Paper 11: ENG-HC-5016 

British Literature: The 20th Century

Credits: 5 (Theory) + 1 (Tutorial)

Marks: 80 (End-Semester Examination) + 20 (Internal Assessment)

While literary modernity can trace its roots to the works of some European writers of the 19th century, in England it is in the 20th century that the era of Modernism finds its voice in arts and literature. The works of the writers chosen for this paper are good introductions to the spirit of modernism, with its urgent desire to break with the codes and conventions of the past, experiment with new forms and idioms, and its cosmopolitan willingness to open itself up to influences coming from other shores. The paper goes beyond the High Modern period of the early century and the students will also get acquainted with the ethos of postmodernism through a reading of recent poetic and fictional works. 

Texts:

• Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness

• Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway

• W.B. Yeats: ‘The Second Coming’; ‘Sailing to Byzantium’

• T.S. Eliot: ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’; ‘Journey of the Magi’

• W.H. Auden: ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’

• Hanif Kureshi: My Beautiful Launderette

• Phillip Larkin: ‘Church Going’

• Ted Hughes: ‘Hawk Roosting’ 

• Seamus Heaney: ‘Casualty’

• Carol Ann Duffy: ‘Standing Female Nude’

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

• Postmodernism in British Literature

• Britishness after 1960s

• Intertextuality and Experimentation

• Literature and Counterculture 


Paper 12: ENG-HC-5026 

Women’s Writing

Credits: 5 (Theory) + 1 (Tutorial)

Marks: 80 (End-Semester Examination) + 20 (Internal Assessment)

This paper seeks to direct the students’ attention to nineteenth and twentieth century writings by women living in different geographical and socio cultural settings. Students will get acquainted with the situationally distinct experiences of women articulated in a variety of genres-poetry, novels, short stories, and autobiography, while the selections from Mary Wollstonecraft-the only 18th century text prescribed, will acquaint students with the ideas contained in one of the earliest feminist treatises of the western world. Apart from an examination of the themes and styles in the prescribed texts, students will be required to engage themselves with the specificities of the contexts from which the texts emerged and also analyze the women writers’ handling of the different genres to articulate their women-centric experiences.Themes: Gender, sexual/textual politics, feminism, body, identity, class, location, voice, space, gender and narrative.

Texts:

• Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New York: Norton, 1988) chap. 1, pp. 11–19; chap. 2, pp. 19–38.

• 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.

• Katherine Mansfield: ‘Bliss’

• Sylvia Plath: ‘Daddy’; ‘Lady Lazarus’

• Alice Walker: The Color Purple

• Mahashweta Devi: ‘Draupadi’, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Calcutta: Seagull, 2002)

• Nirupama Bargohain: ‘Celebration’

• Adrienne Rich: ‘Orion’

• Eunice De Souza: ‘Advice to Women’; ‘Bequest’

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


Paper 1: ENG-HE-5016 

Popular Literature

Credits: 5 (Theory) + 1 (Tutorial)

Marks: 80 (End-Semester Examination) + 20 (Internal Assessment)

Over the years popular literature has moved from the margins to earn for itself a fairly important place in the literary and critical consciousness. This paper seeks to highlight the nature of ‘popular’ literature as a genre and the critical ideas underpinning the theorization of popular literature. This will be done through a practical engagement with various texts falling under its ambit.

Texts:

• Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland

• Agatha Christie:The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

• J. K. Rowling: Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

• Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam: Bhimayana: 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


Paper 2: ENG-HE-5026 

Modern Indian Writing in English Translation

Credits: 5 (Theory) + 1 (Tutorial)

Marks: 80 (End-Semester Examination) + 20 (Internal Assessment)

Literature in the various Indian languages presents a huge body of work testifying to the diverse cultural and regional preoccupations in the respective regions these languages belong to. This paper attempts to give students an introductory glimpse into this richness and diversity of Indian literature written in the regional languages.

Texts:

• Premchand: ‘The Shroud’, in Penguin Book of Classic Urdu Stories, ed. M. Asaduddin (New Delhi: Penguin/Viking, 2006).

• Ismat Chugtai: ‘The Quilt’, in Lifting the Veil: Selected Writings of Ismat Chugtai, tr. M. Asaduddin (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2009).

• Bhabendranath Saikia: ‘Celebration’, Tr. Prachee Dewri, in Splendour in the Grass: Selected Assamese Short Stories, ed. Hiren Gohain (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2010) 

• Fakir Mohan Senapati: ‘Rebati’, in Oriya Stories, ed. Vidya Das, tr. Kishori Charan Das (Delhi: Srishti Publishers, 2000).

• Rabindra Nath Tagore: ‘Light, Oh Where is the Light?' and 'When My Play was with thee', in Gitanjali: A New Translation with an Introduction by William Radice (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2011).

• G.M. Muktibodh: ‘The Void’, (tr. Vinay Dharwadker) and ‘So Very Far’, (tr. Tr. Vishnu Khare and Adil Jussawala), in The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry, ed. Vinay Dharwadker and A.K. Ramanujan (New Delhi: OUP, 2000).

• Amrita Pritam: ‘I Say Unto Waris Shah’, (tr. N.S. Tasneem) in Modern Indian Literature: An Anthology, Plays and Prose, Surveys and Poems, ed. K.M. George,vol. 3 (Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1992).

• Thangjam Ibopishak Singh: ‘Dali, Hussain, or Odour of Dream, Colour of Wind’ and ‘The Land of the Half-Humans’, tr. Robin S. Ngangom, in The Anthology of Contemporary Poetry from the Northeast (NEHU: Shillong, 2003).

• Dharamveer Bharati: Andha Yug, tr. Alok Bhalla (New Delhi: OUP, 2009).

• Hiren Bhattacharyya: ‘What Is It That Burns in Me?’ 

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/what-is-it-that-burns-in-me/

Suggested Topics and Background Prose Readings for Class Presentations Topics

• The Aesthetics of Translation

• Linguistic Regions and Languages

• Modernity in Indian Literature

• Caste, Gender and Resistance

• Questions of Form in 20th Century Indian Literature.


Paper 3: ENG-HE-5036 

Literature of the Indian Diaspora

Credits: 5 (Theory) + 1 (Tutorial)

Marks: 80 (End-Semester Examination) + 20 (Internal Assessment)

In the light of global literature today focusing extensively on ideas of transnationalism, exile, migration, displacement, and so on, literature of the diaspora has come to exert a strong presence in the global scene. This paper will look at the diasporic experience with particular reference to Indian diasporic writers.

Texts:

• M. G. Vassanji: The Book of Secrets (Penguin, India)

• Rohinton Mistry: A Fine Balance ( Alfred A Knopf)

• Meera Syal: Anita and Me (Harper Collins)

• Jhumpa Lahiri: The Namesake (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Suggested Topics and Background Prose Readings for Class Presentations Topics

• The Diaspora

• Nostalgia

• New Medium

• Alienation

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Paper 4: ENG-HE-5046 

Nineteenth Century European Realism

Credits: 5 (Theory) + 1 (Tutorial)

Marks: 80 (End-Semester Examination) + 20 (Internal Assessment)

The insistence on literary representation whose objective was to ‘mirror’ reality gained ground in nineteenth-century Europe across the different cultural spaces of the Continent. That is why varieties of realism surfaced in the literary traditions which were as culturally divergent as Russia and Spain. This paper is designed to provide an interesting sampling of the traditions that contributed to the growth and consolidation of European Realism in the nineteenth century. Study of these texts will also facilitate the understanding of the gradual movement towards modernism in the twentieth century which was, in many ways, both a response and a reaction to the major tendencies of European Realism.

Texts:

• Ivan Turgenev: Fathers and Sons, tr. Peter Carson (London: Penguin, 2009).

• Leo Tolstoy: ‘Kholstomer: The Story of a Horse’

• Nikolai Gogol: ‘The Nose’

• Honore de Balzac: Old Goriot, tr. M.A. Crawford (London: Penguin, 2003).

• Guy de Maupassant: ‘The Necklace’

Suggested Topics and Background Prose Readings for Class Presentations Topics

• History, Realism and the Novel Form

• Ethics and the Novel

• The Novel and its Readership in the 19th Century

• Politics and the Russian Novel: Slavophiles and Westernizers


Paper 5: ENG-HE-5056 

Literary Criticism and Literary Theory

Credits: 5 (Theory) + 1 (Tutorial)

Marks: 80 (End-Semester Examination) + 20 (Internal Assessment)

This paper will familiarize students with some important texts on literary criticism and literary theory. Beginning from William Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads the purpose will be to inform the students on the shifts in literary interpretations and critical approaches so as to equip them while reading texts across genres.


Texts:

• William Wordsworth: Preface to the Lyrical Ballads (1802)

• S.T. Coleridge: Biographia Literaria. Chapters IV, XIII and XIV

• Virginia Woolf: “Modern Fiction”

• T.S. Eliot: “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919)

• I.A. Richards: Principles of Literary Criticism Chapters 1,2 and 34. London 1924 

• Cleanth Brooks: “The Language of Paradox” in The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947)

• Terry Eagleton: Introduction to Marxism and Literary Criticism (University of California Press, 1976)

• 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.

• Toril Moi: “Introduction” in Sexual/Textual Politics (1985. New York and London: Routledge, 2002, 2ndEdn.) pp. 1-18.

• 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.

• Michel Foucault: ‘Truth and Power’, in Power and Knowledge, tr. Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino (New York: Pantheon, 1977) pp. 109–33.

• Mahatma Gandhi: ‘Passive Resistance’ and ‘Education’, in Hind Swaraj and Other Writings, ed. Anthony J Parel (Delhi: CUP, 1997) pp. 88–106.

• Edward Said: ‘The Scope of Orientalism’ in Orientalism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978) pp. 29–110.

• Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks tr. Charles Lam Markmann(Chapter 4 “The So-Called Dependency Complex of Colonized Peoples”) (London: Pluto Press, 1986) pp. 83-108

Suggested Background Prose Readings and Topics for Class Presentations Topics

• Summarising and Critiquing

• Point of View

• Reading and Interpreting

• Media Criticism

• Plot and Setting

• Citing from Critics’ Interpretations 

• The East and the West

• Questions of Alterity

• Power, Language, and Representation

• The State and Culture


Paper 6: ENG-HE-5066 

Science Fiction and Detective Literature

Credits: 5 (Theory) + 1 (Tutorial)

Marks: 80 (End-Semester Examination) + 20 (Internal Assessment)

Science Fiction and Detective Literature have a fairly venerable ancestry, going back at least two centuries. Some fine literary minds have engaged with these genres, and their creations can be fruitfully studied to explore ways in which new narrative possibilities have emerged due to the human fascination for crime, mystery and improbable occurrences.

Texts:

• Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White

• Arthur Conan Doyle: The Hound of the Baskervilles

• Raymond Chandler: The Big Sleep

• H.R.F. Keating: Inspector Ghote Goes by Train

• Doris Lessing: Shikasta

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

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SEC 3

ENG-SE-5014

Technical Writing

Credits: 4 Marks: 100 (80+20)

This course in Technical Writing aims at equipping the student with the skills of writing with a practical purpose. It is concerned with the techniques of good writing, of retaining and communicating information with precision, and also with specific forms of technical writing such as summaries, instructions, descriptions, formal letters and official emails.

Topics to be dealt with:

1. Writing as communication: Characteristics of bad technical writing and characteristics of good technical writing.

2. Purpose of writing and the audience/ target readers.

3. The process of writing: planning, drafting, revising.

4. Writing style: issues of readability, sentence-length, vocabulary, jargon, redundancy, 

circumlocution, choice of active or passive voice, etc.

5. Writing a summary: title, compactness, completeness, aid to memory, description versus informative summary, organization of a summary.

6. Writing instructions, descriptions, explanations.

7. Writing official letters and emails.

Recommended Text: 

-Turk, Christopher and John Kirkman: Effective Writing: Improving Scientific, Technical and Business Communication. London and New York: E & F N Spon (An Imprint of Routledge), 1982. 

-Taylor and Francis e-library edition 2005.

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Discipline Specific Elective I-A

ENG-RE-5016 

Soft Skills

Credits: 5 (Theory) + 1 (Tutorial) Marks: 100 (80+20)

Course Objectives:

The purpose of this Course is to equip students with the resources of soft skills so as to develop their overall personality. With this aim the course is designed to make the learners understand and be aware about the importance, role and contents of soft skills through instructions, knowledge acquisition, demonstration and practice. In effect this course hopes to improve the students’ communication, interaction, writing and documentation skills and thereby hone their confidence level. 

Course Contents 

Some important core competencies to be developed are: 

• Listening Skills

• Oral presentation skills/Speaking Skills 

• Communication skills 

• Self management 

• Resume preparation 

• GD participation 

• Interview facing techniques 

• Creative thinking, problem solving and decision-making

• Leadership 

Methodology 

The methodology to be adopted should be appropriate to the development of the above mentioned competencies. The focus of the course is on “performing” and not on just “knowing”. Lecturing should therefore be restricted to the minimum necessary and emphasis ought to be given for learning through active participation and involvement. The training methods will be individual centred to make each person a competent one. Opportunities for individual work have to be provided by the respective teachers. Demonstrations using different models, audio visual aids and equipment will be used intensively.

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GE I 

ENG-RG-5016

Contemporary India: Women and Empowerment

Credits: 5 (Theory) + 1 (Tutorial) =6 Marks: 100 (80+20)

Course Objectives/Course Description: This course will look at Women’s Issues in India in the light of the various historical and social contexts. It will trace the evolution of Women’s Empowerment both in terms of policy and discourse in postcolonial, contemporary India and at the same time try to locate the women’s position in earlier times.

The course aims to:

• Study the position of women in pre-colonial times

• Show how colonial modernity impacts women

• Study the impact of nationalism on women

• Track the Women’s movement and Empowerment issues in contemporary India

Course Outcome:

The learner will be equipped with:

• A historical understanding of the space accorded to women in India through history

• An understanding of the manner in which the social construction of gender comes about.

• The ability to critique the given and stereotypical notions of such constructions.

UNIT 1: Social Construction of Gender (15)

• Masculinity and Femininity

• Patriarchy 

• Women in Community

UNIT 2: History of Women's Movements in India (Pre & Post Independence) (20) 

• Women and Nation

• Women and the Partition

• Women, Education and Self-fashioning

• Women in the Public and Private Spaces

UNIT 3: Women and Law (15)

• Women and the Indian Constitution 

• Personal Laws (Customary practices on inheritance and Marriage) 

• Workshop on legal awareness

UNIT 4: Women’s Body and the Environment (15)

• State interventions, Khap Panchayats 

• Female foeticide, Domestic violence, Sexual harassment 

• Eco-feminism and the Chipko Movement 

UNIT 5: Female Voices (15)

• Kamala Das: “The Old Playhouse”

• Mahashweta Devi: Mother of 1084

• Krishna Sobti: Zindaginama

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