SNAP 2013 Question Paper

Read the following Passage carefully and answer the questions below:

A TED talk (the acronym stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design) is one of the routes to academic stardom that didn’t exist a decade ago. (The 30th anniversary celebration aside, curators only began posting fame-making free online videos in 2006.) Although TED plays an inordinate role in setting the tone for how ideas are conveyed—not only because of the reach of its videos but also through spinoffs like regional “TEDx” events and the TED Radio Hour, one of the few places nonpolicy intellectuals get substantial on-air time—it’s just one of a number of platforms that are changing the ecology of academic celebrity. These include similar ideas-in-nuggets conclaves, such as the Aspen Ideas Festival and PopTech, along with huge online courses and—yes, still—blogs. These new, or at least newish, forms are upending traditional hierarchies of academic visibility and helping to change which ideas gain purchase in the public discourse.

In a famous essay, “The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos,” first published in the early 90s, the literary scholar Stanley Fish wrote that “the flourishing of the lecture circuit has brought with it new sources of extra income ... [and] an ever-growing list of stages on which to showcase one’s talents, and geometric increase in the availability of the commodities for which academics yearn, attention, applause, fame, and ultimately, adulation of a kind usuallyreserved for the icons of popular culture.” Fish was Exhibit A among professors taking advantage of such trends, and his trailblazing as a lit-crit celebrity inspired the dapper, globe-trotting littheory operator Morris Zapp, a character in David Lodge’s academic satire Small World. But the world Fish was describing, where no one could live-tweet the lectures, let alone post the talks for worldwide distribution, now seems sepiatoned. “If David Lodge’s Morris Zapp were alive and kicking today,” observes John Holbo, an associate professor of philosophy at the National University of Singapore, and blogger at Crooked Timber and the Valve, “he’d be giving a TED talk, not an MLA talk. Which is to say: He wouldn’t be doing Theory. He probably wouldn’t be in an English department.”

Read the following Passage carefully and answer the questions below:

A spectre is haunting the world, just as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto of 1848. This time, however, it is not the spectre of communism but that of neoliberalism. Just as Marx and Engels reported of ‘a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre,’ there is once again an alliance, whether holy or unholy, that has formed to chase the ghost of neoliberalism from the world stage. In any case, it is a curious alliance that has committed to fighting neoliberalism: Religious leaders and artists, environmental activists and globalisation critics, politicians of the left and the right as well as trade unionists, commentators and academics. They all share a passion to unmask neoliberalism
as an inhuman, anti-social, and potentially misanthropic ideology or as a cynical exercise by strangely anonymous forces that wish to exploit the world to their own advantage.

The members of this colourful alliance against neoliberalism are as united in their opposition to neoliberalism as they are diverse. This suggests that neoliberalism cannot be too clearly defined as a concept. Rather, it is a broad umbrella under which very different groups with various points of view can meet. In the church of anti-neoliberalism, there is a place for anyone who believes that neoliberalism stands in the way of reaching his or her political goals. This may also explain the lack of any clear and coherent definition of neoliberalism among its dissenters.

Yet the most curious characteristic of neoliberalism is the fact that these days hardly anyone self-identifies as a neoliberal. In former times, ideological debates were fought between, say, conservatives and socialists, collectivists and individualists. While there may not have been any other agreement between these opposing groups, at least they would have agreed about their respective identities. A socialist would not have felt offended by a conservative calling him a socialist and vice-versa. In present-day debates around neoliberalism, on the other hand, most accused of holding ‘neoliberal’ views would not accept being called ‘neoliberal.’ Either they would insist on being something else (whether it is ‘liberal,’ ‘classical liberal,’ or ‘libertarian’), or they would simply claim to be misunderstood by their opponents. In any case, scarcely anybody wants to be a ‘neoliberal’ any more. For example, in an online survey of the readers of Andrew Norton’s blog, out of more than 1,200 participants not a single person selfidentified with the term, while ‘classical liberal,’ ‘conservative,’ and ‘libertarian’ were strong responses. These are strange debates indeed when the enemy you are fighting claims he does not exist.

Each of the following items is followed by four words or group of words. Fill in the blanks with the appropriate word or group of words.