“The emancipation of women”, James Joyce told one of his friends, “has caused the greatest revolution in our time.” Other modernists agree: Virginia Woolf, claiming that in about 1910 “human character changed” and illustrating the new balance between the sexes, urged, “Read the ‘Agamemon’ and see whether your sympathies are not almost entirely with Clytemnestra”. D.H. Lawrence wrote “perhaps the deepest fight for 200 years and more has been the fight for women’s independence”. But if modernist writers considered women’s revolt against men’s domination as one of their “greatest” and “deepest” themes, only recently, perhaps in the past 15 years has literary criticism begun to catch up with it. Not that the images of sexual antagonism that abound in modern literature have gone unremarked far from it. We are able to see in literary works the perspective we bring to them and now that women are enough to make a difference in reforming canons and interpreting literature, the landscapes of literary history and the features of individual books have begun to change. (SNAP 2010)

According to the passage, modernists are changing literary criticism by

noting instances of hostility between men and women.

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seeing literature from fresh points of view.

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studying the works of early twentieth-century writers.

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reviewing books written by feminists.

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Solution

The correct option is B seeing literature from fresh points of view.
From the following extract, it can be inferred that B is the answer. “We are able to see in literary works the perspective we bring to them and now that women are enough to make a difference in reforming canons and interpreting literature.”.

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Q. “The emancipation of women”, James Joyce told one of his friends, “has caused the greatest revolution in our time.” Other modernists agree: Virginia Woolf, claiming that in about 1910 “human character changed” and illustrating the new balance between the sexes, urged, “Read the ‘Agamemon’ and see whether your sympathies are not almost entirely with Clytemnestra”. D.H. Lawrence wrote “perhaps the deepest fight for 200 years and more has been the fight for women’s independence”. But if modernist writers considered women’s revolt against men’s domination as one of their “greatest” and “deepest” themes, only recently, perhaps in the past 15 years has literary criticism begun to catch up with it. Not that the images of sexual antagonism that abound in modern literature have gone unremarked far from it. We are able to see in literary works the perspective we bring to them and now that women are enough to make a difference in reforming canons and interpreting literature, the landscapes of literary history and the features of individual books have begun to change. (SNAP 2010)

The author quotes James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and D.H. Lawrence primarily in order to show that

The law-and-literature movement claims to have introduced a valuable pedagogical innovation into legal study: instructing students in techniques of literary analysis for the purpose of interpreting laws and in the reciprocal use of legal analysis for the purpose of interpreting literary texts. The results, according to advocates, are not only conceptual breakthroughs in both law and literature but also more sensitive and humane lawyers. Whatever the truth of this last claim, there can be no doubt that the movement is a success: law-and-literature is an accepted subject in law journals and in leading law schools. Indeed, one indication of the movement’s strength is the fact that its most distinguished critic, Richard A. Posner, paradoxically ends up expressing qualified support for the movement in a recent study in which he systematically refutes the writings of its leading legal scholars and cooperating literary critics.

Critiquing the movement’s assumption that lawyers can offer special insights into literature that deals with legal matters, Posner points out that writers of literature use the law loosely to convey a particular idea or as a metaphor for the workings of the society envisioned in their fiction. Legal questions per se, about which a lawyer might instruct readers, are seldom at issue in literature. This is why practitioners of law and- literature end up discussing the law itself far less than one might suppose. Movement leader James White, for example, in his discussion of arguments in the Iliad, barely touches on law, and then so generally as to render himself vulnerable to Posner’s devastating remark that “any argument can be analogized to a legal dispute.”

Similarly, the notion that literary criticism can be helpful in interpreting law is problematic. Posner argues that literary criticism in general aims at exploring richness and variety of meaning in texts, whereas legal interpretation aims at discovering a single meaning. A literary approach can thus only confuse the task of interpreting the law, especially if one adopts current fashions like deconstruction, which holds that all texts are inherently uninterpretable.

Nevertheless, Posner writes that law-and-literature is a field with “promise”. Why? Perhaps, recognizing the success of a movement that, in the past, has singled him out for abuse, he is attempting to appease his detractors, paying obeisance to the movements institutional success by declaring that it “deserves a place in legal research” while leaving it to others to draw the conclusion from his cogent analysis that it is an entirely factitious undertaking, deserving of no intellectual respect whatsoever. As a result, his work stands both as a rebuttal of law-and-literature and as a tribute to the power it has come to exercise in academic circles.

Q. According to Posner, the primary difficulty in using literary criticism to interpret law is that

Q. Fill in the blank with the right choice of word.

Literary criticism has in recent years become increasingly ____; it is almost impossible for the non-literary person to understand its analyses.

Q. Which of the following works is/are considered to be the greatest literary works in Tamil literature from the Sangam period?

It can be inferred that the author believes which of the following about women who are literary critics?

I. They can make a unique contribution to society.
II. They must develop a new theory of the critical process.
III. Earlier, there were very few women in academic profession.

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