Revised Scheme and Syllabus for CSS Competitive Examination-2016
The paper is divided into six components along with the marks allocation for each
component.
I. Essays: (10 Marks)
Bertrand Russell (The Conquest of Happiness)
George Orwell (Politics and the English Language; The Prevention of Literature)
Ralph Waldo Emerson (The Transcendentalist; Self-reliance)
II. Short Stories: (10 Marks)
Somerset Maugham (The Lotus-eater)
G.K.Chesterton (A Somewhat Improbable Story)
O’Henry (The Gift of the Magi)
III. Poetry: (20 marks)
William Wordsworth (Resolution Independence; Tintern Abbey)
John Keats (Ode to a Nightingale; Ode to Autumn)
Lord Alfred Tennyson (Ulysses; The Lady of Shalott)
Yeats (A Dialogue of Self and Soul; The Second Coming)
Eliot (The Wasteland; Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)
Philip Larkin (Maturity; Continuing to Live; The Trees)
Wallace Stevens (A postcard from the volcano; Continual conversation with a
silent man; Dry loaf) OR Walt Whitman (As I ponder’d in silence; Are you the
new person drawn toward me?; This moment yearning and thoughtful)
IV. Drama: (20 marks)
Shakespeare (Hamlet; King Lear, As you like it and Twelfth Night)
William Congreve (The Way of the World)
Shaw (Pygmalion; Heartbreak House )
Harold Pinter (The Caretaker)
Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot)
Eugene O’Neill (Long Day’s Journey into Night)
V. Novels: (20 marks)
Thomas Hardy (Far from the Madding Crowd)
D.H. Lawrence (Sons and Lovers)
George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-four)
James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
Iris Murdoch (Under the Net)
Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter) or William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury)
VI. Literacy Theory & Criticism (20 Marks)
Structuralism
Marxism
Deconstructionism
Psychoanalytic criticism
Feminist criticism
Postcolonial Criticism