IGNOU BEGE-105 - Understanding Prose

1. Comment on the dominant variety of prose (narrative, expository or descriptive) present in each of the following passages. Write a brief critical appreciation of each passage in about 250 words each: a) My brother and I carried our father into the hospital, stamping on the goat turds which were spread all over the floor. There was no doctor in the hospital. The Ward boy, after we bribed him ten rupees, said that a doctor might come in the evening. The doors to the hospital’s rooms were wide open. A few men had spread a newspaper on the ground and were sitting on it. One of them had an open wound on his leg. He invited us to sit with him. My brother and I lowered our father onto the newspaper sheets. Two little girls came and sat beside us; both had yellow eyes and skin. Jaundice it seemed. We kept adding newspapers to the ground and the line of diseased eyes, raw wounds and delirious mouths kept growing. b) It was perfectly true that the house was made out of trees. It was a fair-sized but elderly shack, made out of poplar poles and chinked with mud. There was an upstairs, which was not so usual around here, with three bedrooms, one of which I was to share with Chris’s sister, Jeannie, who was slightly younger than I , a pallid-eyed girl who was either too shy to talk or who had nothing to say. I never discovered which, because I was so reticent with her myself, wanting to push her away, not to recognize her, and at the same time experiencing a shocked remorse at my own unacceptable feelings. c) Theologians don’t much like it when we attempt to peel away the accretions of myth, history, dogma, and sacrament that cloud the origins of their chosen faith. When we seek common threads among the world’s spiritual doctrines, we may be chided for taking a cafeteria approach to religion: a little from this one, a little from that one, as if we were downloading only our favorite songs from the Internet in order to make up our own “Best of” CD It is true enough that some New Age belief systems do little more than dabble in devotion, backing off quickly whenever spiritual discipline becomes too incompatible with one’s lifestyle. One cannot really be a part-time Buddhist any more than a self-described Christian can purchase salvation with one hour a week in church. But the irrefutable truth is that at the heart of each of the great religious traditions are three small words: God is one. 2. The story ‘Misery’ by Chekhov deals with human insensitivity to other peoples’ grief. Do you agree? Give a reasoned answer. 3. Write a detailed note on The Binding Vine as a Stream of Consciousness novel. 4. Comment on how Lamb has used humour in his essay “ A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig”, to make the essay entertaining. Give examples from the text wherever necessary. 5. How does Bill Aitkin comment upon the cultural divide between the North and South? Give a reasoned answer. 6. Write a note on how Gandhi spent his days in Calcutta and his impression of Burma as seen in his autobiography. 7. What do we get to know about the Holocaust from Anne Frank’s diary? 8. Laurence was committed to social causes. Write a note on her commitment to nuclear disarmament as seen in her speech “My Final Hour.”

1. Comment on the dominant variety of prose (narrative, expository or descriptive) present in each of the following passages. Write a brief critical appreciation of each passage in about 250 words each: a) Aim at independence of mind. There are some men who go in leading strings all their days. They always follow in the paths of others, without being able to give any reason for their opinions. There is a proper mental independence which all should maintain; self-respect and the stability of our character require it. The man who pins his opinions entirely on another’s sleeve can have no respect for his own judgment and is likely to be ever changing. When we consider carefully what appeals to our minds and exercise upon it our own reason, taking into respectful consideration what others say upon it and then come to a conclusion of our own, we act as intelligent beings should act and only then this proper independence of mind is far removed from presumptuous self-confidence, than which there is nothing more severely to be condemned. Presumption is the associate of ignorance; and it is hateful in the extreme to hear some halftaught stripling delivering his opinions with all the authority of an oracle. b) All the rooms were prepared. There were pictures on the walls, painted on the paper, with gold frames complete. Red carpet covered all the floors except the kitchen; red plush chairs in the drawing-room, green in the dining-room; tables, beds with real bed clothes , a cradle, a stove, a dresser with tiny plates and one big jug. But what Kezia liked more than anything, what she liked frightfully, was the lamp. It stood in the middle of the dining-room table, an exquisite little lamp with a white globe. c) It was only on the night of the concert, when we assembled on stage behind drawn curtains, that he gave me the notes to be played. I always hoped he would bring himself to do this earlier and I hovered around him all evening, tuning his sitar and preparing his betel leaves, but he would not speak to me at all. There were always many others around him – his hosts and the organizers of the concert, his friends and well-wishers and disciples – and he spoke and laughed with all of them, but always turned his head away when I came near. I was not hurt: this was his way with me, I was used to it. Only I wished he would tell me what he planned to play before the concert began so that I could prepare myself. 2. ‘On Seeing England for the First Time’ is laced with sarcasm and irony with a thread of pathos running through it’. Do you agree? Give reasons for your answer quoting examples from the text. 3. Describe Orwell’s experience of shooting an elephant in Burma in detail. 4. Discuss the character of Gilbert Clandon as he goes from illusion to reality in the short story “The Legacy”. 5. Discuss some of the main features of Margaret Laurence’s speech “My Final Hour”. 6. Write a detailed note on how Gandhi spent his days in Calcutta and in Burma as is seen from his An Autobiography. 7. What do you understand by the stream-of-consciousness novel? Explain with reference to The Binding Vine. 8. Boswell’s Life of Johnson is a piece of art. Discuss