GC University, Lahore

Department of English
B.A. (Hons) Semester VII (Fall 2020)
4205: Research Methodology
Final Exam (25 January 2021)
Max Marks: 60 Time Allowed: 05Hours
Attempt all questions. All questions carry equal marks. The question paper comprises four
pages. Please start writing your answers on a Microsoft Word document which should clearly
state your name, roll number, and course title and exam title.
Instructions for submission
1. Please submit your answer paper in a Microsoft Word document. The file should carry
the exam title, your name and roll number, e.g., Final Exam-Ahmad Ali-105.
2. Upload the file in Microsoft Teams by 5:15 p.m. this evening, latest.
3. Please also email the answer file as an attachment to the following address:
[email protected]

Q. 1 Paraphrase the passage given below. Give in-text citation as well as an entry for works
cited list. (15)
This moment in history after the Cold War is referred to as the era of globalization and is marked
by the ascendancy and rapid politicizing of a single term: culture. During the Cold War, we
discussed socioeconomic or political developments, such as poverty and wealth, democracy and
dictatorship, as mainly local events. This new understanding of culture is less social than
political, tied less to the realities of particular countries than to global political events like the
tearing down of the Berlin Wall or 9/11. Unlike the culture studied by anthropologists—face-to-
face, intimate, local, and lived—the talk of culture is highly politicized and comes in large geo-
packages. Culture Talk assumes that every culture has a tangible essence that defines it, and it
then explains politics as a consequence of that essence. Culture Talk after 9/11, for example,
qualified and explained the practice of “terrorism” as “Islamic.” “Islamic terrorism” is thus
offered as both description and explanation of the events of 9/11. It is no longer the market
(capitalism), nor the state (democracy), but culture (modernity) that is said to be the dividing line
between those in favor of a peaceful, civic existence and those inclined to terror. It is said that
our world is divided between those who are modern and those who are premodern. The moderns
make culture and are its masters; the premoderns are said to be but conduits. But if it is true that
premodern culture is no more than a rudimentary twitch, then surely premodern peoples may not
be held responsible for their actions. This point of view demands that they be restrained,
collectively if not individually—if necessary, held captive, even unconditionally—for the good
of civilization. In post-9/11 America, Culture Talk focuses on Islam and Muslims who
presumably made culture only at the beginning of creation, as some extraordinary, prophetic act.
After that, it seems Muslims just conformed to culture. According to some, our culture seems to
have no history, no politics, and no debates, so that all Muslims are just plain bad. According to
others, there is a history, a politics, even debates, and there are good Muslims and bad Muslims.
In both versions, history seems to have petrified into a lifeless custom of an antique people who
inhabit antique lands. Or could it be that culture here stands for habit, for some kind of
instinctive activity with rules that are inscribed in early founding texts, usually religious, and
mummified in early artifacts?

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Excerpt from the book: Good Muslims, Bad Muslims: America the Cold War and the Roots of
terror by Mahmood Mamdani.
Published by Vanguard in 2005.
Pages 24-25

Q. 2 Summarize the passage given below. Give in-text citation as well as an entry for works
cited list. State the total number of words in the summarized passage. (15)

Feminism is a recent term, coined in the nineteenth century, but its intellectual history goes back
over half a millennium. Simply defined, feminism is the belief that women have the same human
capacities as men. While this claim may no longer seem controversial, the "woman question" has
provoked spirited debate in Western culture since at least the fifteenth century. At that time,
deeply held beliefs about women's physical, moral, and intellectual inferiority justified
patriarchal laws requiring female obedience to fathers and husbands. In response, critics began to
argue passionately that the common humanity of women and men far overshadows the biological
distinctions of sex. This central insight has evolved over the centuries into a variety of feminist
ideas that continue to inspire political movements throughout the world.
Even when men held formal power, however, women across cultures found myriad ways to
transcend or resist patriarchal rule. Elite women could enjoy wealth and political authority
through their connections to powerful male relatives. Some women reigned as queens. More
commonly, women's contributions to household production gave them leverage within their
families. Buddhist and Catholic religious convents in Asia, Europe, and the Americas provided
an alternative to marriage and opportunities for women to claim spiritual authority. When denied
formal education, women still created poetry, music, and art. And in villages from Africa to
North America, women's social net-works attempted to regulate male authority, as when they
publicly shamed abusive husbands.
Two features distinguish feminism from women's individual efforts to claim spiritual, familial,
or political authority. First, feminism explicitly rejects the legitimacy of patriarchal rule. Second,
feminism initiates social movements to alter laws and customs. A series of historical
transformations over the past six hundred years—including democratic politics and industrial
growth—made feminist critiques both possible and necessary. Intellectually, a new worldview
associated with "modernity" questioned inherited dogma and favored individual reason. From
this foundation a political theory based on individual rights encouraged the rejection of rule by
elites in favor of representative government. Simultaneously, the shift from agriculture to
manufacturing, from rural to urban life, and from family economies to market systems based on
wage labor reinforced the critique of social hierarchy.

Chapter: Introduction
Author: Estelle B. Freedman
Book: The Essential Feminist Reader
Editor: Estelle B. Freedman
Pages xi-xii
Publication House: The modern library
Publication year: 2007

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Q.3 Given below is the Works Cited page of a student’s dissertation. Using MLA 8 Style
Guide, correct all the errors. (15)

Works Cited: -

Kanwal, Aroosa. Rethinking Identities in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction. Palgrave

Gray, Richard. “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of
Crisis.” American Literary History, volume. 21, no. 1, 2008, pp. 128–151.,
doi:10.1093/alh/ajn061.

Gray, Richard. After the Fall: American Literature since 9/11. Wiley-Blackwell. 2015.

Qureshi, Emran, and Michael Anthony Sells. The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim
Enemy. Oxford University Press, 2005.

Versluys, Kristaan. Out of the Blue. New York: Columbia UP, 2009.

Michele Foucault. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979.
Translated by Graham Burchell. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Keightley, Emily. “Engaging with Memory.” Research Methods for Cultural Studies, editor
Michael Pickering, Edinburgh UP, 2008.

Spivak, Gayatri, Chakarvorty. Can the Subaltern Speak? Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial
Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, Columbia, 1994, pp.66-111.

Roy, Arundhati. An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. Flamingo, 2004.

Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Robin L. Riley, and Minnie Bruce Pratt. Feminism And War -
Confronting US Imperialism. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Bacevich, Andrew J. The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.

Q. 4 Given below are excerpts from a couple of students’ research papers. Edit them for
grammatical and MLA 8 errors. Please underline the parts that you have edited in your
answers. (15)

Passage A
When viewers are treated to gendered roles in performance at living history museums. It is also
important to consider the effects of those roles on the reenactors, who often do not create their

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own characters or choose their own costuming. The American studies critic and former historical
reenactor Amy Tyson touches on her experiences with gendered criticism in reenactment in her
article Men with Their Muskets and Me in My Bare Feet, which discusses her work at the
Fort Snelling living history museum in Minnesota. After describing an incident in which she was
criticized in a public locker room for a choice not to wear shoes that her supervisor deemed
historically inaccurate, Tyson began to investigate how feminine and masculine bodies (and
work) were policed as presenters of history and how criticisms were often rooted in “notions of
historical authenticity” (Tyson 54).
Tyson also observes, “while women were subject to scrutiny about, say, sewing, cooking,
and cleaning, men were most often scrutinized for their ability to march, fire muskets, be ‘good
soldiers,’—and to convincingly portray masculinity, in both its historic and present-day
dimensions, (“Men” 43)”. The demand to act as a “real” eighteenth-century man or woman also
bled into conversations between reenactors because the social norms were upheld behind the
scenes. In interviews with men who worked at Fort Snelling, Tyson found that “In terms of
material culture, it was not just booze and muskets that were grounds for assessing a fellow
interpreter’s masculinity in the men’s locker room. In the men’s locker room, there was a bell
that a few of them would ring from time to time if a particularly attractive female visitor had
been seen touring the fort on any given day. However, many of the men were not comfortable
with the locker room chatter. (“Men” 59).

Passage B
Throughout his collected works, from Hard Times to A Christmas Carol, Dickens used
antagonistic characters to showcase his suspicions concerning the authorial figures of law and
economic structure in Victorian England, the character Mr. Jaggers in Great Expectations acted
as the verbal embodiment of the ideologies of England, while Joe displayed Dickens’s own
disapproval of the oppressive modern regimes of power and advocacy of solutions. Dickens’s
unforgiving portrayal of Jaggers did not give the audience an ounce of sympathy or high regard
for the character, since Jaggers’s control and self-perceived superiority pervaded his life to the
point of his “frowning at his boots as if he suspected them of designs against him” (288).
However, near the work’s conclusion, Pip finally combated Jaggers by revealing information
unbeknown to him prior to the scene (Dickens, 411). After quietly standing for several moments,
stunned, Jaggers makes one final argument; instead of threatening or dismissing Pip, the lawyer
entertains an appeal to love. Though some may interpret this as a redemptive move, this scene
truly only fuels the utilitarian structuralist attitude of the lawyer, he attempts to diminish love by
reducing it to a rational argument. He tells a man in his office, “I’ll have no feelings here” (415).
Though he makes an emotional appeal, Jaggers solely invokes this argument to sway an
audience.