Which of the following terms are used by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his theory of imagination?
Show Hint
- Primary imagination, secondary imagination, and fancy
- Negative capability, Hellenism, and impersonality
- Egotistical sublime, oversoul, and pantheism
- Unacknowledged legislation, atheism, and anarchy
The Correct Option is A
Solution and Explanation
Step 1: Coleridge's theory of imagination.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria (1817), distinguished between three faculties:
- Primary Imagination: the living power of perception, a repetition of the infinite act of creation in the finite mind.
- Secondary Imagination: an echo of the primary imagination, but operating consciously with will, shaping and unifying artistic creation.
- Fancy: a mechanical faculty of association, dealing with fixity, memory, and ornamentation rather than creativity.
Step 2: Eliminate other options.
- (B) Negative capability (Keats), Hellenism (Arnold), impersonality (Eliot).
- (C) Egotistical sublime (Keats on Wordsworth), Oversoul (Emerson), pantheism (general philosophy).
- (D) Unacknowledged legislation (Shelley), atheism/anarchy (political concepts).
Only (A) belongs to Coleridge.
\[
\boxed{\text{Option (A) is correct.}}
\]
Top GATE XH-C2 English Literature Questions
- Who published the novel The Bell Jar under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas?
- In which collection did Walt Whitman's poem "Song of Myself" first appear?
- Who wrote the introduction to Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali?
- Identify the title of the poem in which the following lines appear:
"He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint
For in everything he did he served the greater community." - Identify the point of view used in the following passage: "You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning. But here you are, and you cannot say that the terrain is entirely unfamiliar, though the details are fuzzy."
Top GATE XH-C2 Literary criticism Questions
- Cleanth Brooks's definition of 'paradox' in poetry foregrounds the following qualities:
- What does gynocriticism recommend as an approach to literature?
- Which of the following statement(s) is/are closely associated with the term Fetishism?
- Literary criticism considers which one of the following texts as offering the strongest support for mimetic theories of art?
- Assertion P: Dalit narratives tend to be read single-dimensionally as evoking the reader’s pity at the protagonist’s caste humiliation, or as telling the story of heroic protest against discrimination, or as a description of the protagonist’s rise from misery to triumph.
Assertion Q: There is a tendency to keep the Other in the space of difference, as perpetually exotic.
In the context of the assertions above, which one of the following statements is true?
Top GATE XH-C2 Questions
- "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is a/an____.
- Match the following pairs of fictional characters with the author who created them:
a Phileas Fogg and Jean Passepartout i William Shakespeare b Don Quixote and Sancho Panza ii Jules Verne c Candide and Pangloss iii Miguel de Cervantes d Dogberry and Verges iv Voltaire - Which one of the following is a famous detective character created by Edgar Allan Poe?
- "The horror! The horror!" - these are the last words of_____.
- Eric Arthur Blair was born in Motihari, Bihar. He went on to become famous as an author of a dystopian work which introduced the terms 'Newspeak', 'Thoughtcrime', and 'Doublespeak'. He wrote under the pseudonym______.