New UPESSC Assistant Professor pattern

Section	Questions	Marks
General Studies / GK	30	90
English	90	270
Total	120	360

• Time: 2 hours
• Each question: 3 marks
• Negative marking: 1 mark for each wrong answer
• English: 90 questions

The revised 30 + 90 structure and 360-mark pattern are independently reported in current 2026 sources.

GK/General Studies — 30 Questions

The new syllabus has these six units:

Unit 1 – Current Affairs

• Major national and international events
• Personalities in news
• Sports
• Current scientific research

Unit 2 – Teaching & Research Aptitude

• Nature, objectives, need and methods of teaching
• Evaluation
• Factors affecting teaching
• Meaning and methods of research
• Sources, collection and analysis of data
• Role of UGC in qualitative development of higher education

Unit 3 – Information & Communication Technology

• Meaning, advantages and disadvantages of ICT
• Internet and e-mail
• General abbreviations and terminology

Unit 4 – People & Environment

• People-environment interaction
• Environmental degradation: causes and solutions
• National and international environmental issues
• Environmental control

Unit 5 – Indian History & Geography

• Salient features of Indian culture
• Indian National Movement (1857–1950)
• Origin of the Universe and Solar System
• General Indian Geography

Unit 6 – Indian Constitution & Economy

• Preamble, Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles
• Legislature, Executive and Judiciary
• Election Commission and Public Service Commission
• Population, poverty and unemployment
• Planning and development
• Income Tax
• Agriculture, industry and trade
• Money, currency, banking and capital market

This six-unit structure is consistently reproduced in current 2026 UPESSC Assistant Professor material.

The crucial part: English — 90 Questions

UPESSC Assistant Professor English Syllabus

Formerly UPHESC — English, Subject Code 10

Update: UPESSC has introduced a revised Assistant Professor examination pattern with 30 General Studies/GK questions + 90 English questions. The English syllabus below is the earlier UPHESC syllabus, which can be used temporarily and updated when the new UPESSC English syllabus is officially confirmed.

Unit I: Literature and Society

Major literary periods:

• Renaissance
• Reformation
• Restoration
• Neo-Classical Period
• Romantic Period
• Victorian Period
• Modern Period
• Post-Modern Period

Unit II: British Drama

• Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta
• Ben Jonson: Everyman in His Humour
• William Shakespeare: Hamlet, King Lear, The Twelfth Night, As You Like It, The Tempest, King Henry IV, Part I & II
• John Dryden: All for Love
• William Congreve: The Way of the World
• John Webster: The Duchess of Malfi
• John Galsworthy: Strife, Escape
• George Bernard Shaw: Candida, Saint Joan, Man and Superman
• John Synge: The Playboy of the Western World
• T. S. Eliot: Murder in the Cathedral
• Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot
• John Osborne: Look Back in Anger
• Harold Pinter: The Birthday Party
• Arnold Wesker: Roots

Unit III: British Prose and Fiction

Prose

• Francis Bacon: “Of Truth,” “Of Revenge,” “Of Studies,” “Of Marriage and Single Life,” “Of Regimen of Health”
• John Milton: Areopagitica
• Addison and Steele: Coverley Papers from The Spectator
• Charles Lamb: “The South Sea House,” “Dream Children,” “Christ Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago,” “The Convalescent,” “Poor Relations,” “Imperfect Sympathies”
• Thomas Carlyle: “The Hero as a Poet”
• William Hazlitt: “Public Opinion,” “On Reading Old Books,” “On Reading New Books”
• T. B. Macaulay: “Minutes on Education” (1835)
• Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own
• George Orwell: “Politics and the English Language”

Fiction

• Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews
• Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice
• Charles Dickens: Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities
• George Eliot: Middlemarch
• Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D’Urbervilles
• D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers
• Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory
• William Golding: Lord of the Flies
• Iris Murdoch: The Sea

Unit IV: British Poetry

• Geoffrey Chaucer: The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales
• Edmund Spenser: The Faerie Queene, Book I
• John Donne: “The Canonization,” “The Flea,” “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” “Go and Catch a Falling Star,” “A Hymn to God the Father”
• John Milton: Paradise Lost, Books I & II
• John Dryden: Absalom and Achitophel
• Alexander Pope: The Rape of the Lock
• William Blake: “London”
• Thomas Gray: “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
• William Wordsworth: The Prelude, Book I; “Tintern Abbey”
• S. T. Coleridge: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” “Kubla Khan”
• P. B. Shelley: “Ode to the West Wind,” “Adonais,” “England in 1819”
• John Keats: “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “To Autumn”
• Alfred Lord Tennyson: “The Lady of Shalott,” “Ulysses,” The Princess, “The Lotos-Eaters”
• Robert Browning: “Rabbi Ben Ezra,” “Prospice,” “A Grammarian’s Funeral,” “The Last Ride Together,” “My Last Duchess”
• Matthew Arnold: “The Scholar-Gipsy,” “Thyrsis,” “Dover Beach”
• W. B. Yeats: “Easter 1916,” “The Second Coming,” “A Prayer for My Daughter,” “Among School Children,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Lapis Lazuli,” “Byzantium”
• T. S. Eliot: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Waste Land, “Burnt Norton”
• W. H. Auden: “Petition,” “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” “Consider,” “The Shield of Achilles,” “Partition,” “The Unknown Citizen”
• Philip Larkin: “The Whitsun Weddings,” “Ambulances,” “Church Going”
• Ted Hughes: “The Crow,” “Hawk Roosting,” “The Thought-Fox”

Unit V: Literary Theory and Criticism

• Aristotle: Poetics
• Longinus: On the Sublime
• John Dryden: An Essay of Dramatic Poesy
• Dr. Samuel Johnson: “Preface to Shakespeare”
• William Wordsworth: “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”
• S. T. Coleridge: Biographia Literaria — Chapters XIII, XIV & XVIII
• Matthew Arnold: “The Study of Poetry,” “Shelley,” “Wordsworth,” Culture and Anarchy
• T. S. Eliot: “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “Hamlet,” “The Metaphysical Poets”
• I. A. Richards: The Principles of Literary Criticism
• F. R. Leavis: “Johnson and Augustanism,” “Literature and Society,” “Literary Criticism and Philosophy”
• Practical Criticism

Unit VI: Literary Theory and Literary Criticism

• Structuralism
• Deconstruction
• Historicism
• New Historicism
• Feminism
• Post-Colonialism
• Cultural Theory
• Russian Formalism
• New Criticism
• Psycho-analytical Criticism
• Marxism
• Reader-Response Theory
• Technological Criticism
• Indian Poetics
  • Rasa School
  • Dhvani School

Unit VII: American Literature

Poetry

• R. W. Emerson: “Each and All,” “Hamatreya,” “Brahma,” “The Over-Soul”
• Walt Whitman: “One’s Self I Sing,” “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” “A Passage to India,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
• Emily Dickinson: “I never lost as much but twice,” “Success is Counted Sweetest,” “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” “If I should die and you should live”
• Robert Frost: “Birches,” “Mending Wall,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “The Road Not Taken,” “Mowing,” “The Death of the Hired Man”
• Wallace Stevens: “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “The World as Meditation”

Drama

• Eugene O’Neill: The Hairy Ape
• Tennessee Williams: The Glass Menagerie
• Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman

Fiction and Prose

• Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
• Ernest Hemingway: The Old Man and the Sea
• Herman Melville: Moby-Dick
• Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
• H. D. Thoreau: “Civil Disobedience”

Unit VIII: Indian Literature in English

• Toru Dutt: “Lakshman,” “The Lotus,” “Our Casuarina Tree”
• Sarojini Naidu: “Palanquin Bearers,” “Bangle-Sellers,” “Weavers,” “The Flute-Players,” “Of Vrindavan”
• R. N. Tagore: Gitanjali
• M. K. Gandhi: Hind Swaraj
• Swami Vivekananda: “Chicago Lecture”
• Sri Aurobindo: Savitri, Canto I; “The Future Poetry”; “Is India Civilized?”
• Nissim Ezekiel: “A Time to Change,” “Enterprise,” “Poet, Lover, Birdwatcher,” “Background, Casually”
• Kamala Das: “An Introduction,” “My Grandmother’s House,” “Summer in Calcutta”
• A. K. Ramanujan: “Self-Portrait,” “A River,” “The Fall,” “Fear No Fall”
• Raja Rao: Kanthapura
• R. K. Narayan: The Guide
• Anita Desai: Cry, the Peacock
• Shashi Deshpande: That Long Silence

Unit IX: Linguistics, Phonetics & Modern Grammar

1. Properties of Human Language
2. Scope and Branches of Linguistics
3. Language Varieties and Language Change
4. Saussure’s Concept of Linguistic Sign
5. Immutability and Mutability of the Sign
6. Speech Mechanism and Phonemes in English
7. Consonant Clusters
8. Syllables and Word Stress
9. English Morphology and Syntax
10. Chomsky’s Transformational and Generative Grammar
11. Leech’s Communicative Grammar
12. Stylistics and Literary Criticism
13. Discourse Analysis
14. ELT & ESP
15. Language Planning

Unit X: New Literatures in English

Australian and New Zealand Literature

• Patrick White: Voss
• Sally Morgan: My Place
• Peter Porter: “Your Attention Please”
• Ray Lawler: Summer of the Seventeenth Doll
• Allen Curnow: “Time,” “House and Land”

Canadian Literature

• M. G. Vassanji: “Am I a Canadian Writer?”
• Marshall McLuhan: The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man
• Margaret Atwood: Surfacing
• A. M. Klein: “Indian Reservation: Caughnawaga”
• P. K. Page: “First Neighbours”
• Earle Birney: “Bushed,” “The Bear on the Delhi Road”

African and Caribbean Literature

• Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart
• Dennis Brutus: “A Common Hate Enriched Our Love and Us”
• Gabriel Okara: “The Mystic Drum”
• David Diop: “Africa”
• Edward Brathwaite: “Tizzic”
• Derek Walcott: “Ruins of a Great House”
• Mervyn Morris: “Judas”
• Wole Soyinka: The Lion and the Jewel
• Nadine Gordimer: “English Language Literature and Politics in South Africa”