The American Scholar Brief Suggestion
Q.1. What philosophy of Emerson does the essay embody?
Ans. It embodies Emerson’s philosophy of what an American Scholar’s profession should be like.
Q.2. What does Emerson mean by the “sere remains of foreign harvests”?
Ans. He means the useless knowledge acquired by other countries, especially the European countries.
Summary: The American Scholar
Q.3. What does Emerson compare the emerging American poetry with?
Ans. Emerson compares American poetry with Vega, the fourth brightest star of the heavens.
Q.4. What is the Root of both Nature and the human mind?
Ans. The Root of both Nature and the human mind is the soul of soul.
Q.5. Why is the pleasure from books remarkable?
Ans. Because books impress us with the conviction that one nature wrote and the same reads.
Q.6.What notion is mischievous?
Ans. The notion that we come late into nature, and that the world was finished a long time ago, is mischievous.
Q.7. What is the traditional notion about a Scholar?
Ans. He should be a recluse, a valetudinarian, as unfit for any handiwork or public labour as a penknife for an axe.
Q.8. What does the writer mean by the “dumb abyss”?
Ans. The wide world around us.
Q.9. Who has the richest return of wisdom?
Ans. The man who has put forth his total strength in fit actions has the richest return to wisdom.
Q.10. What do you understand by the principle of Undulation in Nature?
Ans. The law in Nature makes the opposite phenomena in Nature.
Q.11. What should be the shame of the Scholar?
Ans. if his tranquility, amid dangerous times, arises from the presumption that like children and women, he is a protected class.
More Brief
Q.1. How does Emerson assess Swedenborg’s philosophy?
Ans. Emerson thinks that Swedenborg showed the mysterious bond that allies moral evil to the foul material forms, and has given a theory of insanity, of beasts, of unclean and fearful things.
Q.2. What is the remedy for the deplorable conditions of the youths of America?
Ans. The young man should plant himself indomitably on his instincts and should abide there.
Q.3. What was the occasion on which Emerson gave his speech “The American Scholar”?
Ans. On the occasion of the recommencement of the college year which usually began at Harvard College.
Q.4. “There is one man of genius” – Who does Emerson say this about?
Ans. Emanuel Swedenborg.
Q.5. What is a scholar in the right state of society?
Ans. In the right state of society, a scholar is the Man Thinking.
Q.6.What is the “Other me”?
Ans. The wide world around us is the other me.
Q.7. What is neoclassicism?
Ans. Neoclassicism is the Western movement in the arts, music, and literature that draw inspiration from “classical” art and culture.
Q.8 What must the Scholar read?
Ans. The scholar must read history and exact science.
Civil Disobedience Brief Suggestion
Q.1.What is the logical corollary or conclusion of the motto, “That government is best which governs least”?
Ans. “That government is best which governs not at all.”
Q. 2. What was happening with the American government of Thoreau’s time?
Ans. Was losing integrity every moment.
Summary: Civil Disobedience
Q 3. Why is the majority permitted to rule for a long time?
Ans. Because they are in the right, or fairest to the minority and physically the strongest.
Q.4. How do heroes, patriots, martyrs, and reformers serve the state, according to Thoreau?
Ans. With their conscience.
Q.5.How do feelings about sins progress from one state to another?
Ans. After the first blush of sins comes to its indifference, and from immoral it becomes, as it were, unmoral, and not quite unnecessary to live that we have made.
Q.6. When does a man meet an everlasting death?
Ans. When conscience is wounded, Through this wound a man’s real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to everlasting death.
Q.7. How many years did the author not pay the poll tax?
Ans. For six-years.
Q.8. Why was the author imprisoned for one night?
Ans. As he did not pay the poll-tax.
Q.9. Why does the writer refuse to pay the tax-bill?
Ans. Not because of any particular item in it, but because he simply wishes to refuse allegiance to the state and stand aloof from it.
Q.10. What is the author’s opinion about those who pay the tax?
Ans. They abet injustice to a greater extent than the state requires.
Q.11. What does Thoreau say about legislators of genius?
Ans. Thoreau says that no man with a genius for legislation has yet appeared in America.
More Brief
Q.1. How do the reformers serve the state?
Ans. Reformers want to change for the betterment of the people.
Q.2. When is a minority powerless?
Ans. while it conforms/abides by (মেনে চলা) to the majority.
Q.3. Who uses their conscience to serve the state?
Ans. Very few people such as heroes, patriots, martyrs, and reformers.
Q.4.What is the result of an undue respect for law?
Ans. In undue respect for the law is the creation of a fete of soldiers, colonel, and captain.
Q.5. Who, according to Thoreau, are the enemies of the state?
Ans. Heroes, martyrs, patriots, and reformers are regarded as enemies of the state.
Q.6. What kind of state does Thoreau dream of?
Ans. Thoreau dreams of a state which treats the individual with respect, and not to interfere with his freedom.
Q.7. In Thoreau’s opinion, what action is essentially revolutionary?
Ans. The perception and performance of the right changes in things and relations; are essentially revolutionary.
Q.8. What is Thoreau’s opinion regarding voting?
Ans. Thoreau regards voting as a sort of gaming like checkers and backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it. It is playing with right or wrong.
Shakespeare’s Sister Brief Suggestion
Q.1. Why does the author say that fiction (imaginative work) is like a web?
Ans. A spider’s web is a complicated structure. Fiction is likewise, a very complicated thing, and has to be connected with the deep recesses of life.
Q.2. What kind of an affair was marriage during the Elizabethan age in England?
Ans. Marriage was an affair of family avarice, particularly in the chivalrous upper classes.
Summary: Shakespeare’s Sister
Q.3. What was the position of women during the time of the Stuarts?
Ans. Women’s position did not change even during the next two hundred years. Still, the women of the upper and middle classes were not allowed to choose their own husbands.
Q.4. What intellectual status of women is found in fiction and in reality?
Ans. In fiction, some of the most inspired words fall from her lips and most profound thoughts come from her, but in reality, she could hardly read and spell words.
Q.5. What did an old bishop remark about women?
Ans. It was impossible for any woman, past, present, or future, to have the genius of Shakespeare.
Q.6. Why does the writer think the genius of women could not be born during the Elizabethan age?
Ans. Because Elizabethan women were forced to marry and start family life very early in life.
Q.7. What does the author say about Shakespeare’s state of mind when he wrote his dramas?
Ans. Shakespeare never said anything.
Q.8. What were the things that a girl was debarred from?
Ans. She was debarred from such alleviations as a walking tour, or a little journey to France to get shelter from the tyrannies of her family.
Q.9. What was the experiment of the dairy company?
Ans. They experimented with the effect of ordinary milk and Grade A milk on the rats.
Q.10. What was Mr. Oscar Brwning’s opinion about women?
Ans. The best woman was intellectually inferior to the worst man.
Q.11. What did Lady Bessborough write to Lord Granville Leveson-Gower?
Ans. She wrote that no woman had any business to meddle with that or any other serious business, further than giving her opinion.
Q.12. What are modern girl students likely to say?
Ans. Genius should disregard any dishonourable opinion.
Q.13. What is feminism?
Ans. Feminism is political, ideological, and social movement that share a common goal to establish equal political, economic, and social rights for women.
Q.14. What is the name of Shakespeare’s imaginary sister?
Ans. Judith
Q.15.. How does Mr. Oscar evaluate a woman’s intellect?
Ans. The best woman was intellectually inferior to the worst man.
More Brief
Q.1. What does Virginia Woolf want to know from the historians?
Ans. She wanted to know under what conditions women lived in England in the Elizabethan period.
Q.2. Women of what particular period does Virginia Woolf attack in ‘Shakespeare’s Sister’?
Ans. Elizabethan Period.
Q.3. How were women treated by men in the essay ‘Shakespeare’s Sister’?
Ans. Women were locked up and beaten.
Q.4. What does Virginia Woolf refer to by the phrase “that extraordinary literature”?
Ans. The literature of the Elizabethan period of England.
Q.5. What question does Virginia Woolf raise about the Elizabethan age?
Ans. Why the Elizabethan women not write poetry or fiction in the Elizabethan age?
Tradition and Individual Talent Brief Suggestion
Q.1. What do every nation and every race have?
Ans. Every nation and every race has its own creative, as well as critical turn of mind.
Q.2. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance than what?
Ans. Merely following the immediate predecessors blindly.
Summary: Tradition and Individual Talent
Q.3. How does the writer define the historical sense?
Ans. To the writers, the historical sense is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal, and the timeless and the temporal together.
Q.4. What must the poet be conscious of?
Ans. The poet must be conscious of the main current.
Q.5.What does Eliot call this theory of poetry?
Ans. “impersonal theory of poetry”.
Q.6. How does the mind of the mature poet differ from that of the immature one?
Ans. Not in any valuation of personality, but in the capacity for becoming a medium for the expression of feelings and emotions.
Q.7. What is the mind of a poet?
Ans. The mind of a poet is a receptacle for storing up numberless feelings, phrases, and images.
Q.8. What does the author comment on Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”?
Ans. He says the ode contains a number of feelings, which have nothing to do with the nightingale, but that the nightingale served to bring together because of its name and fame.
Q.9. How does Eliot define his theory of the creation of poetry?
Ans. “poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.’’
Q.10. “Emotions recollected in tranquility” whose poetic theory is it?
Ans. William Wordsworth.
Q.11. What does Eliot comment on a bad poet?
Ans. A bad poet is usually unconscious.
More Brief
Q.1. How can tradition be obtained?
Ans. It must be obtained by hard labour, meaning by serious study and research.
Q.2. How is the emotion of art according to Eliot?
Ans. Impersonal.
Q. 3. What is the ‘impersonal theory of poetry”?
Ans. The personal feelings and emotions of a poet should be absent in composing poems.
Q.4. What is the function of a catalyst?
Ans. A catalyst is a substance that speeds up a chemical reaction.
Q.5. What does Eliot mean by ‘tradition”?
Ans. By ‘tradition’, Eliot does not mean to follow the ways of the immediate generation before us”. It involves the historical sense which in its turn, “involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past but of its presence.”
Q.6. What does Eliot mean by a continual extinction of personality?
Ans. Depersonalization.
Q.7. When should ‘tradition’ be positively discouraged?
Ans. if it meant blindly following.
Q.8. How is the mind of a poet like a catalyst?
Ans. The mind of a poet is a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, and images.
Literature and Society Brief Suggestion
Q.1. What does all of Mr. Eliot’s early prose lay stress on?
Ans. Mr. Eliot’s early prose lays stress on other things besides individual talent.
Q.2. Who formulated the idea of Tradition?
Ans. T.S. Eliot formulated the idea of Tradition.
Summary: Literature and Society
Q.3. Which phrase used by Leavis might be called misleading?
Ans. The phrase “the Romantic attitude”,
Q.4. What did the Augustan tradition originate in?
Ans. The great changes in civilization.
Q.5. Whom does Leavis regard as such a genius in the late 18th century?
Ans. William Blake.
Q.6. What did Blake essentially do?
Ans. Blake essentially reversed for himself the shift of stress that occurred at the Restoration.
Q.7. What did not make Blake prosperously self-sufficient?
Ans. The measure of collaboration and support.
Q.8. What was Bunyan’s aim in The Pilgrim’s Progress?
Ans. To preach his Puritan religious outlook.
Q.9. How did the Southern Appalachians acquire the culture?
Ans. The cycle of Generation/ Generation after generation.
Q.10. What does Bunyan himself show?
Ans. Bunyan himself shows how popular culture could merge with literary culture at the level of great literature.
More Brief
Q.1. How does Wordsworth differ from Blake? Or, In which respect is Wordsworth and Blake different?
Ans. Blake and Wordsworth are different from each other in respect of the kind of interests they had. Blake showed interest in the people or “folk”, whereas Wordsworth showed interest in something felt as external to the world.
Q.2. What can only the trained frequentation of literature bring?
Ans. The sensitizing familiarity with the subtleties of language.
Q.3. What are the “Other things” that Leavis say “were present in Literary history and criticism”?
Ans. The “Other things” are influences, environments, and the extra-literary conditions of literary production.
Q.4. What did the romantic critical tradition lay stress on?
Ans. Inspiration and individual genius.
Q.5. What is “The Pilgrim’s progress”?
Ans. The Pilgrim’s Progress is the most widely read book in English and the greatest work of John Bunyan.
Q.6. What should the poet be alert of?
Ans. He must be aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same.
Q.7. Who is the author of The Pilgrim’s Progress”?
Ans. John Bunyan.
Q.8. What did romantic poets lay stress on, according to Leavis?
Ans. Inspiration and individual genius.
Q.9. What was Mr. Eliot’s early prose directed against, according to F.R. Leavis?
Ans. Against the Romantic tradition.
Q.10. What does F.R. Leavis call the Romantic tradition of criticism?
Ans. An atmosphere of the unformulated and vague.
Must Watch and justify yourself-12 Brief
a)In The American Scholar’, why does Emerson believe that books can be dangerous?
Ans. Because they tempt the scholar away from original thought.
b)What, according to Emerson, is our dictionary?
Ans. According to Emerson,Life is our dictionary.
c) When is a minority powerless?
Ans. While it conforms to the majority.
d)Why does the writer refuse to pay thetax-bill?
Ans. Not because of any particular item in it, but because he simply wishes to refuge allegiance to the state, to withdraw and stand aloof from it.
e)How did Mr. Oscar evaluate women’s intellect?
Ans. His opinion about women was that the best of women was intellectually inferior to the worst man.
f)Why do the mighty poets die in misery?
Ans. Due to the world’s notorious indifference.
g)What is feminism?
Ans. The belief that women should be allowed the same rights, power and privileges in society as men and be treated equally with men.
h)Why was Thoreau imprisoned for one night?
Ans.As he did not pay the poll-tax.
i.Whom does Leavis consider as a genius in the late eighteenth century?
Ans. William Blake.
j)What does Eliot say about a bad poet?
Ans. Eliot says that a bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be unconscious and conscous where he ought to be unconscious.
k)How can tradition be obtained?
Ans.Tradition must be obtained by hard labour meaning by serious study and research.
I)When can a man become a patriot of another man’s thinking?
Ans. Man thinking recognizes the interconnectedness of all things and that anything they do should be for the betterment of society as a whole.
