F.R. Leavis's 1932 book New Bearings in English Poetry was a massive attack on 19th-century Victorian and Romantic poetry.

His goal was to "recast the canon" to show that T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Gerard Manley Hopkins were the true future of poetry. To do this, he fiercely downgraded the Victorian giants (like Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold), arguing their poetry was too dreamy, musical, and divorced from the harsh intelligence of modern life. (He would later famously downgrade Milton and Shelley in his 1936 book Revaluation).

Statement I is False: It claims Deconstruction argues for a "self-sufficient union of signifier and signified." This is the exact opposite of Deconstruction. That was Ferdinand de Saussure's (Structuralism) idea. Jacques Derrida (Deconstruction) argued that the signifier and signified are never united; meaning is always delayed and slipping away (différance).

Statement II is True: Deconstruction argues that language is "non-referential" (it doesn't point directly to a real, solid object in the real world). A word only has meaning because it bounces off other words in an endless "play of signifiers" (e.g., you only know what "cold" means by contrasting it with "hot").

The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin published his highly influential book The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (compiled in English in 1981). The book introduced the concepts of Heteroglossia and the Chronotope. The four essays contained in it are:

1. "Epic and Novel"
2. "From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse" (Note: Option A is slightly misworded).
3. (D) "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel"
4. (B) "Discourse in the Novel"

Noam Chomsky is the father of modern generative linguistics.

• (A) Syntactic Structures (1957): The revolutionary book that introduced transformational-generative grammar to the world, destroying the old behaviorist models.
• (D) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965): Chomsky's follow-up book which established the "Standard Theory" of generative grammar (introducing the concepts of Deep Structure and Surface Structure).

(Note: "Verbal Behavior" is by B.F. Skinner. "Language and Society" is by William Labov. "Politeness" is by Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson).

The Bulgarian-French structuralist critic Tzvetan Todorov published the highly influential essay "The Typology of Detective Fiction" in 1966.

In this essay, Todorov breaks down the specific narrative architecture of mystery novels. He famously argues that a traditional "whodunit" detective story actually contains two separate stories: the story of the crime (which has already happened in the past and is over) and the story of the investigation (which happens in the present as the detective uncovers the past).

This is one of the most famous definitions in Marxist cultural theory, coined by the French philosopher Louis Althusser in his 1970 essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses."

Althusser argues that "Ideology" isn't just a set of political beliefs. It is the invisible, subconscious framework that makes us feel like we have free will, masking the reality that we are just cogs in a capitalist machine. It represents our imaginary relationship to our real economic exploitation.

This question touches on Wolfgang Iser's Reader-Response theory regarding the "Implied Reader."

Assertion (A) is correct: The "implied reader" is not a real flesh-and-blood person holding the book. It is a theoretical construct built into the text by the author (the ideal audience the book expects to respond to its jokes or clues).

Reason (R) is correct: When Victorian authors (like Charlotte Brontë writing "Reader, I married him") address a "Dear Reader," they are creating a fictional persona of the audience. However, R does not explain the broad theoretical concept in A.

I.A. Richards was a foundational figure in Practical Criticism (the precursor to New Criticism).

• (B) Science and Poetry (1926): Argued that science deals with "referential" statements (true/false facts), while poetry deals with "emotive" pseudo-statements meant to organize human psychology.
• (C) The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936): Famous for inventing the terms "tenor" (the underlying idea) and "vehicle" (the figurative image) to explain how metaphors work.

(Note: Concepts of Criticism is by René Wellek. English Literature in Our Time is by F.R. Leavis).

In his famous 1973 book The Anxiety of Influence, the American literary critic Harold Bloom outlines this exact Freudian dilemma.

Bloom argues that for a young "ephebe" poet, the massive tradition of great writers (like Shakespeare or Milton) is both a blessing (providing inspiration) and a terrifying curse. The young poet suffers an "anxiety of influence," feeling that all the great ideas have already been written. To become great themselves, the young poet must deliberately misread, distort, and metaphorically "kill" their literary father.

The Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci (famous for his concept of "Cultural Hegemony") used the term "Philosophy of Praxis" extensively in his Prison Notebooks.

Because he was writing while imprisoned by Mussolini's fascist regime, Gramsci had to use coded language to get past prison censors. "Philosophy of Praxis" was his code word for Marxism. It emphasizes that abstract philosophy is useless unless it is applied to practical, real-world political action (praxis) to overthrow oppression.

J.G. Ballard's apocalyptic 1966 science fiction novel, The Crystal World, features this bizarre premise.

A physician travels to a leprosy clinic deep in the African jungle. He discovers a terrifying, apocalyptic phenomenon: the forest, the animals, and eventually people are being infected by an extraterrestrial virus that crystallizes and freezes them into beautiful, immortal, but lifeless jewel-like structures, effectively stopping time itself.

Matching major critical theory texts to their authors:

A. Homi K. Bhabha — (II) The Location of Culture (1994). The defining text of Postcolonial theory introducing concepts like mimicry, hybridity, and the third space.

B. T.S. Eliot — (III) Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948). A conservative essay arguing that culture must be organic, traditional, and led by a social elite.

C. Roland Barthes — (IV) Image-Music-Text (1977). A collection of structuralist/post-structuralist essays, famously containing "The Death of the Author."

D. John Fiske — (I) Reading the Popular (1989). A Cultural Studies text arguing that consumers actively resist dominant capitalist ideologies through pop culture.

Frantz Fanon (author of The Wretched of the Earth) adapted traditional Marxist theory to fit the realities of the colonized Third World.

Orthodox Marxists believed that all oppression in the world was based purely on economic class (rich vs poor). Fanon argued that in a colonial setting, Marxist theory must be stretched. He articulated that the primary divide is not just economic, but deeply racial: the colonizer is rich because they are white, and the colonized are poor because they are Black/Brown. Thus, race dictates class.

In 1968, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and his colleagues at the University of Nairobi wrote a highly influential, revolutionary memo titled "On the Abolition of the English Department."

They fiercely objected to the fact that in a newly independent African nation, the university still forced students to study the historic continuity of English literature (D) (from Shakespeare to T.S. Eliot) as the most important subject. They demanded the abolition of the "English Department," replacing it with a "Department of African Literature and Languages" that would end the primacy of English culture (A) and place African oral traditions (orature) and literature at the center of the syllabus.