TN PG TRB ENGLISH SYLLABUS 2021

For the post of Written Recruitment Test for the post of Postgraduate
Assistants in Tamil Nadu Higher Secondary Educational Service.

 Syllabus:  English (Subject Code: P02)

 Unit-I – MODERN LITERATURE (1400-1600)

 Poetry

For Detailed Study

          Chaucer       :                  Prologue to the Canterbury Tales

          Spenser       :                  Faerie  Queene - Book-I

 For Non-detailed Study

          Spenser       :                  Prothalamion and Epithalamion

          Wyatt, Surrey:                Selections in Peacock's English verse, Vol-I

          Ballads        :                  Peacock - Vol-II

 Prose

For Detailed Study

          Bacon - Essays -              Of  Truth, Of Adversity, Of Studies,

                                                Of  Revenge, Of Ambition, Of  Friendship   

Sidney        :                  Apologie For Poetrie 

For Non-detailed Study

          The Bible   :                  The Book of Job. 

Drama

For Detailed Study

Marlowe     :                  Dr. Faustus 

For Non-Detailed  Study

Kyd              :                  The Spanish Tragedy      

Ben Jonson          :                  The Alchemist 

Unit-II  - MODERN LITERATURE (1600-1798) 

Poetry

For Detailed study

Donne          :        Canonisation, The Ecstasie      

Milton           :                  Paradise Lost, Book-IX

Pope            :                  The Rape of the Lock. 

For Non-detailed Study

          Milton           :                  Samson Agonistes

Gray, Collins & Blake:          Peacock's English Verse - Vol-III

Herbert       :                  1. Affliction  2. The Pulley

Marvell        :                  To His Coy Mistress

Prose

For Detailed Study

          Johnson      :                  Life of Milton

 For Non-Detailed Study

          Bunyan        :                  The Pilgrim's Progress

          Fielding        :                  Tom Jones

         Drama

For Detailed Study

          Dryden        :                  All for Love

          Sheridan      :                  The School for Scandal

 For Non-detailed Study :

          Congreve    :                  The way of the World

          Goldsmith   :                  She stoops to conquer

 Unit-III -  MODERN LITERATURE (1798 - 1832)

 Poetry

For Detailed Study

          Wordsworth :                  Immortality Ode, Tintern Abbey

          Coleridge    :                  Ode to Dejection, Kubla Khan

Keats           :                  Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to Autumn.

          Shelley        :                  Ode to the West Wind

 For Non-Detailed Study

          Wordsworth :                  Prelude - Book-I

Shelley        :                  Adonais

 Prose

For Detailed Study

          Lamb           :                  Essays  of Elia

Christ's Hospital, The South Sea House, Dream children, New Year's Eve

Hazlitt                    :                  My First Acquaintance with Poets.

 For Non-Detailed Study

Shelley        :                  A Defence of Poetry

          Wordsworth :                  Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1850)

          Jane Austen          :                  Emma

          Emily Bronte:                  Wuthering Heights

 Unit-IV   - MODERN LITERATURE (1832 to the present day)

 Poetry

For Detailed Study:

          Arnold                    :                  Dover Beach, The Scholar Gypsy

          Browning     :                  Andrea Del Sarto

          Tennyson    :                  Morte D' Arthur

          W.B.Yeats   :                  Byzantium

          Eliot             :                  The Waste land

 For Non-Detailed Study:

          Hopkins      :                  The Wreck of the Deutschland

                                                The selections from

(i) Owen (ii) W.H.Auden (iii) Stephen Spender in the Faber Book of Modern Verse.

Prose

For Detailed Study:

Carlyle        :                  The Hero as a Man of Letters

                      (from “On Heroes and  Hero Worship”)

Mathew Arnold:               The Study of Poetry

T.S.Eliot      :                  Tradition and Individual Talent

 For Non-detailed Study:

Dickens                :           Great Expectations

George Elliot                    :           Middle March

Hardy                     :           Jude the Obscure

Virginia Woolf          :           To the Light House

Graham Greene          :           The Power and the Glory 

Unit-V - SHAKESPEARE

Drama

For Detailed Study

Macbeth, The Tempest

 For Non-Detailed Study

          Henry–IV   Part-I:           Measure for Measure

          Antony and Cleopatra    

           A general knowledge of the other plays, poems and sonnets of Shakespeare is expected of the candidates.

 Unit-VI   AMERICAN LITERATURE

Poetry

Detailed  study

          Walt Whitman          :           Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

          Emily Dickinson          :           Because I could not Stop for Death

          Robert Frost                   :           Mending Wall,  Birches, West Running Brook.

          Sylvia Plath            :           Daddy

 Non-Detailed Study

          Walt Whitman          :           Passage to India

          E.E.Cummings          :           The Cambridge Ladies

          Hart Crane           :           Poem: To Brooklyn Bridge.

Fiction 

          Mark Twain           :           The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

          Melville                  :           Moby Dick

          Hemingway            :           The Old Man and the Sea

Prose

Detailed study

          Emerson                :           The American Scholar

          Faulkner                 :           Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech.

 Non-Detailed Study

          Thoreau                :           Walden

          James Thurcer          :           The Owl in the Attic

 Drama 

Detailed study

          Eugene O’ Neil          :           The Hairy Ape

Arthur Miller            :           The Death of a Salesman

Non-Detailed Study

Tennesse Williams          :            A Street Car named Desire

Edward Albee          :           Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Unit-VII     INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH

 Poetry

Detailed Study:

Tagore        :                  Gitanjali

Aurobindo    :                  Thought the Paraclete

 Non-Detailed Study:

Poems of Sarojini Naidu and Toru Dutt from the Golden Treasury of Indian Poetry.

Poems of A.K.Ramanujam, R. Parthasarathy, Kamala Das and Nissim Ezekiel from “Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets” ed. R.Parthasarathy.

 Fiction

Mulk Raj Anand          :           Coolie

Raja Rao              :           Kantapura

R.K.           Narayan      :           The English Teacher

Kamala Markandaya:        A Handful of Rice.

 Prose

Detailed Study:

Ananda Commarasamy Aurobindo:The Dance of Shiva (The Title Essay)

 Non-Detailed Study:

Nehru                     :           An Autobiography

 Drama

Detailed Study:

          Tagore                  :           Muktha Dhara

Girish Karnad          :           Tughlaq

Non-Detailed Study:

          Gurucharan Das          :           Larine Sahib

 Commonwealth  Literature

 Poetry

Non-Detailed Study:

          E.J. Pratt            :           The Dying Eagle

          Judith Wright          :           Fire in the Murdering Hut, The Cedars

          Wole Soyinka          :           The Telephone conversation

          Abioseh Nicoll          :           The Meaning of Africa

          A.D.Hope              :           Australia

 Drama

Detailed Study

          Wole Soyinka          :           The Lion and the Jewel

Non–Detailed Study

Douglas Stewart          :          Ned Kelly

 Prose

Chinua Achebe          : The Novelist as Teacher

 Fiction

          Chinua Achebe          : Things Fall Apart

Alan Paten           : Cry, the Beloved Country

Unit-VIII -- APPROACHES TO LITERATURE

1. Modern  Drama

2. Modern Fiction

3. Literary Movements

4. Literary Criticism and Theory

5. Feminism

6. Teaching of English in India

7.     Journalism and Creative Writing in English

8.     Post – Modernism

 Unit-IX – HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

1.     Origin of Language

2.     Place of English in the Indo-European family

3.     General Characteristics of Old and Middle English

4.     The rise and growth of Modern English

5.     Growth of Vocabulary Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Scandinavian and other foreign influences – Word Formation.

6.     Change of Meaning

7.     The Makers of English, The Bible, Spenserm, Shakespeare, Milton and Dr.Johnson.

8.     American English

9.     Indian English

10.    Characteristics of Modern English

11.    Spelling Reform

12.    The English Lexicon

 Books for reference:

1) Henry Bradley:           The Making of English

2) F.T.Wood :           An outline History of the English Language

3) A.C.Baugh :               A History of the English Language

 LINGUISTICS

 Definitions – The Nature and Scope of linguistics, Speech and Writing,

Form and Meaning

Words, Clause and Phrase – Concord Government– Sentence Pattern

Phonology

Morphology

Idiolect, Dialect

Transformational Generative Grammar

 Books for Study

Frank Plalee           : Grammar, ELBS

John Lyons           : An introduction to Theoretical linguistics

 Unit-X   PRINCIPLES OF LITERARY CRITICISM

1. Aristotle                : Poetics

2. Dryden                  : Essay of Dramatic Poesy

3. Coleridge              : Biographia Literaria Ch.XIV and Ch.XVII

4. Keats           : Letters (from English Critical Tradition-Macmillan)

5. T.S.Elliot                : Metaphysical poets

6. I.A.Richards          : Four kinds of Meaning

7. William Empson          : The Seventh Type of Ambiguity

8. Northrop Frye          : The Archetypes of Literature

9. L.Trilling                : Sense of the Past

10. Brooks                  : Irony as a Principle of Structure

11. Allen Tate          : Tension in Poetry

sentence pattern

parts of speech | Tamil to English | T2E |

morphology

#phonology_explanation_in_tamil | #phonology_example

#Edmund_Spenser's_ Epithalamion | #marriage_ode

Alexander pope's The rape of the lock | Detail Summary

Idiolect and Dialect |

Half a Life by V.S. Naipaul: Summary

Set in India, London, an unnamed African country that is likely Mozambique, and briefly in Berlin, Half a Life is the story of a man who spends two decades in search of a life he can call his own. Willie Somerset Chandran was born to an educated father who rejected materialism and ambition and, instead, married a poverty-stricken woman, who later gave birth to Willie.

The story begins with Willie questioning his father about his middle name, Somerset. When dissecting his full name, Willie discovers that his middle name came from a famous British writer, Somerset Maugham, who once visited his father. His first name is of a Christian nature, and his last name reveals his blended ancestral roots. This knowledge leaves Willie looking for a heritage of which he can be proud, a whole existence as opposed to a half.

Willie knows his mother's social and financial status is on the bottom rung of society's economic ladder, and he is ashamed of that fact. Subsequently, his survival instinct leads him to a fantasy world, one in which he pretends to be someone he is not, someone he does not need to be embarrassed by.

This deceit becomes an everyday occurrence for Willie, as he weaves quite a tangled web of lies about who he is and where he comes from. His hatred for his partial existence and for his parents drives Willie to leave the nest in search of himself.

He first travels to London, hoping to find himself there while studying literature and becoming a writer; instead, he finds himself trapped in uncertainty, uninterested in neither his studies nor making any effort to better himself.

Willie, who has had very little experience with sexual liberation, enters into intimate affairs with women who are already involved with his friends, hoping to educate himself in the art of lovemaking. However, each experience leaves him even more unfulfilled than the last. His visitations with prostitutes carry the same results. Having completed his education and exhausted the possibility of finding his future in London, Willie journeys to Africa.

Willie now has to learn a third language, which is a direct result of his wanderings. He feels so bewildered by communication that he develops difficulty expressing himself, so he settles for silence. Just as his three names are a combination of origins, the three separate languages create an even greater rift between Willie and his own existence.

Willie eventually settles down with Ana, a Portuguese-African woman, accompanying her to Mozambique. The couple makes their home there for eighteen years, living among an eclectic population of people with whom they manage to coexist.

Much as the civil war that has befallen Mozambique during his time there, the same conflict resides within Willie's relationship with Ana. Willie revisits his former habit of sleeping with prostitutes, but he remains unfulfilled and unsatisfied with his life and feels powerless to escape its confines.

After living in Africa for eighteen years, Willie finally faces reality, telling Ana that he is miserable with their life and needs to find his own. Ana agrees because she has been feeling as dissatisfied with her life as Willie has with his, and they go their separate ways, each in search of something that may not even exist.

JUDAS

JUDAS

              This poem was written by Mervyn Eustes Morris a Jamaican poet. Morris usually stresses upon the importance of nation and its language through his verse. He wants to redefine the aspect of Jamaican culture and their Creole language. In the first stanza it had told that the master gave Judas a mocking smile. But actually Christ simply smiled at Judas , but in these lines Morris has exaggerated the smile into a mocking smile. The word 'mocking' seemed to be the striking word and therefore poet wanted to highlight the 'mocking glance' of the master.

            The poet explains the Judas feeling of being partial by his master who had given the priority for John to sit in his right. This was again the poets’ partial feeling even in his own homeland by the colonizers. He has said that the truth which is in the side of colonized is always complicated in the foreign eyes. also the colonizer is the ''knowing judge of man''  in the sense whatever they say is believed by the world.

           On the whole the poem 'Judas' by Mervyn Morris is nothing but a representation of history by the point of view of the victim. He had deconstructed the real and the past i.e. deconstructing the already existing ideas. Also he wanted to say that the colonized people's ideas and life thoughts are not accepted whereas the colonizers ideology, life and thoughts were accepted. The poet uses the word 'master' and 'lord' for Christ in order to avoid the religious conflict. Though he describes the pathetic condition if 'colonized' people in the poem the comparison used in this poem is quite controversial however the poet tried to escape of controversies through his careful selection of words and diction.

I Have a Dream essay

I Have a Dream  
The speech took place at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington,D.C. and was given by Martin Luther King Jr.In his speech he used metaphors,similes,a little personification, and allusions to describe the treatment of colored people by whites and the actions that colored people had to take to right the wrong.He mentioned four documents,one being a song:The Declaration of Independence,the Emancipation Proclamation,the Bible, and the song America:My Country 'Tis of Thee.His unspoken message in mentioning and quoting from the documents is quite clear:It wasn't equal in America as three out of the four documents claimed.The themes of the speech are equality,the four documents;their message,his dream,freedom and segregation.

     King used repetition when mentioning specific states in the South:Georgia,Mississippi,Alabama,and South Carolina.Those were some of the most racist states back then.He also mentioned California,New York and New Hampshire to convey that his dream included all states,from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic coast.King's uses the Declaration and Proclamation because they are both documents promising freedom,justice and equal rights to all people--white or otherwise.He describes slavery and people being in mental chains and implies that the documents weren't being taken into effect.

     The purpose of this speech was:to inform people that living together peacefully as friends and family was possible;To expose the cruelties against colored people and people of different religions;To put the idea of freedom,equality and a future with no segregation in peoples' head.

Summary:-

On August 28, 1963, King gives his speech for freedom. He begins his speech with the emancipation of the slaves, issued by Abraham Lincoln, and later mentions that after being freed from slavery, blacks are still not free. King claims all men were issued a check and a promise of freedom, yet for black men and women that check has come back with “insufficient funds.” The members of the civil rights union issue a check to America, they return America’s unkept promise with one they are sure to keep: the continued pursuit of justice. King, along with his many supporters, demand their freedom now, they demand things to change with a sense of urgency and without procrastination from the oppressor. They do not want to see slow change over time; they would rather see significant change immediately. King roars, “now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.” However, King hopes to obtain equality through non-violent movement. He tells fellow black people to not have hatred or bitterness in their heart or turn to guns and fists. He knows that violence to obtain peace only leads to an endless cycle of fighting, unnecessary death, and cruelty. Also King believes blacks must not let this one incident lead them to hate all people of different races and nationalities. He knows that only leads to the same kind of discrimination he is fighting against with his “I have a dream” speech. Black people are not fighting for their own satisfactions, to fight until they feel content with what they have accomplished. Black people are fighting for continuous freedom and equality, not just to be stopped with King’s 1963 speech

A Far Cry from Africa Essay

 "A Far Cry from Africa"
 "A Far Cry from Africa" is poet Derek Walcott's cry of pain over the situation in Kenya in the 1950s. At that time, Kenya was still a British colony, and local Kenyans chafed under the long term injustices of British rule. A nationalist uprising of Kenyan nationalists called Mau Mau led to the death of about 13,000 people, most of them Kenyan, along with a huge number of animals.
In the poem, Walcott decries man's inhumanity toward man in trying to enact justice through slaughter, and compares it unfavorably to nature and the animal kingdom. He also expresses anger at the way the deaths are reduced to statistics or abstractions. This obscures the reality of the dead and their suffering, whether they are white or so-called "savages."
Walcott, in his second stanza, then expresses how torn he feels in his loyalties. He is from a British Caribbean colony, so he understands the plight of a colonial, but he also perceives himself as British. He is frustrated with both sides over the violence.
Because he is writing this in the Caribbean, his title is a pun. He is physically "a far cry" from Africa, but he is also hearing a cry of pain that has reverberated far and wide across the earth.
It is the heartfelt emotional intensity of the poet's voice, as well as the vivid natural imagery, that gives this poem its power.

If You Want to Know Me By Noémia de Sousa Poem & Essay

If You Want to Know Me

-Noémia de Sousa

If you want to know who I am,

Examine with careful eyes

That piece of black wood

Which an unknown Maconde brother

With inspired hands

Carved and worked

In distant lands to the North.

Ah, she is who I am:

Empty eye sockets despairing of possessing life

A mouth slashed with wounds of anguish

Raised as though to implore and threaten

Body tattooed with visible and invisible scars

By the hard whips of slavery

Tortured and magnificent,

Proud and mystical,

Africa from head to toe,

-ah, she is who I am!

If you want to understand me

Come and bend over my African soul,

In the groans of the Negroes on the docks

In the frenzied dances of the Chopes

In the rebelliousness of the Shaganas

In the strange melancholy evaporating

From a native song, into the night …

And ask me nothing more

If you really wish to know me…

For I am no more than a shell of flesh

In which the revolt of Africa congealed

Its cry swollen with hope

About the Poet:

Noémia de Sousa (aka Vera Micaia) was born in 1927 in Maputo, Mozambique.  She lived in Lisbon working as a translator from 1951 to 1964 and then she left for Paris where she worked for the local consulate of Morocco.  She went back to Lisbon in 1975 and became member of the ANOP.  In the early years of the liberation struggle she was very active.  She later left and lived in exile.  Noemia's background was Portuguese and Bantu and in much of her poetry she explores the idea of Africa and her heritage.  

Her poem below is phenomenal.  It’s angry and inspired and that final stanza—where she proffers her body as a medium for Africa’s struggle for freedom--wow, powerful.  And she ends her poem without a period, perhaps because her last word is ‘hope’ and what is more hopeful than an undefined end?  

Essay 

If you want to know me, by Noemia De Souza, has ruefully used literary devices. It is seen to have a mysterious and carefree title. Only after reading the poem will one realize and understand the depth of the feelings that have been expressed in the poem. That is where the power of the poem lays, in its words, images of wounds, untold stories and so on. She is seen to have written this poem in defense of the colonization of Africa and oppression. It portrays the physiological and psychological impact of colonization. It also showcases the struggle for cultural and political autonomy along with hybridity.

In the beginning of the poem, she establishes her lost identity due to colonization and uses the image of “empty sockets”. The eye is one part of the body that best expresses emotions and that very part itself is seen b devoid of its function/life. She is unable to see her past experiences and life and is now blind to it but despairs her present life. She goes on to tell us the harsh past experiences and marks that she has to live with for the rest of her life. The marks all over her body seem like tattoos that last forever leaving marks of slavery, which will always be part of her and he life no matter what. She uses language as a device to protest against slavery and gain liberation. Her usage of words like magnificent and torture together, beautiful and marred shows her resistance and only form of voicing her opinions.

 She proudly goes on to say “Africa from head and foot and this is what I am”. The colonization, slavery, all forms of violence, abuse, every single experience that she has ever gone through is what gives her identity. Even though it has distorted her life to a great extent, she still proudly believed in liberating her country and also for being an African. This powerful poem has well described and contributed to the identities of all Africans, created a bond against the hegemonic colonizer.