Reading Comprehension

Despite that the people are less inclined to buy sculptures, why does it form an important art of the collection at 'Fifth Dimension'?

Directions: Read the following passage carefully and answer the question that follows.

The gallery named ‘Fifth Dimension’ was started by a young lady in 1978 and for about over 3 decades she has tried to work for the promotion of the young, upcoming and talented artists. Particularly, she has tried to promote the works in rather less explored media like sculpture and printmaking. It has been no less challenging experience for her. It is observed that the medium of sculpture has received comparatively less attention in the contemporary art than painting instead of sculpture for different reasons. However, sculpture has been an integral part of collection at ‘Fifth Dimension’. There are works in wood, terracotta, bronze, ceramic, stone and mixed media in its collection. Creations of Prabhu Katayal, an artist working with beaten and welded metal sheets finds a place in the collection. The themes of the works are mostly of mythical and lyrical nature. There is a sense of strength as well as lightness in his works. There are also works by a group of three artists who have been experimenting with ‘smooth against rough’ technique in granite. One of these artists works in a very interesting way of carving out facial forms with only one prominent feature like a finely rendered nose or mouth against a flat and rough ovoid face. Yet another sculptor who works in metal too has his share in the collection of the gallery. This sculptor’s work shows the influence of Chola bronzes i.e., the rich repository of cast-metal works carried out by the craftsmen during the Chola dynasty. Despite his leanings towards the traditional form of art, he has retained an abstract quality in his works.

How many names of artists/groups are mentioned in the passage in all?

Directions: Read the following passage carefully and answer the question that follows.

The gallery named ‘Fifth Dimension’ was started by a young lady in 1978 and for about over 3 decades she has tried to work for the promotion of the young, upcoming and talented artists. Particularly, she has tried to promote the works in rather less explored media like sculpture and printmaking. It has been no less challenging experience for her. It is observed that the medium of sculpture has received comparatively less attention in the contemporary art than painting instead of sculpture for different reasons. However, sculpture has been an integral part of collection at ‘Fifth Dimension’. There are works in wood, terracotta, bronze, ceramic, stone and mixed media in its collection. Creations of Prabhu Katayal, an artist working with beaten and welded metal sheets finds a place in the collection. The themes of the works are mostly of mythical and lyrical nature. There is a sense of strength as well as lightness in his works. There are also works by a group of three artists who have been experimenting with ‘smooth against rough’ technique in granite. One of these artists works in a very interesting way of carving out facial forms with only one prominent feature like a finely rendered nose or mouth against a flat and rough ovoid face. Yet another sculptor who works in metal too has his share in the collection of the gallery. This sculptor’s work shows the influence of Chola bronzes i.e., the rich repository of cast-metal works carried out by the craftsmen during the Chola dynasty. Despite his leanings towards the traditional form of art, he has retained an abstract quality in his works.

An artist among the group mentioned in the passage works in one of the following techniques

Directions: Read the following passage carefully and answer the question that follows.

The gallery named ‘Fifth Dimension’ was started by a young lady in 1978 and for about over 3 decades she has tried to work for the promotion of the young, upcoming and talented artists. Particularly, she has tried to promote the works in rather less explored media like sculpture and printmaking. It has been no less challenging experience for her. It is observed that the medium of sculpture has received comparatively less attention in the contemporary art than painting instead of sculpture for different reasons. However, sculpture has been an integral part of collection at ‘Fifth Dimension’. There are works in wood, terracotta, bronze, ceramic, stone and mixed media in its collection. Creations of Prabhu Katayal, an artist working with beaten and welded metal sheets finds a place in the collection. The themes of the works are mostly of mythical and lyrical nature. There is a sense of strength as well as lightness in his works. There are also works by a group of three artists who have been experimenting with ‘smooth against rough’ technique in granite. One of these artists works in a very interesting way of carving out facial forms with only one prominent feature like a finely rendered nose or mouth against a flat and rough ovoid face. Yet another sculptor who works in metal too has his share in the collection of the gallery. This sculptor’s work shows the influence of Chola bronzes i.e., the rich repository of cast-metal works carried out by the craftsmen during the Chola dynasty. Despite his leanings towards the traditional form of art, he has retained an abstract quality in his works.

The author refers to a paradoxical aspect. What is that aspect?

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question that follows.

Comparative Literature is a young discipline at the universities and colleges of West Germany: chairs have only been established since the Second World War. For a long time the subject was rejected by historians of literature for reasons not unworthy of consideration, and still today there are representatives of the traditional literary-philosophical departments who consider it superfluous in the sphere of universitas litteratum. But the opposition to Comparative Studies has a paradoxical aspect: most established literature departments are in their very being themselves comparative. Even the names of separate disciplines indicate that literature as a whole, which the comparatists regard as one and indivisible, was only split up from considerations of expedience—a consequence of the fundamentally justified connection between language and literature, but also a carry-over of the dangerous and outmoded nationalistic assumptions of the 19^th and 20^th centuries on to the supernational phenomenon literature.
And the name too, ‘Comparative Literature’, is not very meaningful. It is modeled on the no happier French designation: ‘Litterature comparee’. We keep it simply because we have found no better, for ‘Literary Studies’ would be too vague, and ‘Study of World Literature’ too presumptuous. Yet almost inevitably it gives the impression that the aims of Comparative Literature are limited to comparing German with French literature. Such a proceeding would not promise much success: a general comparison between several national literatures would remain far too vague to produce scientifically relevant results, and a comparison between two authors would reveal more characteristics dividing them than they have in common. Mere parallels seem even more dubious, derived from similarities of structure. As individual creations, works of art are not comparable—and the comparatist knows this as well as anybody else. His goal is no different from that of the nationally defined literary disciplines: it consists of understanding the literary work of art, from as many sides as possible. The difference lies in the conception of literature itself and in the methods.
Although by ‘literature’ we usually mean the established work of art, nevertheless the words of any author who has been able to bring his subject into an appropriate form may claim to count as a work of art—not only poetry but prose as well, not only the drama but also the novel, not only the short story but also the essay, the philosophical tract, the biography, history, specialized writing, and so forth—but only when the form is appropriate to the content. Appropriateness is as hard to grasp as most aesthetic categories: it remains dependent on the critic’s taste, and thus to a certain degree subjective. On the other hand taste is to be formed on the models of the masters, and here lies the necessity for a canon of aesthetically exemplary ‘classical’ authors, established by the consensus of connoisseurs, although at the same time always subject to revision.
The classical author sets to taste in prose and verse the limits of the possible. To know these limits we read the classics—not only Horace’s odes, however, but also the Art of Poetry, not only Dante’s Commedia but also the Vita nuova and De Vulgari Eloquentia, not only Goethe’s poems, plays and novels, but also the scientific and critical prose, the letters and conversations. We extend the realm of the literary beyond linguistic boundaries, and at the same time beyond the boundaries of the merely fictitious, the strictly ‘imaginative’; but we also raise our qualitative demands through an aesthetic criterion, so as not to risk being suffocated under the mass of what has been written. The history of literature is no telephone book for us, in which the subscribers are all listed together, no General Assembly of the United Nations in which the voices of the Great Powers count for no more than those of the smallest political provinces; it is the liber aureus of the aesthetically successful and historically effective works of literature. Only this limitation, which of course does not exclude individual penetration in depth, makes the meaningful study of Comparative Literature possible.

Which of the following appears to have been rejected by the comparatists completely?

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question that follows.

Comparative Literature is a young discipline at the universities and colleges of West Germany: chairs have only been established since the Second World War. For a long time the subject was rejected by historians of literature for reasons not unworthy of consideration, and still today there are representatives of the traditional literary-philosophical departments who consider it superfluous in the sphere of universitas litteratum. But the opposition to Comparative Studies has a paradoxical aspect: most established literature departments are in their very being themselves comparative. Even the names of separate disciplines indicate that literature as a whole, which the comparatists regard as one and indivisible, was only split up from considerations of expedience—a consequence of the fundamentally justified connection between language and literature, but also a carry-over of the dangerous and outmoded nationalistic assumptions of the 19^th and 20^th centuries on to the supernational phenomenon literature.
And the name too, ‘Comparative Literature’, is not very meaningful. It is modeled on the no happier French designation: ‘Litterature comparee’. We keep it simply because we have found no better, for ‘Literary Studies’ would be too vague, and ‘Study of World Literature’ too presumptuous. Yet almost inevitably it gives the impression that the aims of Comparative Literature are limited to comparing German with French literature. Such a proceeding would not promise much success: a general comparison between several national literatures would remain far too vague to produce scientifically relevant results, and a comparison between two authors would reveal more characteristics dividing them than they have in common. Mere parallels seem even more dubious, derived from similarities of structure. As individual creations, works of art are not comparable—and the comparatist knows this as well as anybody else. His goal is no different from that of the nationally defined literary disciplines: it consists of understanding the literary work of art, from as many sides as possible. The difference lies in the conception of literature itself and in the methods.
Although by ‘literature’ we usually mean the established work of art, nevertheless the words of any author who has been able to bring his subject into an appropriate form may claim to count as a work of art—not only poetry but prose as well, not only the drama but also the novel, not only the short story but also the essay, the philosophical tract, the biography, history, specialized writing, and so forth—but only when the form is appropriate to the content. Appropriateness is as hard to grasp as most aesthetic categories: it remains dependent on the critic’s taste, and thus to a certain degree subjective. On the other hand taste is to be formed on the models of the masters, and here lies the necessity for a canon of aesthetically exemplary ‘classical’ authors, established by the consensus of connoisseurs, although at the same time always subject to revision.
The classical author sets to taste in prose and verse the limits of the possible. To know these limits we read the classics—not only Horace’s odes, however, but also the Art of Poetry, not only Dante’s Commedia but also the Vita nuova and De Vulgari Eloquentia, not only Goethe’s poems, plays and novels, but also the scientific and critical prose, the letters and conversations. We extend the realm of the literary beyond linguistic boundaries, and at the same time beyond the boundaries of the merely fictitious, the strictly ‘imaginative’; but we also raise our qualitative demands through an aesthetic criterion, so as not to risk being suffocated under the mass of what has been written. The history of literature is no telephone book for us, in which the subscribers are all listed together, no General Assembly of the United Nations in which the voices of the Great Powers count for no more than those of the smallest political provinces; it is the liber aureus of the aesthetically successful and historically effective works of literature. Only this limitation, which of course does not exclude individual penetration in depth, makes the meaningful study of Comparative Literature possible.

Which of the following sums up the essence of the passage?

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question that follows.

Comparative Literature is a young discipline at the universities and colleges of West Germany: chairs have only been established since the Second World War. For a long time the subject was rejected by historians of literature for reasons not unworthy of consideration, and still today there are representatives of the traditional literary-philosophical departments who consider it superfluous in the sphere of universitas litteratum. But the opposition to Comparative Studies has a paradoxical aspect: most established literature departments are in their very being themselves comparative. Even the names of separate disciplines indicate that literature as a whole, which the comparatists regard as one and indivisible, was only split up from considerations of expedience—a consequence of the fundamentally justified connection between language and literature, but also a carry-over of the dangerous and outmoded nationalistic assumptions of the 19^th and 20^th centuries on to the supernational phenomenon literature.
And the name too, ‘Comparative Literature’, is not very meaningful. It is modeled on the no happier French designation: ‘Litterature comparee’. We keep it simply because we have found no better, for ‘Literary Studies’ would be too vague, and ‘Study of World Literature’ too presumptuous. Yet almost inevitably it gives the impression that the aims of Comparative Literature are limited to comparing German with French literature. Such a proceeding would not promise much success: a general comparison between several national literatures would remain far too vague to produce scientifically relevant results, and a comparison between two authors would reveal more characteristics dividing them than they have in common. Mere parallels seem even more dubious, derived from similarities of structure. As individual creations, works of art are not comparable—and the comparatist knows this as well as anybody else. His goal is no different from that of the nationally defined literary disciplines: it consists of understanding the literary work of art, from as many sides as possible. The difference lies in the conception of literature itself and in the methods.
Although by ‘literature’ we usually mean the established work of art, nevertheless the words of any author who has been able to bring his subject into an appropriate form may claim to count as a work of art—not only poetry but prose as well, not only the drama but also the novel, not only the short story but also the essay, the philosophical tract, the biography, history, specialized writing, and so forth—but only when the form is appropriate to the content. Appropriateness is as hard to grasp as most aesthetic categories: it remains dependent on the critic’s taste, and thus to a certain degree subjective. On the other hand taste is to be formed on the models of the masters, and here lies the necessity for a canon of aesthetically exemplary ‘classical’ authors, established by the consensus of connoisseurs, although at the same time always subject to revision.
The classical author sets to taste in prose and verse the limits of the possible. To know these limits we read the classics—not only Horace’s odes, however, but also the Art of Poetry, not only Dante’s Commedia but also the Vita nuova and De Vulgari Eloquentia, not only Goethe’s poems, plays and novels, but also the scientific and critical prose, the letters and conversations. We extend the realm of the literary beyond linguistic boundaries, and at the same time beyond the boundaries of the merely fictitious, the strictly ‘imaginative’; but we also raise our qualitative demands through an aesthetic criterion, so as not to risk being suffocated under the mass of what has been written. The history of literature is no telephone book for us, in which the subscribers are all listed together, no General Assembly of the United Nations in which the voices of the Great Powers count for no more than those of the smallest political provinces; it is the liber aureus of the aesthetically successful and historically effective works of literature. Only this limitation, which of course does not exclude individual penetration in depth, makes the meaningful study of Comparative Literature possible.

What is the underlying principle of self-help groups according to the passage?

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question that follows.

In Britain in 1970, a Manchester housewife named Katherine Fisher, after suffering from a desperate fear of leaving her own home, founded an organization for others with similar phobias. Today that organization, the Phobics’ Society, has many branches and is one of thousands of new groups cropping up in many of the high-technology nations to help people deal directly with their own problems—psychological, medical, social, or sexual.
In Detroit, some 50 “bereavement groups” have sprung up to aid people suffering from grief after the loss of a relative or friend. In Australia an organization called GROW brings together former mental patients and “nervous persons.” GROW now has chapters in Hawaii, New Zealand, and Ireland. In 22 states an organization called Parents of Gays and Lesbians is formed to help those with homosexual children. In Britain, Depressives Associated has some 60 chapters. From Addicts, Anonymous and the Black Lung Association to Parents Without Partners and Widow-to-Widow, new groups are forming everywhere.
Of course, there is nothing new about people in trouble getting together to talk out their problems and learn from one another. Nonetheless, historians can find little precedent for the wildfire speed with which the self-help movement is spreading today.
These organizations vary widely. Some share the new suspicion of specialists and attempt to work without them. They rely entirely on what might be termed “cross-counselling”—people swapping advice based on their own life experience, as distinct from receiving traditional counselling from the professionals. Some see themselves as providing support system for people in trouble. Others play a political role, lobbying for changes in legislation or tax regulations. Still others have a quasi-religious character. Some are intentional communities whose members not only meet but actually live together.
Such groups are now forming regional, even transnational linkages. To the extent that professional psychologists, social workers, or doctors are involved at all, they increasingly undergo a role change, shifting from the role of impersonal expert who is assumed to know best to that of listener, teacher, and guide who works with the patient or client. Existing voluntary or non-profit groups—originally organized for the purpose of helping others—are similarly struggling to see how they fit in with a movement based on the principle of helping oneself.
The self-help movement is thus restructuring the socio-sphere. Smokers, stutters, suicide-prone people, gamblers, victims of throat disease, parents of twins, overeaters, and other such groupings now form a dense network of organizations that mesh with the emerging Third Wave family and corporate structures.
But whatever their significance for social organization, they represent a basic shift from passive consumer to active prosumer, and they thus hold economic meaning as well. Though ultimately dependent on the market and still intertwined with it, they are transferring activity from Sector B of the economy to Sector A, from the exchange sector to prosumption sector. Nor is this burgeoning movement the only such force. Some of the richest and largest corporations in the world are also—for their own technological and economic reasons—accelerating the rise of the prosumer.

According to the passage, what factors lead to creation of prosumption sector?

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question that follows.

In Britain in 1970, a Manchester housewife named Katherine Fisher, after suffering from a desperate fear of leaving her own home, founded an organization for others with similar phobias. Today that organization, the Phobics’ Society, has many branches and is one of thousands of new groups cropping up in many of the high-technology nations to help people deal directly with their own problems—psychological, medical, social, or sexual.
In Detroit, some 50 “bereavement groups” have sprung up to aid people suffering from grief after the loss of a relative or friend. In Australia an organization called GROW brings together former mental patients and “nervous persons.” GROW now has chapters in Hawaii, New Zealand, and Ireland. In 22 states an organization called Parents of Gays and Lesbians is formed to help those with homosexual children. In Britain, Depressives Associated has some 60 chapters. From Addicts, Anonymous and the Black Lung Association to Parents Without Partners and Widow-to-Widow, new groups are forming everywhere.
Of course, there is nothing new about people in trouble getting together to talk out their problems and learn from one another. Nonetheless, historians can find little precedent for the wildfire speed with which the self-help movement is spreading today.
These organizations vary widely. Some share the new suspicion of specialists and attempt to work without them. They rely entirely on what might be termed “cross-counselling”—people swapping advice based on their own life experience, as distinct from receiving traditional counselling from the professionals. Some see themselves as providing support system for people in trouble. Others play a political role, lobbying for changes in legislation or tax regulations. Still others have a quasi-religious character. Some are intentional communities whose members not only meet but actually live together.
Such groups are now forming regional, even transnational linkages. To the extent that professional psychologists, social workers, or doctors are involved at all, they increasingly undergo a role change, shifting from the role of impersonal expert who is assumed to know best to that of listener, teacher, and guide who works with the patient or client. Existing voluntary or non-profit groups—originally organized for the purpose of helping others—are similarly struggling to see how they fit in with a movement based on the principle of helping oneself.
The self-help movement is thus restructuring the socio-sphere. Smokers, stutters, suicide-prone people, gamblers, victims of throat disease, parents of twins, overeaters, and other such groupings now form a dense network of organizations that mesh with the emerging Third Wave family and corporate structures.
But whatever their significance for social organization, they represent a basic shift from passive consumer to active prosumer, and they thus hold economic meaning as well. Though ultimately dependent on the market and still intertwined with it, they are transferring activity from Sector B of the economy to Sector A, from the exchange sector to prosumption sector. Nor is this burgeoning movement the only such force. Some of the richest and largest corporations in the world are also—for their own technological and economic reasons—accelerating the rise of the prosumer.

What, according to the writer, is this movement leading up to?

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question that follows.

In Britain in 1970, a Manchester housewife named Katherine Fisher, after suffering from a desperate fear of leaving her own home, founded an organization for others with similar phobias. Today that organization, the Phobics’ Society, has many branches and is one of thousands of new groups cropping up in many of the high-technology nations to help people deal directly with their own problems—psychological, medical, social, or sexual.
In Detroit, some 50 “bereavement groups” have sprung up to aid people suffering from grief after the loss of a relative or friend. In Australia an organization called GROW brings together former mental patients and “nervous persons.” GROW now has chapters in Hawaii, New Zealand, and Ireland. In 22 states an organization called Parents of Gays and Lesbians is formed to help those with homosexual children. In Britain, Depressives Associated has some 60 chapters. From Addicts, Anonymous and the Black Lung Association to Parents Without Partners and Widow-to-Widow, new groups are forming everywhere.
Of course, there is nothing new about people in trouble getting together to talk out their problems and learn from one another. Nonetheless, historians can find little precedent for the wildfire speed with which the self-help movement is spreading today.
These organizations vary widely. Some share the new suspicion of specialists and attempt to work without them. They rely entirely on what might be termed “cross-counselling”—people swapping advice based on their own life experience, as distinct from receiving traditional counselling from the professionals. Some see themselves as providing support system for people in trouble. Others play a political role, lobbying for changes in legislation or tax regulations. Still others have a quasi-religious character. Some are intentional communities whose members not only meet but actually live together.
Such groups are now forming regional, even transnational linkages. To the extent that professional psychologists, social workers, or doctors are involved at all, they increasingly undergo a role change, shifting from the role of impersonal expert who is assumed to know best to that of listener, teacher, and guide who works with the patient or client. Existing voluntary or non-profit groups—originally organized for the purpose of helping others—are similarly struggling to see how they fit in with a movement based on the principle of helping oneself.
The self-help movement is thus restructuring the socio-sphere. Smokers, stutters, suicide-prone people, gamblers, victims of throat disease, parents of twins, overeaters, and other such groupings now form a dense network of organizations that mesh with the emerging Third Wave family and corporate structures.
But whatever their significance for social organization, they represent a basic shift from passive consumer to active prosumer, and they thus hold economic meaning as well. Though ultimately dependent on the market and still intertwined with it, they are transferring activity from Sector B of the economy to Sector A, from the exchange sector to prosumption sector. Nor is this burgeoning movement the only such force. Some of the richest and largest corporations in the world are also—for their own technological and economic reasons—accelerating the rise of the prosumer.

Which of the following can definitely not be inferred from the passage?

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question that follows.

In Britain in 1970, a Manchester housewife named Katherine Fisher, after suffering from a desperate fear of leaving her own home, founded an organization for others with similar phobias. Today that organization, the Phobics’ Society, has many branches and is one of thousands of new groups cropping up in many of the high-technology nations to help people deal directly with their own problems—psychological, medical, social, or sexual.
In Detroit, some 50 “bereavement groups” have sprung up to aid people suffering from grief after the loss of a relative or friend. In Australia an organization called GROW brings together former mental patients and “nervous persons.” GROW now has chapters in Hawaii, New Zealand, and Ireland. In 22 states an organization called Parents of Gays and Lesbians is formed to help those with homosexual children. In Britain, Depressives Associated has some 60 chapters. From Addicts, Anonymous and the Black Lung Association to Parents Without Partners and Widow-to-Widow, new groups are forming everywhere.
Of course, there is nothing new about people in trouble getting together to talk out their problems and learn from one another. Nonetheless, historians can find little precedent for the wildfire speed with which the self-help movement is spreading today.
These organizations vary widely. Some share the new suspicion of specialists and attempt to work without them. They rely entirely on what might be termed “cross-counselling”—people swapping advice based on their own life experience, as distinct from receiving traditional counselling from the professionals. Some see themselves as providing support system for people in trouble. Others play a political role, lobbying for changes in legislation or tax regulations. Still others have a quasi-religious character. Some are intentional communities whose members not only meet but actually live together.
Such groups are now forming regional, even transnational linkages. To the extent that professional psychologists, social workers, or doctors are involved at all, they increasingly undergo a role change, shifting from the role of impersonal expert who is assumed to know best to that of listener, teacher, and guide who works with the patient or client. Existing voluntary or non-profit groups—originally organized for the purpose of helping others—are similarly struggling to see how they fit in with a movement based on the principle of helping oneself.
The self-help movement is thus restructuring the socio-sphere. Smokers, stutters, suicide-prone people, gamblers, victims of throat disease, parents of twins, overeaters, and other such groupings now form a dense network of organizations that mesh with the emerging Third Wave family and corporate structures.
But whatever their significance for social organization, they represent a basic shift from passive consumer to active prosumer, and they thus hold economic meaning as well. Though ultimately dependent on the market and still intertwined with it, they are transferring activity from Sector B of the economy to Sector A, from the exchange sector to prosumption sector. Nor is this burgeoning movement the only such force. Some of the richest and largest corporations in the world are also—for their own technological and economic reasons—accelerating the rise of the prosumer.

According to the passage the goal of the comparatist is

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question that follows.

Comparative Literature is a young discipline at the universities and colleges of West Germany: chairs have only been established since the Second World War. For a long time the subject was rejected by historians of literature for reasons not unworthy of consideration, and still today there are representatives of the traditional literary-philosophical departments who consider it superfluous in the sphere of universitas litteratum. But the opposition to Comparative Studies has a paradoxical aspect: most established literature departments are in their very being themselves comparative. Even the names of separate disciplines indicate that literature as a whole, which the comparatists regard as one and indivisible, was only split up from considerations of expedience—a consequence of the fundamentally justified connection between language and literature, but also a carry-over of the dangerous and outmoded nationalistic assumptions of the 19^th and 20^th centuries on to the supernational phenomenon literature.
And the name too, ‘Comparative Literature’, is not very meaningful. It is modeled on the no happier French designation: ‘Litterature comparee’. We keep it simply because we have found no better, for ‘Literary Studies’ would be too vague, and ‘Study of World Literature’ too presumptuous. Yet almost inevitably it gives the impression that the aims of Comparative Literature are limited to comparing German with French literature. Such a proceeding would not promise much success: a general comparison between several national literatures would remain far too vague to produce scientifically relevant results, and a comparison between two authors would reveal more characteristics dividing them than they have in common. Mere parallels seem even more dubious, derived from similarities of structure. As individual creations, works of art are not comparable—and the comparatist knows this as well as anybody else. His goal is no different from that of the nationally defined literary disciplines: it consists of understanding the literary work of art, from as many sides as possible. The difference lies in the conception of literature itself and in the methods.
Although by ‘literature’ we usually mean the established work of art, nevertheless the words of any author who has been able to bring his subject into an appropriate form may claim to count as a work of art—not only poetry but prose as well, not only the drama but also the novel, not only the short story but also the essay, the philosophical tract, the biography, history, specialized writing, and so forth—but only when the form is appropriate to the content. Appropriateness is as hard to grasp as most aesthetic categories: it remains dependent on the critic’s taste, and thus to a certain degree subjective. On the other hand taste is to be formed on the models of the masters, and here lies the necessity for a canon of aesthetically exemplary ‘classical’ authors, established by the consensus of connoisseurs, although at the same time always subject to revision.
The classical author sets to taste in prose and verse the limits of the possible. To know these limits we read the classics—not only Horace’s odes, however, but also the Art of Poetry, not only Dante’s Commedia but also the Vita nuova and De Vulgari Eloquentia, not only Goethe’s poems, plays and novels, but also the scientific and critical prose, the letters and conversations. We extend the realm of the literary beyond linguistic boundaries, and at the same time beyond the boundaries of the merely fictitious, the strictly ‘imaginative’; but we also raise our qualitative demands through an aesthetic criterion, so as not to risk being suffocated under the mass of what has been written. The history of literature is no telephone book for us, in which the subscribers are all listed together, no General Assembly of the United Nations in which the voices of the Great Powers count for no more than those of the smallest political provinces; it is the liber aureus of the aesthetically successful and historically effective works of literature. Only this limitation, which of course does not exclude individual penetration in depth, makes the meaningful study of Comparative Literature possible.

What is the thrust area of the passage?

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question that follows.

In Britain in 1970, a Manchester housewife named Katherine Fisher, after suffering from a desperate fear of leaving her own home, founded an organization for others with similar phobias. Today that organization, the Phobics’ Society, has many branches and is one of thousands of new groups cropping up in many of the high-technology nations to help people deal directly with their own problems—psychological, medical, social, or sexual.
In Detroit, some 50 “bereavement groups” have sprung up to aid people suffering from grief after the loss of a relative or friend. In Australia an organization called GROW brings together former mental patients and “nervous persons.” GROW now has chapters in Hawaii, New Zealand, and Ireland. In 22 states an organization called Parents of Gays and Lesbians is formed to help those with homosexual children. In Britain, Depressives Associated has some 60 chapters. From Addicts, Anonymous and the Black Lung Association to Parents Without Partners and Widow-to-Widow, new groups are forming everywhere.
Of course, there is nothing new about people in trouble getting together to talk out their problems and learn from one another. Nonetheless, historians can find little precedent for the wildfire speed with which the self-help movement is spreading today.
These organizations vary widely. Some share the new suspicion of specialists and attempt to work without them. They rely entirely on what might be termed “cross-counselling”—people swapping advice based on their own life experience, as distinct from receiving traditional counselling from the professionals. Some see themselves as providing support system for people in trouble. Others play a political role, lobbying for changes in legislation or tax regulations. Still others have a quasi-religious character. Some are intentional communities whose members not only meet but actually live together.
Such groups are now forming regional, even transnational linkages. To the extent that professional psychologists, social workers, or doctors are involved at all, they increasingly undergo a role change, shifting from the role of impersonal expert who is assumed to know best to that of listener, teacher, and guide who works with the patient or client. Existing voluntary or non-profit groups—originally organized for the purpose of helping others—are similarly struggling to see how they fit in with a movement based on the principle of helping oneself.
The self-help movement is thus restructuring the socio-sphere. Smokers, stutters, suicide-prone people, gamblers, victims of throat disease, parents of twins, overeaters, and other such groupings now form a dense network of organizations that mesh with the emerging Third Wave family and corporate structures.
But whatever their significance for social organization, they represent a basic shift from passive consumer to active prosumer, and they thus hold economic meaning as well. Though ultimately dependent on the market and still intertwined with it, they are transferring activity from Sector B of the economy to Sector A, from the exchange sector to prosumption sector. Nor is this burgeoning movement the only such force. Some of the richest and largest corporations in the world are also—for their own technological and economic reasons—accelerating the rise of the prosumer.

What, according to the author, is the only condition that must be met in order that the words of any author are termed as ‘literature’?

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question that follows.

Comparative Literature is a young discipline at the universities and colleges of West Germany: chairs have only been established since the Second World War. For a long time the subject was rejected by historians of literature for reasons not unworthy of consideration, and still today there are representatives of the traditional literary-philosophical departments who consider it superfluous in the sphere of universitas litteratum. But the opposition to Comparative Studies has a paradoxical aspect: most established literature departments are in their very being themselves comparative. Even the names of separate disciplines indicate that literature as a whole, which the comparatists regard as one and indivisible, was only split up from considerations of expedience—a consequence of the fundamentally justified connection between language and literature, but also a carry-over of the dangerous and outmoded nationalistic assumptions of the 19^th and 20^th centuries on to the supernational phenomenon literature.
And the name too, ‘Comparative Literature’, is not very meaningful. It is modeled on the no happier French designation: ‘Litterature comparee’. We keep it simply because we have found no better, for ‘Literary Studies’ would be too vague, and ‘Study of World Literature’ too presumptuous. Yet almost inevitably it gives the impression that the aims of Comparative Literature are limited to comparing German with French literature. Such a proceeding would not promise much success: a general comparison between several national literatures would remain far too vague to produce scientifically relevant results, and a comparison between two authors would reveal more characteristics dividing them than they have in common. Mere parallels seem even more dubious, derived from similarities of structure. As individual creations, works of art are not comparable—and the comparatist knows this as well as anybody else. His goal is no different from that of the nationally defined literary disciplines: it consists of understanding the literary work of art, from as many sides as possible. The difference lies in the conception of literature itself and in the methods.
Although by ‘literature’ we usually mean the established work of art, nevertheless the words of any author who has been able to bring his subject into an appropriate form may claim to count as a work of art—not only poetry but prose as well, not only the drama but also the novel, not only the short story but also the essay, the philosophical tract, the biography, history, specialized writing, and so forth—but only when the form is appropriate to the content. Appropriateness is as hard to grasp as most aesthetic categories: it remains dependent on the critic’s taste, and thus to a certain degree subjective. On the other hand taste is to be formed on the models of the masters, and here lies the necessity for a canon of aesthetically exemplary ‘classical’ authors, established by the consensus of connoisseurs, although at the same time always subject to revision.
The classical author sets to taste in prose and verse the limits of the possible. To know these limits we read the classics—not only Horace’s odes, however, but also the Art of Poetry, not only Dante’s Commedia but also the Vita nuova and De Vulgari Eloquentia, not only Goethe’s poems, plays and novels, but also the scientific and critical prose, the letters and conversations. We extend the realm of the literary beyond linguistic boundaries, and at the same time beyond the boundaries of the merely fictitious, the strictly ‘imaginative’; but we also raise our qualitative demands through an aesthetic criterion, so as not to risk being suffocated under the mass of what has been written. The history of literature is no telephone book for us, in which the subscribers are all listed together, no General Assembly of the United Nations in which the voices of the Great Powers count for no more than those of the smallest political provinces; it is the liber aureus of the aesthetically successful and historically effective works of literature. Only this limitation, which of course does not exclude individual penetration in depth, makes the meaningful study of Comparative Literature possible.

The author talks about three academies of the past that failed to deliver because

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question that follows.

A synthesis of the regional or group cultures into a common national culture has already been achieved thrice in the history of India—first with the fusion of the Aryan Dravidian, then with the Hindu and Buddhist and lastly with the fusion of Hindu and Muslim cultures. Today we are faced with the same problem. But this time it is more complex and has several new aspects to it.

Before we can think of a rational solution we must get rid of the futile mentality which urges some of us to try to revive the culture life which prevailed during the Vedic period. For this implies the exclusion of all elements which have come from outside, especially those of the Muslim culture; these have been so completely assimilated in the intellectual, aesthetic and social life of India that they have, as it were, entered the stream of the life-blood running through the veins of Indian culture. The attempt to separate these ingredients and get them out of the system through a process of blood-letting will never succeed. It will only enervate our culture and cause it to suffer from pernicious anaemia.
The first thing that we have to realize then is that the dominating complexion of the present common culture is that of the North Indian culture. That is why its influence over the South India is very limited. To be truly national it has to assimilate the best elements of the various regional cultures specifically those of the South Indian provinces. This requires a maximum cultural contact. Several important steps have already been taken in this direction. Youth festivals in the late fifties held every year at the beginning of the winter was a welcome step in that direction. It was an occasion for the university students from all parts of the country to live together for a few days and give one another glimpses into the cultural life of their respective regions—their music, dance, drama, paintings and sculpture etc. Earlier, three academies were set up, one, for the promotion of the representational arts, another for music, dance and drama and a third for literature. But these academies which bring together their members and Fellows only for a few days in the year cannot provide the continuous and permanent contact among the representatives of group cultures which is required for the process of fusion of the multifarious cultural elements fructifying into the lasting amalgam of a national culture. If they are to serve as cultural laboratories of the Gupta and Mughal periods, they should be turned into institutes where the Fellows are in a permanent residence and receive liberal pensions so that, free from all financial worries they can devote themselves whole-heartedly to evolving common expression to that inner spirit of unity, animating the various peoples of the vast land called India.
Writers’ Camps under the scheme of “Aadan Pradan” where writers of the various regional languages have their selected books published from each language into all others is a laudable course of action. Another course could be adopted to pull down the barriers separating the various linguistic groups and to awaken and foster the spirit of cultural unity among them is the large scale exchange of teachers. Under an exchange system, selected teacher from each linguistic region who knows several Indian languages could be induced with liberal terms to offer their services in different linguistic areas for sufficiently long periods so that they can enter into the spirit of the regional cultures and recognize in them local variants of the common culture of India. These teachers will prove, like the Fellows of the National Academies, to be the makers as well as the messengers of a national culture.

According to the author, if the culture that prevailed during the Vedic period were to be revived,

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question that follows.

A synthesis of the regional or group cultures into a common national culture has already been achieved thrice in the history of India—first with the fusion of the Aryan Dravidian, then with the Hindu and Buddhist and lastly with the fusion of Hindu and Muslim cultures. Today we are faced with the same problem. But this time it is more complex and has several new aspects to it.

Before we can think of a rational solution we must get rid of the futile mentality which urges some of us to try to revive the culture life which prevailed during the Vedic period. For this implies the exclusion of all elements which have come from outside, especially those of the Muslim culture; these have been so completely assimilated in the intellectual, aesthetic and social life of India that they have, as it were, entered the stream of the life-blood running through the veins of Indian culture. The attempt to separate these ingredients and get them out of the system through a process of blood-letting will never succeed. It will only enervate our culture and cause it to suffer from pernicious anaemia.
The first thing that we have to realize then is that the dominating complexion of the present common culture is that of the North Indian culture. That is why its influence over the South India is very limited. To be truly national it has to assimilate the best elements of the various regional cultures specifically those of the South Indian provinces. This requires a maximum cultural contact. Several important steps have already been taken in this direction. Youth festivals in the late fifties held every year at the beginning of the winter was a welcome step in that direction. It was an occasion for the university students from all parts of the country to live together for a few days and give one another glimpses into the cultural life of their respective regions—their music, dance, drama, paintings and sculpture etc. Earlier, three academies were set up, one, for the promotion of the representational arts, another for music, dance and drama and a third for literature. But these academies which bring together their members and Fellows only for a few days in the year cannot provide the continuous and permanent contact among the representatives of group cultures which is required for the process of fusion of the multifarious cultural elements fructifying into the lasting amalgam of a national culture. If they are to serve as cultural laboratories of the Gupta and Mughal periods, they should be turned into institutes where the Fellows are in a permanent residence and receive liberal pensions so that, free from all financial worries they can devote themselves whole-heartedly to evolving common expression to that inner spirit of unity, animating the various peoples of the vast land called India.
Writers’ Camps under the scheme of “Aadan Pradan” where writers of the various regional languages have their selected books published from each language into all others is a laudable course of action. Another course could be adopted to pull down the barriers separating the various linguistic groups and to awaken and foster the spirit of cultural unity among them is the large scale exchange of teachers. Under an exchange system, selected teacher from each linguistic region who knows several Indian languages could be induced with liberal terms to offer their services in different linguistic areas for sufficiently long periods so that they can enter into the spirit of the regional cultures and recognize in them local variants of the common culture of India. These teachers will prove, like the Fellows of the National Academies, to be the makers as well as the messengers of a national culture.