Department of English

Visva-Bharati
Santiniketan

B. A. Honours in English under CBCS

I. Core Courses

Paper 1: Indian Classical Literature

Course Objectives: The recommended syllabus familiarises entry-level students with the broad
rubric of genres and themes embodied in ancient and classical Indian literature. The purpose is to
allow them to connect literary and cultural developments beyond boundaries of single nations,
cultures and languages. Given the essential porosity of all literature, art, knowledge and culture,
it is important to give students exposure to the comparatist methodology right from the outset of
the three-year Honours programme. Without understanding the traffic of ideas and motifs
between continents, students will not arrive at a truly contemporary reading of world literature in
the ancient and classical world of the West and the East.

Learning Outcome: Given that we make judicious use of the leverage given to departments for
partial modification of the syllabus on the basis of existing areas of specialization and preference
among teachers, we can vouch that students successfully completing this course will have gained
a selective but in-depth understanding of the particularities of Indian literature and culture and its
moorings in socio-political realities of those centuries. Parallelly, it will certainly have groomed
them in reading the different core papers both historically and relationally. The suggested
reading ensures that due importance is given to framing the discussion of literary texts against
the salient critical positions articulated by theorists and critics emerging from that time-period.

1. Kalidasa Abhijnana Shakuntalam, tr. Chandra Rajan, in Kalidasa: The Loom of Time (New
Delhi: Penguin, 1989).
2. Vyasa ‘The Dicing’ and ‘The Sequel to Dicing, ‘The Book of the Assembly Hall’, ‘The
Temptation of Karna’, Book V ‘The Book of Effort’, in The Mahabharata: tr. and ed. J.A.B. van
Buitenen (Chicago: Brill, 1975) pp. 106–69.
3. Sudraka Mrcchakatika, tr. M.M. Ramachandra Kale (New Delhi: MotilalBanarasidass, 1962).
4. IlangoAdigal ‘The Book of Banci’, in Cilappatikaram: The Tale of an Anklet, tr. R.
Parthasarathy (Delhi: Penguin, 2004) book 3.

Suggested Topics and Background Prose Readings for Class Presentations Topics
The Indian Epic Tradition: Themes and Recensions
Classical Indian Drama: Theory and Practice
Alankara and Rasa Dharma and the Heroic

Readings
1. Bharata, Natyashastra, tr. Manomohan Ghosh, vol. I, 2nd edn (Calcutta: Granthalaya, 1967)
chap. 6: ‘Sentiments’, pp. 100–18.
2. IravatiKarve, ‘Draupadi’, in Yuganta: The End of an Epoch (Hyderabad: Disha, 1991) pp. 79–
105.
3. J.A.B. Van Buitenen, ‘Dharma and Moksa’, in Roy W. Perrett, ed., Indian Philosophy, vol. V,
Theory of Value: A Collection of Readings (New York: Garland, 2000) pp. 33–40.
4. Vinay Dharwadkar, ‘Orientalism and the Study of Indian Literature’, in Orientalism and the
Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, ed. Carol A. Breckenridge and Peter van
der Veer (New Delhi: OUP, 1994) pp. 158–95.

Paper 2: European Classical Literature

Course Objectives: It was any way imperative to route an intensive reading in early, medieval
and early modern British literature through ancient and classical Greco-Roman literature and
culture. The broadly representative selection, along with the semester-to-semester revisions we
make to break the monotony and to sync the selection with changing thrusts in subsequent
papers, ensures that students probe intensively in patterns of thought, motifs and representational
strategies. Class presentations in related subjects are encouraged to ensure independent and
shared explorations beyond the texts designated for detailed study.

Learning Outcome: We would like to think that the course we design and then implement after
revisions provides an optimal balance between broad historical overview and close textual
explorations. Students move on from this course with a nuanced grounding in the remarkable
maturity and modernity of classical literature and the classical underpinnings of much modern
works and even contemporary writing today.

1. Homer The Iliad, tr. E.V. Rieu (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1985).

2. Sophocles Oedipus the King, tr. Robert Fagles in Sophocles: The Three Theban Plays
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984).
3. Plautus Pot of Gold, tr. E.F. Watling (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965).
4. Ovid Selections from Metamorphoses ‘Bacchus’, (Book III), ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ (Book
IV), ‘Philomela’ (Book VI), tr. Mary M. Innes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975). Horace Satires
I: 4, in Horace: Satires and Epistles and Persius: Satires, tr. Niall Rudd (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 2005).

Suggested Topics and Background Prose Readings for Class Presentations Topics
The Epic Comedy and Tragedy in Classical Drama
The Athenian City State
Catharsis and Mimesis Satire
Literary Cultures in Augustan Rome

Readings
1. Aristotle, Poetics, translated with an introduction and notes by Malcolm Heath, (London:
Penguin, 1996) chaps. 6–17, 23, 24, and 26.
2. Plato, The Republic, Book X, tr. Desmond Lee (London: Penguin, 2007).
3. Horace, Ars Poetica, tr. H. Rushton Fairclough, Horace: Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica
(Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005) pp. 451–73.
Paper 3: Indian Writing in English

Course Objectives:
The course comprises a well-represented cluster of modern Indian classics of the twentieth
century in poetry, prose and drama. The endeavour is give the students a solid grounding in the
rich range of literatures produced at the cusp of the Indian mind and the English language; and to
offer them insights into the processes through which the language of the colonizer was gradually
assimilated into thehorizon of expression by Indian writers anxious to embody the complexities
of their encounter with modernity under foreign rule and afterwards.

Learning Outcome: At the end of the course, it is expected that students will have been able to
configure the collectivity called Indian literature in English along with all its regional variations.

1. R.K. Narayan, Swami and Friends

2. Anita Desai In Custody
3. H.L.V. Derozio ‘Freedom to the Slave’ ‘The Orphan Girl’
Kamala Das ‘Introduction’ ‘My Grandmother’s House’
Nissim Ezekiel ‘Enterprise’ ‘The Night of the Scorpion’
Robin S. NgangomThe Strange Affair of Robin S. Ngangom’ ‘A Poem for Mother’
Mulk Raj Anand ‘Two Lady Rams’
Salman Rushdie ‘The Free Radio’
RohintonMistry ‘Swimming Lesson’
ShashiDespande ‘The Intrusion’

Suggested Topics and Background Prose Readings for Class Presentations Topics
Indian English
Indian English Literature and its Readership
Themes and Contexts of the Indian English Novel
The Aesthetics of Indian English Poetry
Modernism in Indian English Literature

Readings
1. Raja Rao, Foreword to Kanthapura (New Delhi: OUP, 1989) pp. v–vi.
2. Salman Rushdie, ‘Commonwealth Literature does not exist’, in Imaginary Homelands
(London: Granta Books, 1991) pp. 61–70.
3. Meenakshi Mukherjee, ‘Divided by a Common Language’, in The Perishable Empire (New
Delhi: OUP, 2000) pp.187–203.
4. Bruce King, ‘Introduction’, in Modern Indian Poetry in English (New Delhi: OUP, 2nd edn,
2005) pp. 1–10.

Paper 4: British Poetry and Drama: 14th to 17th Centuries

Course Objectives: The course content spanning three centuries of British poetry and drama is
meant to showcase the thematic and generic intersections between medieval and early modern
British poetic and dramatic traditions. The background reading charts the necessary
philosophical context in Renaissance perspectives on the human condition, with a view to
annotating the thematic and rhetorical structures underlying individual literary exercises. We
make sure that students laterally explore other works by the same writers through independent
projects. The priority is laid upon using the texts as a platform for wide-ranging discussions in
the key tenets of medieval and Renaissance literature.

Learning Outcome: It is believed that the student passing on from the course will have gained a
reasonably secure toehold in a staggeringly varied corpus of literature that cannot be adequately
represented within the limited purview of a semester syllabus. Students will also have learned to
look beyond traditional historiographic labels and demarcations and recognized the fluidity of
interactions and influences between successive centuries of literary practices even within
national boundaries.

1. Geoffrey Chaucer The Wife of Bath’s Prologue

Edmund Spenser Selections from Amoretti: Sonnet LXVII ‘Like as a huntsman...’ Sonnet LVII
‘Sweet warrior...’ Sonnet LXXV ‘One day I wrote her name...’
John Donne ‘The Sunne Rising’ ‘Batter My Heart’ ‘Valediction: forbidding mourning’
2. Christopher Marlowe Doctor Faustus
3. William Shakespeare Macbeth
4. William Shakespeare Twelfth Night

Suggested Topics and Background Prose Readings for Class Presentations Topics
Renaissance Humanism
The Stage, Court and City
Religious and Political Thought
Ideas of Love and Marriage
The Writer in Society

Readings
1. Pico Della Mirandola, excerpts from the Oration on the Dignity of Man, in The Portable
Renaissance Reader, ed. James Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin (New York: Penguin
Books, 1953) pp. 476–9.
2. John Calvin, ‘Predestination and Free Will’, in The Portable Renaissance Reader, ed. James
Bruce Ross and Mary Martin McLaughlin (New York: Penguin Books, 1953) pp. 704–11.
3. Baldassare Castiglione, ‘Longing for Beauty’ and ‘Invocation of Love’, in Book 4 of The
Courtier, ‘Love and Beauty’, tr. George Bull (Harmondsworth: Penguin, rpt. 1983) pp. 324–8,
330–5.
4. Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, ed. Forrest G. Robinson (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill,
1970) pp. 13–18.

Paper 5: American Literature

Course Objectives: The course is designed to accommodate milestones in the literary map of
America from its inception to the present in the areas of poetry, prose fiction and drama alike.
The selection is aimed to provide a base for demonstrating the broad historical trends in the
representation of American culture in its literary works.

Learning Outcome: The completed course will have acquainted the student with landmark texts
across the gamut of American literature and helped them locate in these texts key moments in
America’s journey of becoming as a nation.
1. Tennessee Williams: The Glass Menagerie
2. Toni Morrison Beloved
3. Edgar Allan Poe ‘The Purloined Letter’, F. Scott Fitzgerald ‘The Crack-up’, William Faulkner
‘Dry September’
4. Anne Bradstreet ‘The Prologue’, Walt Whitman Selections from Leaves of Grass: ‘O Captain,
My Captain’ ‘Passage to India’ (lines 1–68), Alexie Sherman Alexie ‘Crow Testament’
‘Evolution’

Suggested Topics and Background Prose Readings for Class Presentations Topics
The American Dream
Social Realism and the American Novel Folklore and the American Novel
Black Women’s Writings
Questions of Form in American Poetry

Readings
1. Hector St John Crevecouer, ‘What is an American’, (Letter III) in Letters from an American
Farmer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982) pp. 66–105.
2. Frederick Douglass, A Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1982) chaps. 1–7, pp. 47–87.
3. Henry David Thoreau, ‘Battle of the Ants’ excerpt from ‘Brute Neighbours’, in Walden
(Oxford: OUP, 1997) chap. 12.
4. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘Self Reliance’, in The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson,
ed. with a biographical introduction by Brooks Atkinson (New York: The Modern Library,
1964).
5. Toni Morrison, ‘Romancing the Shadow’, in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and Literary
Imagination (London: Picador, 1993) pp. 29–39.

Paper 6: Popular Literature

Course Objectives: The course is intended to help students develop a critical understanding of
the different constituent categories of writing within the broad rubric of popular literature and
also learn to differentiate between popular literature and its alternative, i.e. canonical literature,
using parameters theorized under Suggested Reading.

Learning Outcome: The syllabus can be expected to have introduced undergraduate students to
notable texts in popular literature from across expatriate sub-continental cultures as well as from
Britain with special reference to children’s literature, detective fiction, subaltern literature and
mainstream fiction.

1. Lewis Carroll Through the Looking Glass

2. Agatha Christie The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
3. Shyam Selvadurai Funny Boy
4. DurgabaiVyam and SubhashVyamBhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability/
Autobiographical Notes on Ambedkar (For the Visually Challenged students)

Suggested Topics and Background Prose Readings for Class Presentations Topics
Coming of Age
The Canonical and the Popular
Caste, Gender and Identity
Ethics and Education in Children’s Literature
Sense and Nonsense
The Graphic Novel

Readings
1. ChelvaKanaganayakam, ‘Dancing in the Rarefied Air: Reading Contemporary Sri Lankan
Literature’ (ARIEL, Jan. 1998) rpt, MalashriLal, AlamgirHashmi, and Victor J. Ramraj, eds.,
Post Independence Voices in South Asian Writings (Delhi: Doaba Publications, 2001) pp. 51–65.
2. SumathiRamaswamy, ‘Introduction’, in Beyond Appearances?: Visual Practices and
Ideologies in Modern India (Sage: Delhi, 2003) pp. xiii–xxix.
3. Leslie Fiedler, ‘Towards a Definition of Popular Literature’, in Super Culture: American
Popular Culture and Europe, ed. C.W.E. Bigsby (Ohio: Bowling Green University Press, 1975)
pp. 29–38.
4. Felicity Hughes, ‘Children’s Literature: Theory and Practice’, English Literary History, vol.
45, 1978, pp. 542–61.

Paper 7: British Poetry and Drama: 17th and 18th Centuries

Course Objectives: This paper aims to pick up from the earlier paper concentrating on 14th to
16th century British Poetry and Drama. The chronological methodology of studying British
literature in clusters of centuries as opposed to cultural historical labels means that writers from
the early and the late seventeenth century are read alongside those from early and late eighteenth
century. New alignments and influences emerge as a result of this approach. As the Suggested
Reading will indicate, themes for theoretical overview include categories as excitingly variant as
gender, women, religion, and market forces. This pattern, consistently followed in other papers
as well, help merge literature studies with culture studies in an interdisciplinary pedagogy.

Learning Outcomes: The course is likely to educate students about the broad philosophical
concerns of British literature in a period that was rich in polemics. The difficulty index of the
texts taught as well as the suggested reading will have challenged students into engaging with
dense material.

1. John Milton Paradise Lost: Book 1

2. John Webster The Duchess of Malfi
3. Aphra Behn The Rover
4. Alexander Pope The Rape of the Lock

Suggested Topics and Background Prose Readings for Class Presentations Topics
Religious and Secular Thought in the 17th Century
The Stage, the State and the Market
The Mock-epic and Satire
Women in the 17th Century
The Comedy of Manners

Readings
1. The Holy Bible, Genesis, chaps. 1–4, The Gospel according to St. Luke, chaps. 1–7 and 22–4.
2. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. and tr. Robert M. Adams (New York: Norton, 1992)
chaps. 15, 16, 18, and 25.
3. Thomas Hobbes, selections from The Leviathan, pt. I (New York: Norton, 2006) chaps. 8, 11,
and 13.
4. John Dryden, ‘A Discourse Concerning the Origin and Progress of Satire’, in The Norton
Anthology of English Literature, vol. 1, 9th edn, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton
2012) pp. 1767–8.

Paper 8: British Literature: 18th Century

Course Objectives: This paper is essentially an adjunct or twin to its predecessor. In terms of its
pedadogical format, it follows its predecessor in foregrounding continuities between the late
seventeenth literature and writings across genres in the eighteenth century, i.e. between
Restoration and pre-Romantic literatures.

Learning Outcomes: The student completing this course will have consolidated her grounding in
seventeenth and eighteenth century literature and culture through two successive papers.

1. William Congreve The Way of the World

2. Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels (Books III and IV)
3. Samuel Johnson ‘London’
Thomas Gray ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’
4. Laurence Sterne The Life and Opinions of TristramShandy, Gentleman

Suggested Topics and Background Prose Readings for Class Presentations Topics
The Enlightenment and Neoclassicism
Restoration Comedy
The Country and the City
The Novel and the Periodical Press

Readings
1. Jeremy Collier, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage
(London: Routledge, 1996).
2. Daniel Defoe, ‘The Complete English Tradesman’ (Letter XXII), ‘The Great Law of
Subordination Considered’ (Letter IV), and ‘The Complete English Gentleman’, in Literature
and Social Order in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Stephen Copley (London: Croom Helm,
1984).
3. Samuel Johnson, ‘Essay 156’, in The Rambler, in Selected Writings: Samuel Johnson, ed.
Peter Martin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009) pp. 194–7; Rasselas Chapter
10; ‘Pope’s Intellectual Character: Pope and Dryden Compared’, from The Life of Pope, in The
Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 1, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, 8th edn (New York:
Norton, 2006) pp. 2693–4, 2774–7.

Paper 9: British Romantic Literature

Course Objectives: The course is heavily invested in the most substantial segment of Romantic
literature, namely poetry, covering all the major names.At the same time, it accommodates a
seminal piece of prose fiction by a woman Romantic.
Learning Outcome: The course is expected to have groomed students in strategies of close
engagement with Romantic poetry and Romantic critical theory.

1. William Blake ‘The Lamb’, ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ (from The Songs of Innocence and The
Songs of Experience) ‘The Tyger’ (The Songs of Experience) 'Introduction’ to The Songs of
Innocence Robert Burns ‘A Bard’s Epitaph’ ‘Scots WhaHae’
2. William Wordsworth ‘Tintern Abbey’ ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ Samuel Taylor
Coleridge ‘Kubla Khan’ ‘Dejection: An Ode’
3. Lord George Gordon Noel Byron ‘Childe Harold’: canto III, verses 36–45 (lines 316–405);
canto IV, verses 178–86 (lines 1594–674)
Percy Bysshe Shelley ‘Ode to the West Wind’ ‘Ozymandias’ ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ John
Keats ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ ‘To Autumn’ ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’
4. Mary Shelley Frankenstein

Suggested Topics and Background Prose Readings for Class Presentations Topics
Reason and Imagination
Conceptions of Nature
Literature and Revolution
The Gothic
The Romantic Lyric

Readings
1. William Wordsworth, ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’, in Romantic Prose and Poetry, ed. Harold
Bloom and Lionel Trilling (New York: OUP, 1973) pp. 594–611.
2. John Keats, ‘Letter to George and Thomas Keats, 21 December 1817’, and ‘Letter to Richard
Woodhouse, 27 October, 1818’, in Romantic Prose and Poetry, ed. Harold Bloom and Lionel
Trilling (New York: OUP, 1973) pp. 766–68, 777–8.
3. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Preface’ to Emile or Education, tr. Allan Bloom (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1991).
4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, BiographiaLiteraria, ed. George Watson (London: Everyman, 1993)
chap. XIII, pp. 161–66.

Paper 10: British Literature: 19th Century

Course Objectives: This is a justifiably ambitious paper comprising a wide range of verse and
prose classics from the long nineteenth century. The suggested reading indicates the felt
necessity of balancing the literary content with landmark texts in seminal social, economic and
political theory that have since shaped reading methodology in fundamental ways.

Learning Outcome: The course module will have given students a fair amount of exposure to a
spectrum of nineteenth century texts and genres. In addition, it will have introduced students to
the beginnings of Marxian and Darwinian thought.

1. Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice

2. Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre
3. Charles Dickens Hard Times
4. Alfred Tennyson ‘The Lady of Shalott’ ‘Ulysses’ ‘The Defence of Lucknow’ Robert
Browning ‘My Last Duchess’ ‘The Last Ride Together’ ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ Christina Rossetti
‘The Goblin Market’

Suggested Topics and Background Prose Readings for Class Presentations Topics
Utilitarianism
The 19th Century Novel
Marriage and Sexuality
The Writer and Society
Faith and Doubt
The Dramatic Monologue

Readings
1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ‘Mode of Production: The Basis of Social Life’, ‘The Social
Nature of Consciousness’, and ‘Classes and Ideology’, in A Reader in Marxist Philosophy, ed.
Howard Selsam and Harry Martel (New York: International Publishers,1963) pp. 186–8, 190–1,
199–201.
2. Charles Darwin, ‘Natural Selection and Sexual Selection’, in The Descent of Man in The
Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th edn, vol. 2, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York:
Norton, 2006) pp. 1545–9.
3. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women in Norton Anthology of English Literature, 8th
edn, vol. 2, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 2006) chap. 1, pp. 1061–9.

Paper 11: Women’s Writing

Course Objectives: In this paper, the objective is to cover a cross-section of global women’s
writing from the late eighteenth century onwards, with a view to configuring the beginnings of
the woman identity in literature and then tracing Indian ramifications of literature by women
writers about the woman condition.

Learning Outcome: Students are expected to have gained intensive grounding in issues
surrounding representation of the woman condition and the politics of women’s writing.

1. Emily Dickinson ‘I cannot live with you’ ‘I’m wife; I’ve finished that’ Sylvia Plath ‘Daddy’
‘Lady Lazarus’ Eunice De Souza ‘Advice to Women’ ‘Bequest’
2. Alice Walker The Color Purple
3. Charlotte Perkins Gilman ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ Katherine Mansfield ‘Bliss’ Mahashweta
Devi ‘Draupadi’, tr. GayatriChakravortySpivak (Calcutta: Seagull, 2002)
4. Mary Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New York: Norton, 1988) chap.
1, pp. 11–19; chap. 2, pp. 19–38; Ramabai Ranade ‘A Testimony of our Inexhaustible
Treasures’, in Pandita Ramabai Through Her Own Words: Selected Works, tr. MeeraKosambi
(New Delhi: OUP, 2000) pp. 295–324; Rassundari Debi Excerpts from Amar Jiban in Susie
Tharu and K. Lalita, eds., Women’s Writing in India, vol. 1 (New Delhi: OUP, 1989) pp. 191–2.

Suggested Topics and Background Prose Readings for Class Presentations Topics
The Confessional Mode in Women's Writing
Sexual Politics
Race, Caste and Gender
Social Reform and Women’s Rights

Readings
1. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, 1957) chaps. 1 and 6.
2. Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Introduction’, in The Second Sex, tr. Constance Borde and
ShielaMalovany-Chevallier (London: Vintage, 2010) pp. 3–18.
3. KumkumSangari and SudeshVaid, eds., ‘Introduction’, in Recasting Women: Essays in
Colonial History (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989) pp. 1–25.
4. Chandra TalapadeMohanty, ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial
Discourses’, in Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. PadminiMongia (New York:
Arnold, 1996) pp. 172–97.

Paper 12: British Literature: The Early 20th Century

Course Objectives
The syllabus is intended to provide students extensive textual grounding in major early twentieth
century novelists and the two most significant poets. In addition, pioneering critical and
theoretical works are also introduced in order that later critical and theoretical trends can be
traced back to their origins.

Learning Outcome: Students are expected to have conceptualised Modernism and its multiple
refractions from the carefully selected poetic and fictional texts. Additionally, they will have
been taught to differentiate between twentieth century literature and Modernist writing.

1. Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness

2. D.H. Lawrence Sons and Lovers
3. Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway
4. W.B. Yeats ‘Leda and the Swan’ ‘The Second Coming’ ‘No Second Troy’ ‘Sailing to
Byzantium’
T.S. Eliot ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’ ‘The
Hollow Men’

Suggested Topics and Background Prose Readings for Class Presentations Topics
Modernism, Post-modernism and non-European Cultures
The Women’s Movement in the Early 20th Century
Psychoanalysis and the Stream of Consciousness
The Uses of Myth
The Avant Garde

Readings
1. Sigmund Freud, ‘Theory of Dreams’, ‘Oedipus Complex’, and ‘The Structure of the
Unconscious’, in The Modern Tradition, ed. Richard Ellman et. al. (Oxford: OUP, 1965) pp. 571,
578–80, 559–63.
2. T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in Norton Anthology of English Literature,
8th edn, vol. 2, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: Norton, 2006) pp. 2319–25.
3. Raymond Williams, ‘Introduction’, in The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (London:
Hogarth Press, 1984) pp. 9–27.
Paper 13: Modern European Drama

Course Objectives: This course is designed to introduce students focally to the major
divergences in twentieth century developments in drama and theatrical practices with special
reference to the Theatre of Ideas, Absurdist drama and Epic Theatre. Understandably, the cluster
is pan-European in thrust and the texts are taught intensively in authoritative English translation.

Learning Outcome: The projections for the student successfully completing this paper are that
she will have acquired a broad and in-depth knowledge of the salient trends in drama.

1. Henrik Ibsen Ghosts

2. Bertolt Brecht The Good Woman of Szechuan
3. Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot
4. Eugene Ionesco Rhinoceros

Suggested Topics and Background Prose Readings for Class Presentations Topics
Politics, Social Change and the Stage
Text and Performance
European Drama: Realism and Beyond
Tragedy and Heroism in Modern European Drama
The Theatre of the Absurd

Readings
1. Constantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, chap. 8, ‘Faith and the Sense of Truth’, tr.
Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967) sections 1, 2, 7, 8, 9, pp. 121–5,
137–46.
2. Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Street Scene’, ‘Theatre for Pleasure or Theatre for Instruction’, and
‘Dramatic Theatre vs Epic Theatre’, in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, ed.
and tr. John Willet (London: Methuen, 1992) pp. 68–76, 121–8.
3. George Steiner, ‘On Modern Tragedy’, in The Death of Tragedy (London: Faber, 1995) pp.
303–24.

Paper 14: Postcolonial Literatures

Course Objectives: In this module, the focus returns to non-British literatures of the world
originating in erstwhile British colonies that have become classics in English translation.

Learning Outcome: As a concluding core paper, Postcolonial Literatures (in the plural) serves to
bring the undergraduate course full circle in terms of addressing texts that ‘write back’ to British
and European canonical and popular writings across centuries. Taken as a whole, the
undergraduate syllabus for Honours in English is expected to leave the outgoing, final semester
student with a well-rounded understanding of the specificities of British Literature even as its
overlap with successive movements and moments in world literature is systematically traced and
critically assessed.

1. Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart

2. Gabriel Garcia Marquez Chronicle of a Death Foretold
3. Bessie Head ‘The Collector of Treasures’ Ama Ata Aidoo ‘The Girl who can’ Grace Ogot
‘The Green Leaves’
4. Pablo Neruda ‘Tonight I can Write’ ‘The Way Spain Was’ Derek Walcott ‘A Far Cry from
Africa’ ‘Names’ David Malouf ‘Revolving Days’ ‘Wild Lemons’ Mamang Dai ‘Small Towns
and the River’ ‘The Voice of the Mountain’

Suggested Topics and Background Prose Readings for Class Presentations Topics
De-colonization, Globalization and Literature
Literature and Identity Politics
Writing for the New World Audience
Region, Race, and Gender
Postcolonial Literatures and Questions of Form

Readings
1. Franz Fanon, ‘The Negro and Language’, in Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Charles Lam
Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 2008) pp. 8–27.
2. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, ‘The Language of African Literature’, in Decolonising the Mind
(London: James Curry, 1986) chap. 1, sections 4–6.
3. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, in Gabriel Garcia Marquez:
New Readings, ed. Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1987).

II. Discipline Centric Electives (Any Four)

Paper 5: Literary Theory

Course Objectives: The purpose of this paper is to give mature undergraduate students a sound
foundation in the five major theoretical schools that have had a formative influence on our
reading and writing practices in the literature and culture studies disciplines.

Learning Outcome: Students of this paper will have been introduced to theoretical categories
pertaining to the fundamental socio-economic and political conditions mediating the construction
or production and circulation of literature.

1. Marxism
a. Antonio Gramsci, ‘The Formation of the Intellectuals’ and ‘Hegemony (Civil Society) and
Separation of Powers’, in Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and tr. Quentin Hoare and
Geoffrey Novell Smith (London: Lawrence and Wishart,1971) pp. 5, 245–6.
b. Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy and
Other Essays (New Delhi: Aakar Books, 2006) pp. 85–126.

2. Feminism
a. Elaine Showalter, ‘Twenty Years on: A Literature of Their Own Revisited’, in A Literature of
Their Own: British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing (1977. Rpt. London: Virago, 2003)
pp. xi–xxxiii.
b. Luce Irigaray, ‘When the Goods Get Together’ (from This Sex Which is Not One),in New
French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken Books,
1981) pp. 107–10.

3. Poststructuralism
a. Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Science’, tr. Alan
Bass, in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed. David Lodge (London: Longman, 1988)
pp. 108–23.
b. Michel Foucault, ‘Truth and Power’, in Power and Knowledge, tr. Alessandro Fontana and
Pasquale Pasquino (New York: Pantheon, 1977) pp. 109–33.

4. Postcolonial Studies
a. Mahatma Gandhi, ‘Passive Resistance’ and ‘Education’, in Hind Swaraj and Other Writings,
ed. Anthony J Parel (Delhi: CUP, 1997) pp. 88–106.
b. Edward Said, ‘The Scope of Orientalism’ in Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978) pp.
29–110.
c. Aijaz Ahmad, ‘“Indian Literature”: Notes towards the Definition of a Category’, in In Theory:
Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992) pp. 243–285.

Suggested Background Prose Readings and Topics for Class Presentations Topics
The East and the West
Questions of Alterity
Power, Language, and Representation
The State and Culture

Readings
1. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008).
2. Peter Barry, Beginning Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).

Paper 6: Literary Criticism

Course Objectives: This elective paper is projected to introduce undergraduate students majoring
in literatures in English to seminal critics of poetry and literature who have helped define literary
historiography from the Romantic period to the present.

Learning Outcome: Students completing this course will be well advised as to the major tenets
of Romantic, Modernist, and New Critical theories, and also the rudiments of feminist criticism.
In practice, students will have acquired the skills necessary for interpreting literary texts in the
light of such critical positions and for citing critical texts thus used.

1. William Wordsworth: Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1802)

S.T. Coleridge: BiographiaLiteraria. Chapters IV, XIII and XIV
2. Virginia Woolf: Modern Fiction; T.S. Eliot: “Tradition and the Individual Talent” 1919, “The
Function of Criticism” 1920
3. I.A. Richards: Principles of Literary Criticism Chapters 1, 2 and 34. London 1924 and
Practical Criticism. London, 1929
4. Cleanth Brooks: “The Heresy of Paraphrase”, and “The Language of Paradox” in The Well-
Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947)
5. Maggie Humm: Practising Feminist Criticism: An Introduction. London 1995

Suggested Topics and Background Prose Readings for Class Presentations Topics
Summarising and Critiquing
Point of View
Reading and Interpreting
Media Criticism
Plot and Setting
Citing from Critics’ Interpretations

Readings
1. C.S. Lewis: Introduction in An Experiment in Criticism, Cambridge University Press 1992
2. M.H. Abrams: The Mirror and the Lamp, Oxford University Press, 1971
3. Rene Wellek, Stephen G. Nicholas: Concepts of Criticism, Connecticut, Yale University 1963
4. Taylor and Francis Eds. An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory, Routledge, 1996

Paper 7: Science Fiction and Detective Literature

Course Objectives: This paper is an optional adjunct of the core paper on Popular Literature. It
offers more concentrated grounding in two branches of Popular Literature outlined in the title.
For the sake of penetration, either of the two branches is studied. The selection here pertains to
Detective Fiction begins with one of the earliest texts in detective fiction, from nineteenth
century England, and ends with one from the present millennium set in India.

Learning Outcome: The paper is expected to make the student conversant with broad issues and
concerns relating to the socio-political framework and narrative modalities of detective fiction.

1. Wilkie Collins The Woman in White

2. Arthur Conan Doyle The Hound of the Baskervilles
3. Raymond Chandler The Big Sleep
4. H.R.F. Keating Inspector Ghote Goes by Train

Suggested Topics and Readings for Class Presentation Topics

Crime across the Media
Constructions of Criminal Identity
Cultural Stereotypes in Crime Fiction
Crime Fiction and Cultural Nostalgia
Crime Fiction and Ethics
Crime and Censorship

Paper 8: Literature and Cinema

Course Objectives: The exhaustive course content is meant for students to gain a serious
grounding in the intersections between literature and cinema both theoretically and through close
interpretation of word-texts and their cinematic adaptations. The content is duly balanced
between mainstream Western genres and texts and those originating in India.
Learning Outcome: Students will have learned to inter-read between word texts and motion
pictures using methodologies particular to the one or the other as well as shared ones. The list of
additional suggested viewing will have given due exposure to students interested in trying out
interpretative strategies on other canonical film-texts of India and the West.

1. James Monaco, ‘The language of film: signs and syntax’, in How To Read a Film: The World
of Movies, Media & Multimedia (New York: OUP, 2009) chap. 3, pp. 170–249.
2. William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, and its adaptations: Romeo & Juliet (1968; dir.
Franco Zeffirelli, Paramount); and Romeo + Juliet (1996; dir. BazLuhrmann, 20th Century Fox).
3. Bapsi Sidhwa, Ice Candy Man and its adaptation Earth (1998; dir. Deepa Mehta, Cracking the
Earth Films Incorp.); and Amrita Pritam, Pinjar: The Skeleton and Other Stories, tr. Khushwant
Singh (New Delhi: Tara Press, 2009) and its adaptation: Pinjar (2003; dir. C.P. Dwivedi, Lucky
Star Entertainment).
4. Ian Fleming, From Russia with Love, and its adaptation: From Russia with Love (1963; dir.
Terence Young, Eon Productions).

Suggested Topics and Background Prose Readings for Class Presentations Topics
Theories of Adaptation
Transformation and Transposition
Hollywood and ‘Bollywood’
The ‘Two Ways of Seeing’
Adaptation as Interpretation

Readings
1. Linda Hutcheon, ‘On the Art of Adaptation’, Daedalus, vol. 133, (2004).
2. Thomas Leitch, ‘Adaptation Studies at Crossroads’, Adaptation, 2008, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 63–77.
3.PoonamTrivedi, ‘Filmi Shakespeare’, Litfilm Quarterly, vol. 35, issue 2, 2007.
4. Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, ‘Figures of Bond’, in Popular Fiction: Technology,
Ideology, Production, Reading, ed. Tony Bennet (London and New York: Routledge, 1990).

Other films that may be used for class presentations:

1. William Shakespeare, Comedy of Errors, Macbeth, and Othello and their adaptations: Angoor
(dir. Gulzar, 1982), Maqbool(dir. Vishal Bhardwaj, 2003), Omkara (dir. Vishal Bhardwaj, 2006)
respectively.
2. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice and its adaptations: BBC TV mini-series (1995), Joe Wright
(2005) and Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice (2004).
3. Rudaali (dir. Kalpana Lajmi, 1993) and Gangor or ‘Behind the Bodice’ (dir. Italo Spinelli,
2010).
4. Ruskin Bond, Junoon(dir. ShyamBenegal, 1979), The Blue Umbrella (dir. Vishal Bhardwaj,
2005), and Saat Khoon Maaf (dir. Vishal Bhardwaj, 2011).
5. E. M. Forster, Passage to India and its adaptation dir. David Lean (1984).

Note:
a) For every unit, 4 hours are for the written text and 8 hours for its cinematic adaptation (Total:
12 hours)
b) To introduce students to the issues and practices of cinematic adaptations, teachers may use
the following critical material:
1. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Literature on
Screen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
2. John M. Desmond and Peter Hawkes, Adaptation: Studying Film and Literature (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 2005).
3. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006).
4. J.G. Boyum, Double Exposure (Calcutta: Seagull, 1989).
5. B. Mcfarlens, Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation (Clarendon
University Press,1996).

Paper 11: Research Methodology

Course Objectives: This crucial course proposes to groom undergraduate students in the
modalities of research. As the course components enlisted here suggest, the objective is to take
students through the entire trajectory of identifying a research problem, text and hypothesis to
the actual writing of an article based on well-substantiated findings.

Learning Outcome: Students may be reasonably expected to have been trained empirically and
theoretically in all aspects of research methodology pertaining to short projects leading onto the
writing of a scholarly paper. They will have learned to distinguish between literary essays and
academic articles and also to gauge the differential nature of small research projects culminating
in a single paper and larger dissertation projects.

1. Practical Criticism and Writing a Term paper

2. Conceptualizing and Drafting Research Proposals
3. On Style Manuals
4. Notes, References, and Bibliography

Paper 12: Travel Writing

Course Objectives: This paper trains students in reading and critiquing a genre that has
commanded considerable critical and theoretical attention lately. Travel writing as a mode of
ethnographic research is one of the emerging areas of interdisciplinary research in the
humanities. The selection is impressively broad-ranging and entails accounts of travel by early
and established travel writers as well as by personages from other walks of life.

Learning Outcome: Students completing this course will have been acquired a fairly extensive
overview of travel writing as a genre in world literature as a whole as also the methodological
components pertinent to travel literature as an academic discipline.

1. Ibn Batuta: ‘The Court of Muhammad bin Tughlaq’, Khuswant Singh’s City Improbable:
Writings on Delhi, Penguin Publisher Al Biruni: Chapter LXIII, LXIV, LXV, LXVI, in India by
Al Biruni, edited by Qeyamuddin Ahmad, National Book Trust of India
2. Mark Twain: The Innocent Abroad (Chapter VII , VIII and IX) (Wordsworth Classic
Edition)
Ernesto Che Guevara: The Motorcycle Diaries: A Journey around South America (the Expert,
Home land for victor, The city of viceroys), Harper Perennial
3. William Dalrymple: City of Dijnn (Prologue, Chapters I and II) Penguin Books
Rahul Sankrityayan: From Volga to Ganga (Translation by Victor Kierman) (Section I to
Section II) Pilgrims Publishing
4. Nahid Gandhi: Alternative Realties: Love in the Lives of Muslim Women, Chapter ‘Love, War
and Widow’, Westland, 2013
5. Elisabeth Bumiller: May You be the Mother of a Hundred Sons: a Journey among the Women
of India, Chapters 2 and 3, pp.24-74 (New York: Penguin Books, 1991)

Suggested Topics and Background Prose Readings for Class Presentations

Travel Writing and Ethnography
Gender and Travel
Globalization and Travel
Travel and Religion
Orientalism and Travel

Readings
1. Susan Bassnett, ‘Travel Writing and Gender’, in Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed.
Peter Hulme and Tim Young (Cambridge: CUP,2002) pp, 225-241
2. TabishKhair, ‘An Interview with William Dalyrmple and Pankaj Mishra’ in Postcolonial
Travel Writings: Critical Explorations, ed. Justin D Edwards and Rune Graulund (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 173-184
3. Casey Balton, ‘Narrating Self and Other: A Historical View’, in Travel Writing: The Self and
The Other (Routledge, 2012), pp.1-29
4. SachidanandaMohanty, ‘Introduction: Beyond the Imperial Eyes’ in Travel Writing and
Empire (New Delhi: Katha, 2004) pp. ix –xx.