Introduction to Postcoloniality
This course shall introduce postcolonial theory and literature from South America, South Asia and Africa. The course will alert the students to larger questions and debates around the term “postcolonial” and how it has had varied (and often contested) meanings and progressions as an academic discipline as well more recently in the larger context of globalisation and cultural imperialism. It will also focus on a close reading of fiction (novels and short stories) as well as memoir writing from South America, South Asia and Africa.
Primary Texts
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother”
Alejandro Zambra, “Memories of my Personal Computer”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Arrangers of Marriage”
Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart.
Geetanjali Shree, Mai
Michael Ondaantje, “The Passions of Lalla”, Running in the Family.
References:
Ania Loomba, Colonialism/postcolonialism, Oxon, NY: Routledge, 1998.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Is the Post in Postmodernism the
Post- in Postcolonial?”, Critical Inquiry 17, no. 2 (1991): 336-57.
Aamir R. Mufti, “Orientalism and the Institution of Indian Literature”, Forget English!
Orientalisms and World Literatures, Harvard University Press, 2016. [More books and essays will be suggested as we cover the primary texts.]
Immersion in Shakespeare
Course description not available.
Exploring Literature
Course description not available.
Fundamentals Of Translation
Course description not available.
History of English Literature: Victorian Era
Course description not available.
Academic Writing
This course is meant for all first-year students of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences (SHSS). The course trains the student to read and write academic texts with care and rigor. Through classroom discussions and closely mentored writing sessions, the course ultimately aims to inculcate in the student the faculty of critical thinking.
Development of Language
Course description not available.
Language, Literature and Communication
Course description not available.
Introduction To Creative Writing
Course description not available.
Literary Method
Course description not available.
Narrative Techniques in the 19th Century
Course description not available.
Poetry: Chaucer to Milton
Course description not available.
The Language Game of Literature
This course seeks to address some basic questions that pertain to the domain of the literary. Some of these are: what kinds of texts qualify as literature? Do literary texts possess some special, objectively demonstrable properties, or does the label merely connote some arbitrary social consensus? Moreover, do literary texts invite us to treat them differently, as compared to non-literary texts? Does the appreciation of a literary text, depending on whether it is a poem, a story, or a play, require us to pay attention to different kinds of textual phenomena? What precisely are those phenomena? The kinds of questions raised above will be addressed in this course as we immerse ourselves in a wide-ranging selection of texts drawn from the genres of poetry, fiction, and drama. The texts are chosen so that our engagement with each of them will illuminate some specific aspects of literary appreciation. Also, as we progress through this course, we will build a critical vocabulary that will enable us to express, with increasing perspicuity, our assessments of the literary merits of literary texts. (3:0:0). Prerequisites: none.
Primary Texts
A selection of poems ranging across history and geography. The poems for study will be made available to the student either electronically or through handouts.
Drama: Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House (1879)
Fiction: A selection of short stories including:
“The Fall of the House of Usher,” Edgar Allen Poe (1839).
“The Yellow Wallpaper,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892).
“The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim,” Jorge Luis Borges (1935). Trans. Anthony Kerrigan.
“The Cathedral,” Raymond Carver (1983).
Fantasy and Science Fiction
During the course we will discuss the nature of fantasy and science fiction literature as a form of fiction writing, how it is different from other forms of writing, and what it can do that other forms writing cannot. The course will be divided in 4 units, the first unit will be of a theoretical nature, and the last three will discuss select examples of fantasy and science fiction. Some movies will be screened and discussed. (3:0:0). Prerequisites: none.
Primary Texts
Robert Scholes and Kellog, Nature of Narrative
Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism
Rosemary Jackson, The Literature of Subversion
Variable Selections from
J R R Tolkien, Lord of the Rings
Ursula K Le Guin, The Dispossessed
Variable Selections from
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
Barry Longyear, ‘Enemy Mine’
Variable Selections from
William Gibson, Necromancer
Bruce Sterling, Holy Fire
Drama: Tropes and Adaptations
In this course students will read drama as a literary text and get a sense for how drama evolves from performance to text and then specifically as text geared to performance. We begin with Medea by Euripides, move on to Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and finish with Shakespeare’s Hamlet along with Vishal Bharadwaj’s film adaptation Haider. This course will think through the types and tropes of classical drama to drama as text for literary analysis and move on to the idea of dramatic adaption in screenplay. (3:0:0). Prerequisites: none.
Primary Texts
Euripides, Medea Dover Thrift Edition. (Trans. Rex Warner)
Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (Norton Critical Edition)
William Shakespeare Hamlet (Arden Edition)
Academic Writing Hybrid
Course description not available.
Introduction to Creative writing
Course description not available.
Classics and their Times
Course description not available.
History of Criticism
Course description not available.
Rise of Novel
Course description not available.
Survey of American Literature
Course description not available.
Literature and Culture
Course description not available.
Immersion in Shakespeare
Course description not available.
Creative Writing Level Two Prose
Course description not available.
Development and Acquisition of Language
Course description not available.
Women's Writing in Translation
Course description not available.
20th Century South Asian English Poetry
Course description not available.
Modernist Fiction
Course description not available.
Studying Culture, Caste and Gender
Course description not available.
Getting Verse
This course will introduce students to the idea of poetic form, think about what constitutes a poetic movement, and finally focus on an individual poet as training in ways to read poetry by understanding craft and cultivating an ear for resonance to understanding what individual talent has to do with tradition. We will begin the semester with a sample of genres and modes and learn about what the distinguishing and overlapping characteristics of different poetic forms and modes are, for instance in the following: sonnet, villanelle, ghazal, blank verse, ode and aubade. Moving from reading poems in isolation we will think about the idea of poetic tradition, where a group of poets can be read together as a part of a movement such as Bhakti Poetry. In the final part of the course we will focus on the work of a single poet to understand how we read poets in their time a get a sense for a body of a single poet’s work. This semester we will study Arun Kolatkar. (3:0:0). Prerequisites: none.
Primary Texts
A selection of poems by Shakespeare, Donne, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Mir, Adrienne Rich, Agha Shahid Ali, Elizabeth Bishop, John Keats, Philip Larkin, T. S Eliot
Arundhati Subramaniam Ed. Eating God: Bhakti Poetry, Penguin 2014
Arun Kolatkar Jejuri, New York Review Book, 1974
Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
The commercial playhouses and playing companies of Elizabethan and Jacobean London were a unique socio-cultural phenomenon which produced some of the richest literary texts within the entire corpus of English literature as well as literatures in English. The myth of Shakespeare’s ‘timeless genius’, his universal adaptability across spatio-temporal boundaries has become a critical commonplace. This course seeks to locate Shakespeare in his times, to examine his works as a product of his times. To this end we will read two Shakespearean plays, in conjunction with two plays by contemporary dramatists, to understand better the scope and breadth of English Renaissance drama including and beyond Shakespeare. The course will focus on the specific material circumstances of dramatic production and performance, but also attempt a sustained engagement with the language and formal aspects of the popular theatre, and situate the readings within broader currents of intellectual, political, and religious thought. More specifically, we will engage with disparate ideas ranging from kingship to conjugality, from gender to genre, from self-reflexive theatricality to early modern notions of self-hood. The texts will include one tragedy and one comedy by Shakespeare, and one each by another contemporary dramatist—in this case Middleton (comedy) and Webster (tragedy). This course will aim to inculcate familiarity with the language of Renaissance drama through close readings. It will also equip the students with an understanding of the social, political, religious, and economic conditions which shaped, inhibited, and engendered the rise of the commercial theatre and of the conditions and modes of performance of the plays. (3:0:0). Prerequisites: none.
Primary Texts
Merchant of Venice (1605)
Macbeth (1606)
Thomas Middleton Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613)
Webster Duchess of Malfi (1614)
Linguistic Approaches to Literature
This course will be on the basic concepts in Linguistics: Phonetics, Morphology, Semantics, Syntax, includes theory plus practice sessions – to introduce students to the methodology of modern linguistics and teach analytic reasoning via examination of linguistic data. The course would be divided into four modules. Module 3 and 4 introduces students to philological analysis of literary texts like two cantos from Dante’s Inferno, as well as Dante’s essay on the eloquence of the vernacular. Students are also introduced to selected essays by the philologist Eric Auerbach and Sheldon Pollock.
Module 1: Studying Beowulf (preferably chapter 1) on its language, context, and cultural background. Manuscript available through the Electronic Beowulf project. The module will focus on one tale from the Canterbury Tales (preferably The Knight's Tale), rudiments of Middle English as a spoken and written language, to become familiar with Middle English.
Module 2: Beyond the sentence: Pragmatics; Translation exercises for Beowulf as well as for Chaucer; a word-for-word transliteration from Old/ Middle English into Modern English; grammatical information for some of the terms in that line of text. (3:0:0). Prerequisites: none.
Module 3 Theory- Dante's De Vulgari Eloquentia (in translation)
Praxis - Dante's Inferno Canto I and X
Module 4 Theory - Auerbach's Philology and WeltLiteratur
Praxis - Auerbach's Farinata and Cavalcanti
Sheldon Pollock on Liberation Philology
Primary Texts
Beowulf (preferably chapter 1) Manuscript available through the Electronic Beowulf project
Canterbury Tales (preferably The Knight's Tale), Simon, Sherry; Gender in Translation — Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. 1996. New York: Routledge.
Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman, & Nina Hyams. An Introduction to Language, 10th edition. Cengage Learning, 2014.
Steven Pinker 2007, ‘The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language’, HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
Eric Auerbach’s essay “Philology and Welt Literatur” and selections from Mimesis
Sheldon Pollock’s essay ‘Liberation Philology.’
Essay and poetry by Dante (in translation).
Introduction to Translation Studies
This is a basic course which will introduce students to key theories, models and approaches in Translation Studies relevant to contemporary research and practice in the field. The students would be studying statements from linguists, theologians, and writers to examine and recognize the value of the diversity with which translation has been appreciated and practiced throughout the ages. They will be able to analyse the traditional understanding of the link between the original and translated text, between author and translator, the source and target languages and cultures. (3:0:0). Prerequisites: none.
The course is divided into three modules:
History of Translation and Translation Studies
(From ancient times to the 20th century)
Linguistic approach; Machine Translation; Translation: process and product; Text types
Techniques, strategies, and procedures in translation
A Survey of Different Approaches in Translation Studies:
Functional - Skopos theory- Hans Josef Vermeer
Systems - Even-Zohar
Philosophical - Steiner, Benjamin
Translation Studies and Other Disciplines
Cultural turn; cultural studies; gender studies– feminist translation theory
Simon, Sherry
Postcolonial translation theory - Spivak, Niranjana
Primary Texts
Munday Jeremy; 2008; Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications; Taylor & Francis; ISBN: 0415396948, 9780415396943
Susan Bassnett, ed. Translating Literature
John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte, eds., The Craft of Translation
The Letters of St. Jerome; Letter 57 -- To Pammachius On The Best Method Of Translating; English Translation: Fremantle, pp. 112-119
Vermeer Hans J.;1996; “Skopos and Commission in Translational Action
George Steiner: The Translation Studies Reader. 2000. (Ed) Lawrence Venuti. Routledge
Itamar Even-Zohar: "The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem." Poetics Today 11:1 (1990), pp. 45-51.
Simon, Sherry; Gender in Trans-lation — Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. 1996. New York: Routledge
Tejaswini Niranjana; Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism and the Colonial Context
Spivak Gayatri Chakravorty; ‘The Politics of Translation’. In The Translation Studies Reader. 2000. (Ed) Lawrence Venuti. Routledge
Modernist Literature
This course will familiarize the student with the literary-aesthetic paradigm that has come to be called “modernist.” This will be achieved through the study of exemplary works in each of the major genres: the novel, the short story, drama, and poetry. Through this study the student will gain a sound understanding not only of the particulars of the modernist aesthetic, but also of the cultural, political, and philosophical ethos that informed it. (3:0:0). Prerequisites: none.
Primary Texts
Fiction
James Joyce, “The Dead” (1914).
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925).
Drama:
Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (1949).
Poetry: A selection of poems by poets such as William Butler Yeats, Wilfred Owen, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Rainer Maria Rilke, and T S Eliot.
South Asian Literature
This course is designed to introduce students to some of the most important and vibrant texts in contemporary South Asian literature. It straddles the genres of novel, poetry and short-stories written in different regions of South Asia, including Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan and the disputed Kashmir valley. This course seeks, thus, to familiarize the students with the literary output in South Asia and its diasporas, that comes to grips with vital questions of form, political conflict, caste, language, religion and gender. (3:0:0). Prerequisites: none
Primary Texts
Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (1997)
Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost (2000)
Premchand, The Chess-Players (tr. by Hans Raj Rahbar)
Ismat Chughtai, The Quilt (tr. by M. Asaduddin)
Saadat Hasan Manto, Toba Tek Singh (tr. by Khalid Hasan)
Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Last Night, Don’t ask me for that love again, A Prison Evening, Bangladesh III in The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems by Faiz Ahmad Faiz, translated by Agha Shahid Ali (1991)
Agha Shahid Ali, Tonight, Homage to Faiz Ahmad Faiz, The Country Without a Post Office, I See Kashmir From New Delhi At Midnight in The Veiled Suite: The Collected Poems (2009)
Special Topics in Translation and Linguistics
Course description not available.
Special Topics In Literature: Medieval to Romantic
Course description not available.
Case Study - Single Author: Dorothy Parker
Course description not available.
British Literature: Romantic Poetry
Course description not available.
Introduction to Gender Studies
Course description not available.
Advanced Creative Writing Level III - Prose
Course description not available.
Folklore
Course description not available.
18th Century Prose: Essayists, Pamphleteers and Diarists
Course description not available.
Victorian Novels: Narrative Techniques
Course description not available.
Global Folklore
Course description not available.
Post-Modernist Fiction
Course description not available.
Drama
Course description not available.
The Fundamentals of Creative Writing
Course description not available.
Mapping Language Change
Language change is constant. Linguistic boundaries are never clear-cut. At best, linguistic boundaries can be described as overlapping transitional spaces where migration and urbanization shape new possibilities of human interaction. Language spoken at present is the best laboratory for a linguist.
This course is both theoretical and empirical inquiry into language change. Focus of the chosen texts is on language universals and linguistic typology. Second part of this course will be field study- data collection and analysis. Students will learn data analysis through triangulation- statistical analysis of quantitative data in specialized linguistic labs; and critical discourse analysis of qualitative data. (1:0:3). Prerequisites: none
Primary Texts
Language Universals and Linguistic Typology, Bernard Comrie, 1981.
Weinreich,U., Labov, W., Herzog, M., 1968. Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change, in Directions for Historical Linguistics, ed. W.P.Lehmann, Y. Malkiel, 97-195, Austin: Univ. Texas Press.
Introduction to Critical Theory
This course aims to introduce students to the basic theoretical works that revolutionized literary studies during the 1970s and 80s.The focus of the texts chosen is insistently on the literary. They comprise some of the most definitive works we have on (a) the basic aspects of the literary (language, discourse, author, reader), (b) literary genres (the novel, poetry) and the locations of literary criticism (Feminism, Post-colonialism).
Focusing on language, discourse, genres and social orientation, this course will equip students with sophisticated conceptual frames to deal with not just literary material but any situation in life which involves human communication. (3:1:0). Prerequisites: none
Primary Texts
Ferdinand de Saussure, (1915) A Course in General Linguistics W. ed. M. Baskin (London: Fontana) p111-121
M.M. Bakhtin, from. The Dialogical Imagination (1934) Holquist extract in Rice and Waugh, Modern Literary Theory pp230-39
Roland Barthes, “Death of the Author” From Image-Music-Text (1968) trans. S.Heath, pp142-48
Michel Foucault, “The Order of the Discourse” (1971) in Robert Young, Untying the Text (1971) 52-64
Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process” (1974) extract in Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh, Modern Literary Theory: A Reader (London: Arnold)
Elaine Showalter, “Towards a Feminist Poetics” in Mary Jacobus ed. Women Writing About Women (1979) pp. 25-36
Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of the Colonial Discourse” October No. 28, Spring (1983) 125-33.
Jerome J. McGann, “The Text, the Poem and the Problem of the Historical Method” (1985) from The Beauty of Inflections pp. 251-268
Landmarks in the Novel Form
This course is designed to introduce students to some of the most characteristic forms that the novel has taken through the course of its long and continuing evolution and to the range of expressive possibilities that the novel, as a whole, has acquired.
The novels that will be studied in this course are (i) Don Quijote , not only because it exemplifies the picaresque form , but also because it is a novel about novel writing itself (ii) Wuthering Heights because it both represents and radically subverts one of the novel’s great sub genres : domestic fiction and (iii) One Hundred Years of Solitude which brings the novel up to our times and unfurls the whole range of expressive resources that it acquired through the long course of its development
This course seeks, thus, to take the student through the great landmarks of the novel form, explain to her how these novels achieve their characteristic effects and enable her to analyze and work with many real life situations that involve prose narratives. (3:1:0). Prerequisites: none
Primary Texts
Miguel De Cervantes, Don Quijote Book 1 (1605) trans. Burton Raffel
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights (1847)
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) trans. Gregory Rabassa.
Poetry and Conflict
This course is designed to introduce students to a wide range of contemporary poetry written around conflict, whether armed combat, protracted war, occupation or forced exile. It includes poetic texts that approach some of the most intractable conflicts of the modern world with formal dexterity, empathy and resilience. This course seeks to take the students through the enormous formal, emotional and political resources wielded by such poetry in order to speak meaningfully about the conflicts that affect our contemporary world. (3:1:0). Prerequisites: none.
Primary Texts
Vietnam
Bruce Weigl, Song of Napalm, Elegy for Peter, The Last Lie
Wislawa Szymborska (tr.. Stanislaw Baranczak & Clare Cavanagh) Vietnam
Ocean Vuong, Aubade with Burning City, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
First World War
Wilfred Owen, Dulce Et Decorum Est, Smile Smile Smile, Anthem for Doomed Youth
Siegfried Sassoon, Glory of Women, Repression of War Experience
Philip Larkin, MCMXIV
Palestine
Mahmoud Darwish, A Soldier Dreams of White Lilies, Identity Card (tr. Salman Masalha and Vivian Eden)
Rafeef Ziadah, We Teach Life Sir, Shades of Anger
Kashmir
Agha Shahid Ali, The Country Without a Post-Office, I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight
Roushan Ilahi/MC Kash, My People, I Protest
Politics and Polemics in Early Modern Europe
This is a special topic course which will examine in detail the intersection of the political and the literary in early modern Europe. Reading political treatises from the archipelago and the mainland in juxtaposition with each other, this course will try and investigate the way in which humanist political thought develops across Europe. At the same time we will immerse ourselves in the study of the stylistic aspects various genres of vernacular prose writing popular in the Renaissance: the polemical pamphlet, the dialogue, the treatise, the advice-book for princes etc. The course will be divided in following four modules, each comprising short excerpts from a two or three key texts.
Through a close reading of the material this course seeks to follow the shifting contours of political discourse, the simultaneous emergence of the rhetoric of absolutism and the language of civic rights, while relating these transformations to the major historical landmarks of the period—such as the Reformation, the Huguenot massacre, Mary Stuart’s deposition, the English civil war etc. Some of thematic and formal aspects we will focus on include: political theology, the importance of translation in the humanist project, the material circumstances of circulation of texts and ideas, political counsel, morality and ethics in the political realm, the influence of Platonic and Aristotelian political models, violence and sovereign power. (3:1:0). Prerequisites: none.
Primary Texts
The Sovereign and his Counsellors
Erasmus Education of a Christian Prince (1516) [Dedication, Chapter I]
Machiavelli The Prince (1513) [Chapters XV-XIX, XXIII-XXV]
Castiglione The Courtier (1528) [Book IV, chapters 3-10]
Sovereignty and Governance
Smith De Republica Anglorum (1562-3) [Book I, Chapters 1, 2, 7, 8, Book II, Chapter 1-3]
Bodin Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576) [Book I, Chapters VIII, X, Book VI, Chapter 4]
Tyranny and Resistance
Ponet A Short Treatise on Political Power (1556) [Chapters I and VI]
Buchanan De Iure Regni Apud Scotos (1571) [Chapters 7-12, 24, 27, 29, 34]
Polemics of the English civil war: Justifying Tyrannicide
Milton The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1641)
Excerpts from Digger (Gerrard Winstanley) and Ranter tracts (1640’s)
[Winstanley, New Year’s Gift, Norton Anthology of Eng Lit Vol B pp. 1849-55; Nigel Smith, A Collection of Ranter Writings: Spiritual Liberty and Sexual Freedom in the English Revolution]
Compulsory reading: Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols., Cambridge: 1978.
Independent Study
Course description not available.
Literary Theory
Course description not available.
Literature Today: The Novel
Course description not available.
Philology As The Newbie/Oldie In Literary Method
Course description not available.
Special Topics In Renaissance Literature: Magic And Science
Course description not available.
Political Prose Writings In India Post-1947
Course description not available.
Global Swift
Course description not available.
Translation Criticism & Translation Project
Course description not available.
Writing Narratives
Course description not available.
South Asian Writing
Course description not available.
Post-Colonial Theory
Course description not available.
The Visual and the Literary
Course description not available.
20th Century Fantasy Fiction
Course description not available.
Contemporary Forms of Fiction
In this course we shall, having studying various kinds of fiction writing, look at other forms of fiction making, including RPG, ‘psuedo’ videos on YouTube®, made-up trailers for movies etc, graphic novels and movies and TV shows. The intention is to attempt to understand the difference between reading a more or less structured piece of literature, and forms that at this point in time seem more free-flowing and less deterministic. The following issues will be addressed primarily:
Virtuality, Simulation, Actuality, Reality, Virtual Reality, Digital Gaming and its Implications for Gaming, More Recent Digital Innovations, and the question ‘Why does a Game Need a Story?’(3:1:0). Prerequisites: none.
Primary Texts
Selections from David Bell and Barbara Kennedy, The Cybercultures Reader
Richard Stallman, Lecture at Calcutta, 16.08.2006 (text will be provided)
Selections from
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (section on the ‘panopticon’, and the section on ‘Docile Bodies’
Gilles Deleuze, ‘Society of Control’
Graphic Novel
Joe Sacco, Palestine, (with an introduction by Edward Said)
TV Show/ Movie
Westworld
Feminist Theory: Unlocking the Literary
This course is primarily designed to introduce students to feminist theory. The course will also examine the pleasures and problems of women's literature. The broad framework of the course lies in posing the following questions: What are the ways in which feminist theory unlocks literary texts? What is distinctive about feminine ecriture - how does a women writer write and fictionalize her vision of the world in its actuality and possibility? (3:1:0). Prerequisites: none
Primary Texts
Ruth Vanita, Gender, Sex, and the City: Urdu Rekhti Poetry in India, 1780-1870 (2012).
Helene Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa (1975).
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own.
A History of Feminist Literary Criticism, Cambridge U Press, 2007, 66-100 (Chapters 4 and 5).
Mary Eagleton, Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader. Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 98-102, 238-265.
Translation Theory and Practice
This course will offer some advanced discussion of translation as a cultural form, history of translation studies, and lastly, theoretical approaches to translation.
This course provides a study of translation criticism which is the systematic study, evaluation, and interpretation of different aspects of translated works. It is an interdisciplinary academic field closely related to A. Literary Criticism B. Translation Theory. & C. Translation Project.
Students will be expected to complete each reading and 1. Prepare a short critical analytical essay (approx. 500 words) and 2. Questions on each assigned reading. Students would bring a typed copy of the prepared short analytical essay and questions to class. Add-on and edit your essay on this printed page after the discussion is over. (3:1:0). Prerequisites: none
Primary Texts
Montaigne's Essays Montaigne's Essays: Book I (1533-1592) - Translation by J. Florio (1553-1625)
Hugo Friedrich; ‘On the Art of Translation’. In Rainer Schulte, John Biguenet (eds), Theories of Translation.
Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, from Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Two translations of this essay will be studied.
George Steiner ‘The Hermeneutic Motion’. In The Translation Studies Reader. 2000. (Ed) Lawrence Venuti. Routledge
Antoine Berman, "La traduction comme epreuve de l'etranger," [Translation and the trials of the foreign] Texte 4 (1985)
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak ‘The Politics of Translation’. In The Translation Studies Reader. 2000. (Ed) Lawrence Venuti. Routledge
Jacques Derrida, "From Des Tours de Babel." In Rainer Schulte, John Biguenet (eds), Theories of Translation.
The Bible: King James’ Version, Book of Genesis (several translations of this book will be discussed.
Translation Project
English translation of a text (of the student’s choice) along with details involved in process of translation or a scholarly research project on a topic related to translation, supervised by the faculty member.
Crafting Poems
This course is meant to introduce undergraduate students to the art of writing poetry. Every student will be preparing a portfolio of poems throughout the semester on which s/he will be examined. There will be a supportive workshop context within the class hours. Classroom exercises will include reading and listening to important contemporary poets, focusing on three specific areas of Form, Theme and Politics. We will explore formal, aesthetic, emotional and political choices in writing poetry through both group and individual writing exercises that are experimental and stimulating. The course would include interacting with a visiting poet, whose work the students would read in detail, and who will be responding to the students' works. Through extensive workshopping of the students' poems, this course hopes to create enthusiastic practitioners of the genre. (3:1:0). Prerequisites: none
Primary Texts
Week 1: Introduction
Readings: I’m Explaining a Few Things by Pablo Neruda, To a Young Poet by Mahmoud Darwish, Indian Summer by Dorothy Parker, Open Letter to Honey Singh by Rene Sharanya Verma,
Week 2: Reading, Writing Exercise: On Theme: Love, Workshop
Readings: Dubious by Vikram Seth, Don’t ask me for that love again by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, A ‘Thank You’ Note by Wislawa Szymborska, Tonight I can write the saddest lines by Pablo Neruda
Week 3: Reading, Writing Exercise: On Form: Ghazal, Workshop
Readings: Ghazal on Ghazals by John Hollander, Tonight by Agha Shahid Ali, Bring the Flowers to Bloom by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Hip-Hop Ghazal by Patricia Smith
Week 4: Reading, Writing Exercise: On Politics, Workshop
Readings: Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen, Dear Mr. Yadav, I too am an Indian Woman by Aditi Rao, Harlem by Langston Hughes, I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight by Agha Shahid Ali
Week 5: Reading, Writing Exercise: On Theme: Loss, Workshop
Readings: Musee des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden, Atlantis by Mark Doty, Aubade by Philip Larkin, Resume by Dorothy Parker
Week 6: Reading, Writing Exercise: On Form: Villanelle, Workshop
Readings: One Art by Elizabeth Bishop, Do not go Gentle into that Good Night by Dylan Thomas, If I could tell you by W.H. Auden, Mad Girl’s Love Song by Sylvia Plath
Week 7: Reading, Writing Exercise: On Politics, Workshop
Readings: Still I Rise by Maya Angelou, The White Man Killed My Father by David Diop, Merged Landscapes by Rudramoorthy Cheran, We Teach Life, Sir by Rafeef Ziadah,
Week 8: Reading, Writing Exercise: Individuated, Workshop
Readings: [TBA]
Week 9: Final Revisions, Individual Workshops with Instructor, Submission of Mid-Term Portfolios
Week 10: Reading Works by Writer in Focus
Readings: [TBA]
Week 11: Responses to Works by Writer in Focus, Workshop
Week 12: Responses to Works by Writer in Focus, Workshop
Week 13: Visit by Writer in Focus, Responses to Students’ Works
Week 14: Individual Workshops with Instructor
Week 15: Final Revisions, Submission of Portfolios
Crafting Short Fiction
This course will look at the short story from 1000 to 3000 words. Students will study exemplary texts in class. They will discuss the nuts and bolts of writing fiction such as point of view, creation of character, and plot. They do that in the Fundamentals of Creative Writing course as well. However, here they will do it in far greater detail. Furthermore, they will study setting, writing dialogue, editing and revising, and also use workshopping techniques extensively. In addition to the creative writing, they will write a critical commentary which will make them aware of the fact that the creative and critical go together. For grading purposes they will produce two stories each, plus a critical commentary to go with the second story. It would help if students taking this course have taken Intro to Creative Writing at the 100 -level.
In the first half of the course, we will focus on the shorter 1500-word story. After the mid-term, we will focus on the 2,500-word story. Through a mixture of lecture and discussion, students will focus on the intricacies of plot, characterisation, point of view, voice and other important attributes of writing fiction. Students will also learn to utilise workshopping techniques, which will enable them to become better critics of their own and other people’s work. (3:1:0). Prerequisites: none.
Primary Texts
Ernest Hemingway, ‘Hills like White Elephants’
Raymond Carver, ‘A Small, Good Thing’’
Jhumpa Lahiri, ‘When Mr Pirzada Came to Dine’’
James Joyce, ‘Araby’
Anton Chekhov, ‘The Grasshopper’
Etgar Keret, ‘Lieland’
Junot Diaz, Miss Lora
Daniyal Mueenuddin, ‘Nawabdin Electrician’
Sol Stein, Stein On Writing, ISBN-13 978-0312254216
World Folk Literature
This course is a survey of folk literature identifying archetypes, themes, and motifs, orally transmitted literature across place and time. Students will begin by learning key concepts of folklore scholarship: culture, tradition, performance, genre, the local/global distinction, the folk/popular divide, and the dynamics of the customary and innovative in folklore production. Through an exploration of these concepts students will develop an expansive definition of folklore the way that stories live between and among people i.e. tellers and audiences, collectors and translators; adapting themselves to changing times, circumstances and metaphysical spaces. The course will focus on the transmission and transformation of cultural knowledge and practice in situations of want and plenty, peace and conflict. (3:1:0). Prerequisites: none
Primary Texts
Barre Toelken, The Snails Clues in The Anguish of Snails: Native American Folklore of the West, pp. ix-xii and 1-8
Zipes, Jack. 2003. “Once There Were Two Brothers Named Grimm.” Introduction to the Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, 3rd ed. New York: Bantam. xxiii-xxxvi.
Propp V. (1968) Discussion of Tale-Types and Motifs, Morphology of the Folktale. University of Texas Press, Chapter 2-4
Kirin Narayan, 1993; Refractions of the Field at Home: American Representations of Hindu Holy Men in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Cultural Anthropology 8(4):476-509
Regina Bendix, 1989 Tourism and Cultural Displays: Inventing Traditions for Whom? The Journal of American Folklore 102 (404): 131-146.
Sadhana Naithani (2006) In Quest of Indian Folktales, Orient Blackswan; Chapter 3
Kelly Feltault, 2006; Development Folklife: Human Security and Cultural Conservation, Journal of American Folklore 119 (471):90-110
Films:
Ever After (1998) by Andy Tennant – with Drew Barrymore in a new version of “Cinderella” (with Leonardo da Vinci as her fairy godmother)
Sugar Cane Alley (1983) Director Euzhan Palcy
Vernacular Literary Practices
This course will highlight the historical emergence and development of vernaculars in European and world literature. Students will be introduced to major theoretical formulations about vernaculars by poets and novelists. Drawing on these readings students will analyze a short fiction and a novel in which the vernacular is the central concern. The goal of the course is to introduce students to the idea that there is a profound fissure at the heart of literature between hegemonic concepts of the literary versus minority or non- elite; controversies and debates that circulate around the notion of the vernacular constitute one way to get at this fissure and analyze it. (3:1:0). Prerequisites: none
Primary Texts
Module One: Histories of the Emergence of Vernacular Language–Literatures ( Four Weeks)
Benedict Anderson, ‘Old Languages, New Models’ Imagined Communities, Verso Revised Edition 2007, 69-84.
Sheldon Pollock, ’The Cosmopolitan Vernacular ’ The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 57: No. I ( Feb 1998) 6-37.
Korean television drama, Tree with Deep Roots (the TV serial dramatizes King Sejong who lived in 1397-1450 and his promotion of the Korean vernacular and invention of Hangul alphabet at a time of elite dominance of Mandarin Chinese).
Module Two: Debates around the concept of vernaculars (Four Weeks)
Aligheri Dante, De Vulgare Eloquentia (1302).
Ngugi Wa Thiongo, ’The Language of African Fiction” Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), 63-86.
UG Krishnamoorthy, English Brahmins, Kannada Shudras
Module Three and Four: Two Case Studies of Vernacular Literary Studies (Seven Weeks)
Phaniswarnath Renu’s The Third Vow (Aanchalik Sahitya)
Perumal Murugan, One Part Woman (Vattara Ilakkiam)
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Issues in Higher Education
Course description not available.
Renaissance Literature
Course description not available.
Advanced Writing and Research Methods
This course will introduce post-graduate students to the art of research and formal research paper writing. Expect to be taken through the nitty-gritties of research training in genres of formal writing: research proposal, research paper, conference abstract, conference presentation, MLA citation, methods of researching library catalogues (card and digital), indexes and databases and how to access and gain membership in the major research libraries in Delhi.
Unit 1: Reading to Write
Brooks, Cleanth., Gregory Colomb, Joseph Willams Eds. The Craft of Research. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Foucault, Michele. “The Statement and the Archive” from The Archaeology of Knowledge & the Discourse on Language. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972
Gallaghar, Catherine and Stephen Greenblatt. “Introduction” Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997
Geertz, Clifford. “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture” in The Interpretations of Culture. New York: Basic Books Inc., 1973
MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, Seventh Edition.
3 weeks
Unit 2: Pick an area for a research paper
Make a Bibliography
Annotate the Bibliography
Research Proposal
Write a literature Review
3 weeks
Unit 3: 5-page Paper
5-page paper due (1700 words)
Draft 1
Draft 2
3 weeks
Unit 4: 10-15 page Paper
10-15 page paper due (3500-4000 words)
Rough Draft 1
Rough Draft 2
Final Draft
Conference abstract
Conference presentation
The Global 18th Century
It is impossible to understand 18th Century Europe without understanding the 18th century as a global phenomenon. This course will be interdisciplinary and will track various strands through literary analysis, cultural studies and history. Decades of the long eighteenth century are remarkable for the prose output of essayists, diarists, pamphleteers, writers of conduct books, and travelogues. The rise of political parties, mushrooming of clubs and coffee houses, and the new publishing houses gave huge impetus to prose writings. This course will also track that particular moment of European history when the common public started asking uncomfortable questions about ‘imperialism’. From a geo-political perspective, this course will resonate deeply with 21st century political realities.
Unit 1: Primary Texts
Selections from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels
Excerpts from Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Letters
Secondary Texts:
Clement Hawes’ introduction to the critical edition of Gulliver’s Travels
Donna Landry, “Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and the literature of social comment" in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1650-1740. 1999
Felicity Nussbaum, Introduction to The Global Eighteenth Century
4 weeks
Unit 2: Primary Text
Selections from Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of Tub
Secondary Text:
Excerpt from Carole Fabricant’s Swift’s Landscape
3 weeks
Unit 3: Primary Text
Joseph Addision, The Musical Instruments of Conversation; On Giving Advice
On Long Winded People; Reflections by Richard Steele
Excerpts from Roger De Coverley Series
Example of Conduct Literature: Lady Sarah Pennington - An Unfortunate Mother’s Advice to Her Absent Daughters
Secondary Texts:
Caroline Davis, "Publishing in the Eighteenth Century: Popular Print Genres" 2005
Critical Edition of Pennington’s prose piece by Mary Lynette Austin, 2009.
3 weeks
Unit 4: Primary Text
Excerpts from Pepys and Evelyn’s Diaries
Secondary Texts:
Dan Doll and Jessica Munnis, Essays on the Seventeenth –and Eighteenth-Century Diary and Journal, 2006
Srinivas Aravamudan’s chapter titled “Lady Mary in the Hammam” in Tropicpolitans, an excerpt from Enlightenment Orientalism.
4 weeks
Evaluation
Reading Comprehension in-class exam
Long paper (min. 10 double spaced pages)
Power-point presentation on long-paper
The Novel in 19th Century Europe
The three European nations that play a crucial role in the evolution of the novel in Europe in the nineteenth century are Britain, France and Russia. In this course we will investigate how the novel evolved in these countries with a view towards locating the points of convergence and divergence. As part of this investigation we will also study what two influential critics have to say about the novels in question as well as the 19th-century European novel in general.
Unit 1
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
4 weeks
Unit 2
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
6 weeks
Unit 3
Stendhal The Red and the Black
4 weeks
Secondary Readings Georgy Lukacs ,"Balzac and Stendhal’’ in Studies in European Realism, pp. 65- 85 Mikhail Bakhtin, excerpts from "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" from The Dialogical Imagination pp.243-258.
Evaluation
3 papers of 1500 words each on all 3 novels (one on each novel)
A research paper of 2000-2500 words on one of the three authors studied during the semester
An examination at the end of the semester
Philology
Course description not available.
Women, Subjectivity and Modernity in India and Engliand
Course description not available.
Research Writing
Course description not available.
The Literary and the Visual
This course which focuses on material drawn from Europe between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries aims to equip students with the ability to move between literary and visual forms and to track ways in which expressive strategies mutate in this process. The course will focus on formal categories such as realism and the differing ways in which chronotopes are deployed by literary and visual forms , but it will also take students through a set of paintings and novels to demonstrate how these forms can be brought into an interanimating relationship.
Unit 1: Time and Space
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon : An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry translated by Edward Allen McCormick, Chapters 16-18
Mikhail Bakhtin “Forms of time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” ( excerpt) from The Dialogical Imagination translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist.
3 weeks
Unit 2: Realism
E.H .Gombrich, Art and Illusion ( excerpts )
Norman Bryson Vision and Painting ( excerpts)
Roland Barthes , S/Z Trans. Richard Miller.
Jaques Ranciere, The Future of the Image. trans. Gregory Elliott. Chapter 3, “Painting in the Text”
6 weeks
Unit 3: Painting and the Novel
Titian , “Venus of Urbino”
Vermeer “The Lace maker”
Peter de Hooch , “Woman Reading a Letter”
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
Hogarth, “Industry and Idleness” all 12 plates
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
5 weeks
Evaluation
Evaluation in this course will be continuous and conducted throughout the semester. The object of evaluation will be to test a student’s knowledge of the material taught through the course and the development of her analytical, critical and writing abilities. A final grade will be awarded on the basis of written presentations in seminars, participation in seminars and a 2,000 words term paper to be submitted at the end of the course. The course instructor may also set a short written examination to test the student’s knowledge of the texts taught.
Writing Narratives
This course is concerned with establishing a dialogue between the writing and analysis of narrative which will enable students to become better critics of their own work as well as the work of others. We will look at the fictional as well as the nonfictional narrative. While the primary texts will form the bulwark of the course, from time to time, other material will be circulated among the students by way of class handouts. The class itself will be a combination of seminar, workshopping and in-class writing. In addition, students will have to turn in homework as well as assignments for grading.
Unit 1: Life writing and translating experience into fiction
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (Life writing),
Tim O’Brien, ‘The Man I Killed’ (short story)
4 weeks
Unit 2: Fiction
Short stories
Jhumpa Lahiri, ‘Hell-Heaven’
Anton Chekhov, ‘The Lady with the Dog’
Raymond Carver, ‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Love’
Novel
Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
7 weeks
Unit 3: Reportage
John Carlin, Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game
3 weeks
Secondary reading:
Sol Stein, Stein on Writing, St Martin’s Griffin, 2000.
Evaluation
A piece of life-writing (2000-2500 words) to be turned in at mid-term
Short story or piece of reportage (2000-2500 words) to be turned in as part of the final portfolio.
With the short story or piece of reportage the student will also submit a critical commentary that will analyse the process of creating the narrative and explain the creative decisions made in the process of composition. This will be turned in as part of the final portfolio
There will be an end-of-semester examination.
Postcolonial Theory
This course is meant to introduce students to the major debates within the field of Postcolonial Theory. The debates are outlined under three subheadings which familiarize the students with, first, the field of postcolonial literature and how it responds to the long history of the Empire, second, an exploration of how Postcolonial Theory is deeply invested in revising Eurocentric discourse and studying its consequences, and third, an investigation of how colour prejudice has been both the primary medium and the effect of the long duree of colonial domination.
Unit 1: Writing Back
Achebe, Chinua. “African Writer,” in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, Eds. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.
Ashcroft, Bill, et al., “Introduction”, “Cutting the ground: critical models of post-colonial literatures”, “Theory at the crossroads: indigenous theory and post-colonial reading”, “Rethinking the post-colonial: post-colonialism in the twenty first century” in The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London, Routledge, 1989.
4 weeks
Unit 2: Changing Discourse
Said, Edward., “Introduction”, “The Scope of Orientalism”, “Orientalism Structures and Restructures”, in Orientalism, New York: Pantheon, 1978.
James, C. L. R., “Preface to the First Edition”, “The Property”, “The Owners”, “Parliament and Property”, “The San Domingo Masses Begin”, “And the Paris Masses Complete”, in The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, New York: The Dial Press, 1938.
5 weeks
Unit 3: Colouring Perceptions
hooks, bell. “Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination,” in Grossberg, Lawrence et al., Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1990.
Fanon, Frantz., “Introduction”, “The Black Man and Language”, “The Woman of Colour and the White Man”, “The Man of Colour and the White Woman”, “The Black Man and Psychopathology” in Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1962.
5 weeks
Evaluation
Mid-semester - Written Assignment (Choice between 10 questions) - 1500 words
Final Submission - Written Assignment (Question decided individually for candidates in consultation with the instructor) - 2500 words
South Asian Writing
This course is meant to familiarize the students with the major literary texts and debates from 20th/21st century South Asia. It is divided into two sections, consisting of novels and poetry respectively. Through an exploration of Hyder, Rushdie and Hanif, the students get a chance to explore the literary responses to the turbulent political history of the subcontinent from the Partition, to the Emergency to the fall and rise of dictatorships in the region. Through studying the poetry of Dhasal, Pasha and Das, we investigate the issues of caste, gender and conflict as inflecting the aesthetic of the subcontinent’s poets. The background readings help to ground these debates with critical writings on caste, on the viability of the category of ‘South Asian literature’, on the role of English in the region, and on conflict in the region.
Unit I
Qurratulain Hyder, River of Fire (NDPC: 1999)
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (Random House: 2006)
Mohammed Hanif, A Case of Exploding Mangoes (Vintage: 2009)
9 weeks
Unit II
Namdeo Dhasal: “Man, You Should Explode”, “Speculations on a Shirt”, “Cruelty”, “The day she was gone”, “Arsefuckers Park”, “New Delhi: 1985”, “Mandakini Patil: A Young Prostitute, My Intended Collage” Kyla Pasha, Selections from High Noon and the Body (Yoda Press, 2010), “Poem on a Paper Aeroplane Floated Across the Border”, “High Noon and the Body”, “Saddest Seattle Song”, “Up Next, Lahore Song”, “Playmate of the Year”
Kamala Das, Selections, “Farewell to Bombay”, “The Dance of the Eunuchs”, “A Feminist’s Lament”, “An Introduction”, “The Looking Glass”, “Summer in Calcutta”, “Nani”, “Gracious Allah”
5 weeks
Background Readings
B.R.Ambedkar, Sections 1-11, The Annihilation of Caste (1936)
Harish Trivedi, "South Asian Literature: Reflections in a Confluence" Indian Literature, Vol. 49, No. 5 (September-October 2005), pp. 186-194
Raja Rao, Preface to Kanthapura (1938)
Perry Anderson, "Why Partition?", London Review of Books Vol 34 No. 14, 19 July 2012
Evaluation
Mid-semester - Written Assignment (Choice between 10 questions) - 1500 words
Final Submission - Written Assignment (Question decided individually for cadidates in consulation with the instructor) - 2500 words
The Long Renaissance
This course will examine in detail four quintessential moments that visibly shaped thought and knowledge in the British Renaissance. We will read a prose fantasy by a leading humanist, poetry that is mired in anxieties of love, politics and science, a play that puts self-doubt and skepticism at the heart of early modernity, and finally two books of an epic that gives aspiration, failure and the exercise of justification a grand lyric. The theme of wanting to know, sometimes more than what is obviously knowable, will underlie our reading and enquiry.
Unit 1: Utopia by Sir Thomas More
Stephen Greenblatt, "At the Table of the Great: More's Self-Fashioning and Self-Cancellation," in Renaissance Self-Fashioning
Quentin Skinner, "Sir Thomas More's 'Utopia' and the language of Renaissance humanism"
3 weeks
Unit 2: “In Defense of Poesie” by Philip Sidney
Selections of sonnets by Petrarch, Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, Marvel and Donne
Dolan, Francis E. “Taking the Pencil out of God’s hand: Art, Nature and the Face Painting Debate in Early Modern England”. PMLA 108. 2 (March 1993) 224-239
3 weeks
Unit 3: Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Peter Stallybrass, Roger Chartier, J. Franklin Mowery, and Heather Wolfe
“Hamlet’s Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England”
Selections from Kastan, David Scott, Ed. Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. New York: G. K. Hall, 1995.
4 weeks
Unit 4: Book I & 2of Paradise Lost by John Milton
Fish, Stanley. Surprised by Sin Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.
Guillory, John. "From the Superfluous to the Supernumerary: Reading Gender into Paradise Lost." In Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry. Eds Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katherine Eisaman Maus. Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 1990. 68-88.
4 weeks
Evaluation
2 papers (2500 words each)
1 creative response to any one of the texts or themes under discussion (this can be a set of poems, a story, a pamphlet, graphic art, anything at all). Word limit can be negotiated depending on the genre)
1 final paper (3500-4000 words) and conference-style presentation at the end of the semester
Modernism
This course is meant to introduce the students to the major debates of the literary movement of Modernism in the early-mid 20th century. The selection of texts represents the range of experimentation with form and content that the movement exhibited. The texts emerge from as varied a set of places as Germany and Argentina, England and Russia, and Romania and Ireland, testifying to the transcontinental nature of the movement. The background readings from Bertolt Brecht, Frederic Jameson and Henri Bergson help us understand the new equations of the formal and the thematic that Modernism brought about.
Unit 1
Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage
Eugene Ionesco, Rhinoceros
4 weeks
Unit 2
Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse
James Joyce - The Dead (from The Dubliners)
Jorge Louis Borges – "The Approach to Al-Mu'tasim", "The Garden of Forking Paths", " The Library of Babel", "The Secret Miracle".
7 weeks
Unit 3
T.S. Eliot - The Wasteland
Wilfred Owen – “Dulce et decorum est”, “A Terre”
Anna Akhmatova – “The Muse”, “Epigram”, “In Memoriam, July 19, 1914”
W. B. Yeats – “Leda and the Swan”, “Among School Children”
3 weeks
Background Readings
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.
Henri Bergson, 1913 'The Intensity of Psychic States' in Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, George Allan & Company: London.
Fredric Jameson, 'Introduction' to The Modernist Papers, Verso: 2007.
Evaluation
Mid-semester - Written Assignment (Choice between 10 questions) - 1500 words
Final Submission - Written Assignment (Question decided individually for candidates in consulation with the instructor) - 2500 words
Translation Studies
Students will study the various approaches to the history, theory, and criticism of literary and humanistic translation. Topics of discussion would include study of translation criticism which is the systematic study, evaluation, and interpretation of different aspects of translated works, translator’s working methods, interviews with translators, multiple translations, the changing nature of interpretive approaches, theoretical models of translation, and criteria for the evaluation of translations It is an interdisciplinary academic field closely related to literary criticism and translation theory.
Unit 1: Equivalence and equivalent effect Walter Benjamin ‘The Task of the Translator’. In L. Venuti (Ed.)., The Translation Studies Reader, 2000
Eugene Nida ‘Principles of Translation as exemplified by Bible Translating’. R. A. Brower (ed.): On Translation, New York, OUP.
Swann's Way. (À la recherche du temps perdu #1) by Marcel Proust, Lydia Davis (Translator) 2004 by Penguin Classics (first published 1913) [ pp ‘Overture’]
David Bellos. 2012. Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything. [Article: A Fish in Your Ear: The Short History of Simultaneous Interpreting, pp 259-273]
5 weeks
Unit 2: Translation Shift Approach & Linguistic approach to translation
Jakobson, Roman. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” In Translation Studies Reader by
L. Venuti. 2000. Routledge.
Vinay, Jean-Paul and Darbelnet, Jean. ‘A Methodology for Translation’. 1995. John Benjamins Publishing.
J C Catford, A Linguistic Approach to Translation. 1965. OUP
Zwart, K. M. van: ‘Translation and original: Similarities and Dissimilarities, I’, Target [pp 151 – 189]
4 weeks
Unit 3: Translation and Post-Structuralism Season of Migration to the North, 2003 Penguin Classics Series
Derrida, J. (1985). Des Tours de Babel. J. Graham (Tr.). In J. Graham (Ed.), [Difference in Translation (pp. 165-207)]. Ithaca, London
Geeta Patel . 2002. “Lyrical Movements, Historical Hauntings on Gender, Colonialism, and Desire” in Miraji’s Urdu Poetry. Stanford University Press.
3 weeks
Unit 4: Translation as a cultural act
K Ramanujan “Three Hundred Ramayanas”
Bassnett Susan. 1998. ‘Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice’
Bassnett S, Lefevere A. 1998 ‘Constructing Cultures’. [The Translation Turn in Cultural Studies. pp 123-140]
2 weeks
Evaluation
A short paper and class presentation of 1000 words on each of the Module
Final assessment: A Critical Analysis of a translated work (last week)
Class Participation and peer review
Feminist and Queer Writing
This course is meant to introduce students to important feminist and queer literature produced between the late 19th and the early 21st century. Whereas the section “Feminist Interventions” is meant as an exploration of feminist subjectivities across regions and races, the section “Queer Interrogations” studies how queer expressions have used existing social discourses to make place for same-sex desire in their worlds. The background readings open up the theoretical debates about categories of ‘women’ and ‘LGBT’, explore intersectionality as an analytical force, and subject feminist and queer claims to questions of form.
Unit 1: Feminist interventions
Selections from Carol Ann Duffy: ‘Warming her pearls’, ‘How many sailors to sail a ship?’, ‘Havisham’, ‘Valentine’, ‘Mrs. Midas’, ‘Anne Hathaway’, “The Lovers”, “Mrs Lazarus”
Audre Lorde: Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Crossing Press: 1982)
Ismat Chughtai, A Life in Words, translated by M. Asaduddin (Penguin: 2012)
7 weeks
Unit 2: Queer interrogations
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Pandey Bechan Sharma ‘Ugra’ , Chocolate and Other Writings on Male Homoeroticism, translated by Ruth Vanita (Duke University Press: 2009)
Geetanjali Shree, The Roof Beneath Their Feet, translated by Rahul Soni (Harper Collins India: 2010)
7 weeks
Background Readings
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Introduction: Axiomatic" to Epistemology of the Closet (University of California Press: 1990)
Judith Butler, "Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire" in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge: 1990)
bell hooks, "Black Women: Shaping Feminist theory" in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre (Pluto Press: 2000)
Evaluation
Mid-semester - Written Assignment (Choice between 10 questions) - 1500 words
Final Submission - Written Assignment (Question decided individually for candidates in consultation with the instructor) - 2500 words
19th Century Poetry
This course acquaints the student with some key moments in the poetry of nineteenth-century Europe and America. We begin with the English romantics, exploring the romantic engagement with nature, the self, and the tantalizing promise of political revolution. Next, we encounter some distinctively American poetic strains such as the transcendentalist and the gothic. Finally, we return to Europe, to Browning’s dramatic monologue and the French Symbolists, where we witness the early stirrings of the twentieth-century preoccupation with the craft of poetry.
Unit 1: The Romantics: Nature and the Imagination
Primary Texts:
William Wordsworth: “The Daffodils”, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”
S. T. Coleridge:”Kubla Khan”, “The Ancient Mariner”
Secondary Texts:
William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”
4 weeks
The Romantics: The Age of Enlightenment
Primary Texts:
William Blake: London, Tyger
P. B. Shelley: Ode to the West Wind
Secondary Texts:
Thomas Paine: “The Rights of Man”
3 weeks
Unit 2: Nineteenth Century American Poetry
Primary Texts:
Walt Whitman: “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
Emily Dickinson: “I heard a Fly buzz - when I died”, “Because I could not stop for Death”, “The Soul selects her own society”, and other selections from Complete Poems
Secondary Texts:
Henry David Thoreau, Conclusion of Walden
Emily Dickinson, Letters of Emily Dickinson
4 weeks
Unit 3: Precursors to Modernist Poetry
Primary Texts:
Robert Browning: “My Last Duchess”, “The Bishop Orders His Tomb”
Charles Baudelaire: “To a Passerby”, “Le Crépuscule du soir [Evening Twilight]”, (from The Flowers of Evil translated by William Aggeler)
Secondary Texts:
“The Flaneur” from The Writer of Modern Life by Walter Benjamin
3 weeks
Evaluation
Three assignments, one on each unit (2500 words each)
Class participation
American Literature
This course is meant to be an indicative survey of 20th century American literature. The genres include novels, memoirs and poetry, and major issues explored in this course are crisis of American self-identity in the long 20th century, race and the afterlife of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism, and experimentation of genre within American literature.
Unit I
F. Scott. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
4 weeks
Alice Walker, The Colour Purple
4 weeks
Unit 2: Nonfiction
Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
2 weeks
Unit 3: Poetry
Allen Ginsberg, ‘Howl’, ‘A Supermarket in California’, ‘America’
Elizabeth Bishop, ‘Arrival at Santos’, ‘Crusoe in England’, ‘One Art’, ‘Questions of Travel’
3 weeks
Unit 4: Short Stories
Junot Diaz, ‘How to date a browngirl (black girl, white girl or halfie)’
Raymond Carver, ‘A small, good thing’
Ernest Hemingway, ‘A clean, well-lighted place’
1 week
Background Readings
Zora Neale Hurston, ‘How It Feels To Be Coloured Me’
James Baldwin, ‘Notes of a Native Son’ Joan Didion, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem"
Vine Deloria, ‘Indian Humor’
Evaluation
Class Participation
Mid-term assignment (1500 words)
Final assignment (2500 words)
Analyzing Culture
This course seeks to equip students from the humanities and especially the social sciences with methods which they might fruitfully deploy when engaging with problems related to culture. The course is made up of four units . The first comprises a set of readings that engage with one of the central problems in the analysis of modern culture : the deeply ambiguous role of technology in the production of culture . The second unit will address another cultural effect of modern capitalism – its capacity to produce desire. The third and fourth sections focus on recent methodological breakthroughs that have unfolded in the key domains of women’s and post-colonial studies.
Unit 1: Culture and Industrial Capitalism
Theodor Adorno, ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’ in The Culture Industry – selected essays on mass culture. Edited and with an introduction by J. M. Bernstein, London, Routledge, 1991, pp. 98-106.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility ” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writing 1935- 1938 , Harvard University Press, 2002,pp 101-134
3 weeks
Unit 2: Desire of the insubstantial
“On the fetishism of commodities” From Capital Vol. 1, Part 1, Chapter 1, Section 4.
Freud ,“Fetishism” from the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud . J. Strachey tras. Hogarth Press, pp 147-57
Jean Baudrillard,The System of Objects Verso, 1966
4 weeks
Unit 3: Gendering Cultural Studies
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge: New York, 1991, 149-181.
Gloria Anzaldua, "How To Tame a Wild Tongue." in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books: San Francisco. 1999, 75-86.
bell hooks, “Gangsta culture" in We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. Routledge: New York, 2004, 15-31.
Supplementary Readings
Linda Zerelli, "We Feel Our Freedom': Imagination and Judgment in the Thought of Hannah Arendt" Political Theory 33, No. 2 (April 2005): 158-188.
Moira Weigel" Further Materials Towards A Theory of The Man Child" The New Inquiry. July 9, 2013.
Wendy Brown, "Freedom and the Plastic Cage." in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton University Press; New York. 1995, 3-29.
4 weeks
Unit 4: Post-colonial Cultural Studies
Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, "Moving Devi" in Other Asias. Blackwell Publishing: Oxford, 2003, 178-208.
Rajeswari Sunderajan, “The Ameena Case” in The Scandal Of The State: Women: Law and Citizenship in the Postcolonial State. Duke University Press; Durham, 2003, 45-71.
Supplementary Readings
Dipesh Chakraborty, “Of Garbage, Modernity and the Citizen's Gaze." in Habitations of Modernity: Essays in The Wake of Subaltern Studies. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2002, 65-79.
Bill Ashcroft, “Sugar and slavery” in MSF Dias ed. Legacies of Slavery: Comparative Perspectives. Cambridge Scholars Publishing: Newcastle, UK, 2008, 108-125.
3 weeks
Evaluation.
Evaluation in this course will be continuous and conducted throughout the semester. The object of evaluation will be to test a student’s knowledge of the material taught through the course and the development of her analytical, critical and writing abilities. A final grade will be awarded on the basis of written presentations in seminars, participation in seminars and a 2,000 words term paper to be submitted at the end of the course. The course instructor may also set a short written examination to test the student’s knowledge of the texts taught.
Fairy Tale, Fantasy and Myth
Course description not available.
Conceptualizing World Literature
Course description not available.
Supervised Research Paper
Course description not available.
Skills in Reading and Writing in English
Course description not available.
Introduction to Reading and Writing in English
Course description not available.
Art and Technology
The course will discuss, mainly, the relation between art and technology, where 'technology' is understood not only as the various techniques of production, fabrication and fabulation that are available at specific moments of production; but also as a condition which makes some techniques possible or impossible. While taking a few examples from painting and sculpting and literary writing, the discussion will mainly focus on how we understand the relation between art and technology, often seen as opposites of each other. After a discussion of the history of various techniques that available technology makes possible or impossible, we shall move on to more contemporary issues of 20th century art and 21st century art as well: graphic images made of ASCII code printing, to digital videography and 'live' coverage of events. The concept of 'virtuality' will be introduced.
Unit 1 12 hrs
A theoretical consideration of what technology means and does in contemporary society.
Reading:
Gilbert Simondon, 'Technical Mentality'
Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility'
Stanislaw Lem, excerpts from Summa Technologica.
Unit 2 12 hrs
A discussion of selected stories by Walter Miller Jr., and of positive and negative evaluations of 'technology', with a focus on Section One of 'A Canticle for Leibowitz'
A discussion of Ursula Le Guin's 'The World for the World is Forest'
Unit 3 13 hrs
A return to the theoretical discussion of 'technology', along with a discussion of visual material from recommended readings.
Donna Harraway, 'The Cyborg Manifesto'
Martin Heidegger, 'The Questsion Concerning Technology'
Compulsory Readings:
Gilbert Simondon, 'Technical Mentality'
Martin Heidegger, 'The Question Concerning Technology'
Donna Haraway, 'The Cyborg Manifesto'
Stanislaw Lem, excerpts Summa Technologica
Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reprducibility'
Recommended Readings
Philosophy
Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time vol. 1
Fiction
Selections from fiction by Walter Miller Jr.
'Big Joe and the Nth Generation'
'Conditionally Human'
Section One of A Canticle for Leibowitz
Ursula Le Guin, 'The Word for the World is Forest'
Visual Material
Documentaries
BBC 'Life: Primates', the Chimpanzee Section
BBC 'Life:Birds'
Movies
Terminator 1-3
Solaris (Tarkovsky, 1972)
(animation)
Ghost in the Shell 1-2 (anime)
Graphic
H R Giger
Performance Art
Stellarc
Stefanie Trojan
Marina Abramovic
Ted Talks
https://www.ted.com/talks/neil_harbisson_i_listen_to_color?language=en
https://www.ted.com/talks/hugh_herr_the_new_bionics_that_let_us_run_climb_and_dance
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqtiM1hK6lU
Assessment
Attendance and Class Participation:
Classroom Presentation:
Mid-term Assignment:
Term-end Assignment:
Independent Study And Research
Course description not available.
M.A Comprehensive Exam
Course description not available.
Thesis Proposal
Course description not available.
Thesis Draft
Course description not available.
Thesis Defence
Course description not available.
The UG Supervised Research Paper
Course description not available.
Research Methodology
Course description not available.
Gender Studies
Course description not available.
Advanced Academic Writing
Course description not available.
Literary Studies: Theory and Practice I
Course description not available.
Translation Studies
Course description not available.
Writing Narratives
Course description not available.
Drama: Medieval to Renaissance
Course description not available.
19th Century Poetry
Course description not available.
Prose -1: Rise of the Novels
Course description not available.
Literary Theory and Criticism
Course description not available.
Gender Studies
Course description not available.
Literature and the Visual Arts
Course description not available.
Poetry: Romantic to Modern
Course description not available.
The Novel in 19th Century Europe
Course description not available.
Postcolonial Theory
Course description not available.
Poetry 2
Course description not available.
South Asian Writing
Course description not available.
Methods in the analysis of culture
This course seeks to equip students from the humanities and especially the social sciences with methods which they might fruitfully deploy when engaging with problems related to culture. The course is made up of four units . The first comprises a set of readings that engage with one of the central problems in the analysis of modern culture : the deeply ambiguous role of technology in the production of culture . The second unit will address another cultural effect of modern capitalism – its capacity to produce desire. The third and fourth sections focus on recent methodological breakthroughs that have unfolded in the key domains of women’s and post-colonial studies.
Unit 1: Culture and Industrial Capitalism
Theodor Adorno, ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’ in The Culture Industry – selected essays on mass culture. Edited and with an introduction by J. M. Bernstein, London, Routledge, 1991, pp. 98-106.
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility ” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writing 1935- 1938 , Harvard University Press, 2002,pp 101-134
Unit 2: Desire of the insubstantial
Marx, “On the fetishism of commodities” From Capital Vol. 1, Part 1, Chapter 1, Section 4.
Freud ,“Fetishism” from the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud . J. Strachey tras. Hogarth Press, pp 147-57
Jean Baudrillard,The System of Objects Verso, 1966
Unit 3: Gendering Cultural Studies
Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge: New York, 1991, 149-181.
Gloria Anzaldua, "How To Tame a Wild Tongue." in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Aunt Lute Books: San Francisco. 1999, 75-86.
bell hooks, “Gangsta culture" in We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. Routledge: New York, 2004, 15-31.
Supplementary Readings
Linda Zerelli, "We Feel Our Freedom': Imagination and Judgment in the Thought of Hannah Arendt" Political Theory 33, No. 2 (April 2005): 158-188.
Moira Weigel" Further Materials Towards A Theory of The Man Child" The New Inquiry. July 9, 2013.
Wendy Brown, "Freedom and the Plastic Cage." in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton University Press; New York. 1995, 3-29.
Unit 4: Post-colonial Cultural Studies
Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, "Moving Devi" in Other Asias. Blackwell Publishing: Oxford, 2003, 178-208.
Rajeswari Sunderajan, “The Ameena Case” in The Scandal Of The State: Women: Law and Citizenship in the Postcolonial State. Duke University Press; Durham, 2003, 45-71.
Supplementary Readings
Dipesh Chakraborty, “Of Garbage, Modernity and the Citizen's Gaze." in Habitations of Modernity: Essays in The Wake of Subaltern Studies. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2002, 65-79. 17
Bill Ashcroft, “Sugar and slavery” in MSF Dias ed. Legacies of Slavery: Comparative Perspectives. Cambridge Scholars Publishing: Newcastle, UK, 2008, 108-125.
Evaluation.
Evaluation in this course will be continuous and conducted throughout the semester. The object of evaluation will be to test a student’s knowledge of the material taught through the course and the development of her analytical, critical and writing abilities. A final grade will be awarded on the basis of written presentations in seminars, participation in seminars and a 2,000 words term paper to be submitted at the end of the course. The course instructor may also set a short written examination to test the student’s knowledge of the texts taught.
American Literature
Course description not available.
Literary Theory
This course will familiarize the student with some key ideas in the history of literary theory and criticism. We shall read the relevant texts closely, beginning with the ancients and arriving at the first half of the twentieth century. From Plato to Fish, we will pay special attention to the epistemological and ontological presuppositions of each theorist. Students will write short papers on important areas covered in class. There will be an open-book exam at the end of the semester.
Unit 1: Text and World: The question of mimesis
Plato: Book X of The Republic
Aristotle: Excerpts from Poetics
2 weeks
Unit 2: Text and Author: Poetic subjectivity
Alexander Pope: Excerpts from An Essay on Criticism
William Wordsworth: Excerpts from “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”
ST Coleridge: Excerpts from Biographia Literaria
TS Eliot: “Tradition and the Individual Talent”
3 weeks
Unit 3: Text and Reader (A): Aesthetics
Immanuel Kant: Excerpt from Critique of Judgment
Edmund Burke: “The Sublime and the Beautiful Compared”
2 weeks
Unit 4: The Text Itself (A): Formalism
Wimsatt and Beardsley: “The Intentional Fallacy”
Viktor Shklovsky: Excerpts from “Art as Technique”
2 weeks
Unit 5: The Text Itself (B): Language and Semiotics
Mikhail Bakhtin: “Heteroglossia in the Novel”
Ferdinand de Saussure: Excerpts from Course in General Linguistics
Roland Barthes: Excerpts from Mythologies
3 weeks
Unit 6: Text and Reader (B): Reader Response Theory
Roland Barthes: “Death of the Author”
Stanley Fish: “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One.”
2 weeks
Evaluation
Two assignments during the semester (2500 words each)
Final Exam (open book)
Class participation
Supervised Research Paper
Course description not available.
Modernism
Course description not available.
Special Topics In Theory And Criticism
Course description not available.
Feminist and Queer Writing
Course description not available.
Special Topics In Comparative And World Literature
Course description not available.
Global Swift
Course description not available.
English In The Vernacular
Course description not available.