SSC CGL 2025 PYQ — Question 17

In the given passage, some words have been deleted. Read the passage intently and choose the most appropriate option to fill in each blank:

Literature, far from being a static repository of aesthetic delight, is a restless medium through which cultures interrogate themselves. The novel, the poem, the play—all are not merely forms but fields wherein ideologies (1) ____, mutate, and sometimes dissolve. To read deeply is to risk disorientation, for every interpretation implies an act of displacement: of authorial intent, of reader expectation, of historical certainty. The literary canon itself is less a monument than a (2) ____—a site of contestation shaped by inclusion, exclusion, and reinvention. A Shakespearean soliloquy may bear universal resonance, yet it also emerges from a matrix of Elizabethan anxieties and power structures. The illusion of timelessness is, more often than not, a function of critical emphasis rather than intrinsic merit. Postcolonial and feminist critiques have challenged this apparent neutrality, foregrounding the voices that were once peripheral. Such interventions have not diminished literature’s prestige but instead (3) ____ its moral and political stakes. Texts once considered apolitical are now read as cultural artifacts entangled in empire, patriarchy, and resistance. In this light, literary criticism becomes an act not of judgment but of (4) ____—an excavation of silences as much as meanings. The reader, then, is not a passive consumer but a co-creator, whose insights must be (5) ____ with humility and historical awareness.