English Literature Surveys and Criticism — LET Practice Questions

Personification gives human qualities to non-human things. In the line, the wind is described as 'whispering secrets'—whispering is a human action, and having secrets is a human trait. By attributing these qualities to the wind, the poet makes nature seem alive and intentional. Hyperbole exaggerates, onomatopoeia imitates sounds, and oxymoron combines contradictory terms. Personification is one of the most common and accessible poetic devices in English literature.

Stream of consciousness is a narrative technique that attempts to capture the continuous, unorganized flow of a character's thoughts and feelings—how the mind actually works, not how formal writing usually organizes ideas. Writers like James Joyce used stream of consciousness to show characters' associations, contradictions, and emotional currents without editorial shaping. It mimics the fluidity and apparent chaos of human thinking rather than imposing plot-like structure. It is not limited to poetry and can appear in any literary form.

Post-colonial criticism examines how colonization shaped both colonizer and colonized societies and how those power dynamics show up in literature. It analyzes themes of identity, cultural displacement, resistance to imperial rule, and contested meanings of 'home' and 'nation.' Scholars like Edward Said (Orientalism) showed how colonial-era writing often reflected and justified imperial ideology. The framework is especially useful for reading Filipino literature on the Spanish or American colonial periods, where English itself becomes a contested language of power — an inheritance from colonizers that is also now a tool for Filipino self-expression.