UGC NTA NET/JRF Exam. December 2020/June 2021 ENGLISH-II (Shift-I)

Nadine Gordimer is the author of the short story, "Beethoven was One Sixteenth Black".
In this collection of new stories Beethoven was One-sixteenth Black, Nadine Gordimer. crosses the frontiers of politics, memory, sexuality and love with the fearless insight that is the hallmark of her-writing.
Nadine Gordimer was a South African writer and political activist. She received Nobel Prize in 1991 and Booker prize in 1974.

Note- This Bridge Called My Back is a feminist anthology (a book that contains pieces of writing or poems, often on the same subject, by different authors)

" Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool" is an essay by George Orwell. It was inspired by a critical essay on Shakespeare by Leo Tolstoy, and was first published in Polemic (a British Magazine of philosophy, psychology and Aesthetics) March 1947. In this essay Orwell analyzes Tolstoy's criticism of Shakespeare's work in general and his attack on King Lear in particular.

The lines, "Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things. /The honest thief, the tender murderer, / The superstitious atheist....." have been taken from Robert Browning's poem "Bishop Blougram's Apology". Bishop Blougram's Apology is a long poem. published in the two volume collection Men and Women (1855).

The Cornhill Magazine (1860-1975) first edited by William Makepeace Thackeray. It was monthly Victorian magazine and literary journal, first published in 1860 from London.
William Makepeace Thackeray (born 1811, Calcutta-died 1863, London) was an English novelist author and illustrator. In 1860 he founded the Cornhill Magazine and became its first editor for the magazine which was published by British publishing company Smith, Elder & Co.

The Razor's Edge is a 1944 novel by W. Somerset Maugham. The novel's title comes from a translation of a verse in the Katha Upanishad, paraphrased in the book's epigraph as: "The sharp edge of a razor is difficult to pass over; thus the wise say the path to salvation is hard".
The novel is concerned in large part with the search for the meaning of life and with the dichotomy between materialism and spirituality. It was one of the first western novel to propose non-western solutions to society's ills.

E.D. Hirsch Jr. is the author of the essay 'What Isn't Literature?'
Eric Donald Hirsch Jr. is an American literary critic and educator who is best known for his Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (1987). He also wrote 'The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy (1988)' and was the main editor of 'A First Dictionary of Cultural Literacy' (1989).

Erich Auerbach's Mimesis (1947) ends with a chapter on Virginia Woolf's "To The Lighthouse".
Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature is a book of literacy exoticism and contains twenty chapters, each one anchored to a characteristic passage from theological or literary work, which is then tested for tore, direction and syntax, and enfolded within a specific historical context.
Title of the last chapter of Mimesis is "The Brown stocking" in which "To The Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf and "In Search of Lost Time" by Marcel Poust is discussed chiefly.

The cluster of "Displacement, Slippage and Condensation" is associated with what Julia Kristeva terms the 'Semiotic'.
Semiotic, also called Semiology is the study of signs and sign-using behavior. It was defined by one its founders, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, as the study of "the life of signs within society".
In Kristeva's terms, the semiotic is defined as the matriarchal aspect of language that shows the speaker's inner drives and impulses. Julia Kristeva (1941), French psychoanalyst, critic, novelist and educator, best known for writing is structuralist linguistics, psychoanalysis, semiotics and philosophical feminism.

The Rover : or, The Banish't Cavaliers and Oroonoko are written by English playwright Aphra Behn. The Rover, Comedy by Apra Behn, produced and published in two parts in 1677 and 1681. The play depicts the adventures of a small group of English Cavaliers during the exile of England's king Charles-II in Madrid and Neples.
Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave, novel by Apra Behn, published in 1688. The author's experiences in the Dutch colony of Surinam in South America provided the plot and the locale for this story of a proud, Virtuous African prince who is enslaved and cruelly treated by "Civilized" white Christians; Oroonoko was adapted for the theatre by Thomas Southerner and performed in 1695.