer the question in about two paragraphs.    (1×10=10)
15. Carefully look at the below given cartoons, see what they depict and give opinions.

 

 

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