Syllabus for
Bachelor of Arts (English Honours)
Academic Year  (2023)

This course has been conceptualized to break the age-old notions of the classics as the best. It attempts to familiarize students with the debates of high culture and low culture; problematize their understanding of literature itself which had begun in the previous semester. It will enable students to understand and contest the hierarchies established within literary and academic circles; relook at their own assumptions in judging literature as good and bad. It will enable them to engage with literature as a text, in context.

This course aims to enable the student to:

• Understand the concept of canon

• Interrogate notions of the canon

• Debate on notions of high and low culture

• Critically engage with literature

• Questions the notions of ‘authority’ and

• Understand that all classifications are arbitrary constructions.

The course will serve as a detailed introduction to the major approaches in western Literary theory and Criticism. It will familiarise the students with different modes of analysis too. The course will help them to have a thorough understanding of the various dimensions of literary works

This course has been conceptualized in order to expose students to research enterprises that seek to discover the underlying structure of language and cognition. The traditional approach towards the rules of language is both problematic and, on many fronts, inadequate when it comes to the application of the explanatory adequacy approach towards the language. Linguistics is the study of human language, its nature, structure, origin and its uses. Linguists (those who study language) have devised various methodologies which can be used to study language, not as a set of rules of the system but as the rules which unravel human cognition. In this course, the approach towards the linguistic system would be to ask the question of why the language is the way it is rather than just describing the phenomenon. This course will give students an overview of the field of modern linguistics and will enable them with the basic tools, methodologies, rules, etc. The course develops an understanding of the various subsystems of languages including Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, and Semantics as generative systems. It also directs towards the objectivity of languages in order to think of language as an independent system. The course aims to provide enough basics/working knowledge of the discipline that can be further enhanced in order to develop skills like data analysis, data mining, text mining, POS tagging, corpus understanding, etc., for the students wishing to have a career in language data analysis in Google, Amazon, Meta, and other AI startups. Its objective is to see language as a generative mechanism from the cognitive and computational perspectives. Further, how can this knowledge be translated to understand the relationship between language, mind and machine?

This course provides an introduction to the discipline of Linguistics. Students will learn the basic concepts and methods used by linguists in the scientific study of human language. The course will examine the material, accessible properties of language (the sounds, the words, the phrases...) to get an understanding of its non-material, abstract ones. Given that language is intimately connected to our cognitive and social experience, an understanding of linguistic structure can help illuminate aspects of these domains as well. While many key aspects will be illustrated using evidence derived primarily from English and Indian languages. The course will discuss evidence from a variety of languages in order to better demonstrate the richness of linguistic diversity. 

each era will be analysed in detail to give the student first-hand experience of the texts. To familiarize students with some of the range and diversity of early American literature; to introduce students to major movements in the history of American literature; to deepen students’ interpretative and critical skills, both by discussing literary critical practice and by engaging in it; to improve students’ verbal skills of argumentation and articulation of ideas through large and small group discussion; to improve students’ skills of written argumentation through writing and revising essays

The course aims to

• To familiarise the beginnings of American literary and cultural context

• To be aware of the political history and its influence on literature of America.

• To familiarize students with some of the most important thinkers of the period

The course investigates the interactions between language and society. This course brings the sociolinguistic issues, including the relationship between linguistic variation and social factors like identity, class and power, the development of pidgins and creoles, code choices in bi-dialectal and bilingual communities, and language change. Students will also draw connections with research methods and approaches to data analysis used in other areas of linguistics, and examine attitudes toward language and culture and their social and political consequences. The course emphasizes the insights into the use of language in society provided by a generative linguistics approach to natural language. The course will enable the understanding of intersection of language and gender, language and social class, language and social change. The learning of course can help the students to acquire the skills to analyse the language change alongwith the social factors and can enable them to get employed in language planning and policy making.

the questions of construction, mainly, how we see, what we see and don't see will be addressed through critical analysis and interpretation of various images, how they function in terms of identity and help us to identify and categorize cultural ideas. Exploring identity, power, representation and intentionality, the course will help students to critically approach the questions of gender, values, ethics, race, and other identities. The course discusses texts and contexts which are relevant in the regionally, nationally and globally. The course will enable students to develop critical skills, and analytical skills.

The course aims to help students

• to Identify and assess through different theoretical lenses relevant visual elements from one’s surroundings and the way these elements are influencing the experience of life.

• To Investigate the ways that forms of visual culture function in society and how these are linked to race, class, and gender as well as politics and economics

• To Critically evaluate the domain of visual culture in terms of both production and consumption, and recognize its influence on making and maintaining certain positions, experiences, practices, privileges, assumptions, aesthetics, and power relations in one’s local, national and global contexts.

• To Develop lateral thinking, critical reading skills, and analytical and interpretative skills of the medium.

Basic psychological processes offer an introduction and overview of the field of psychology. The course encompasses the subject matter of general psychology. This course is designed to familiarize the student with the basic concepts of Psychology. 

Course Objectives: This course aims to

●      Understand issues and debates in contemporary psychology.

●      Understand and apply the principles of psychology in day-to-day life for a better understanding of themselves and others.

●      Understand and apply the principles of psychology in various areas like human development, personality, learning, language, memory and so on.

• Familiarize with the symptoms of major psychological disorders

This course has been designed to enable the students to acquire skills that would help them in the process of knowledge acquisition. Through this engagement, it will revisit and question different notions of knowledge and how it is constructed, created, disseminated, and acquired. The course would also enable the students to understand various research practices that are the focal point of the discipline. Also central to the course is an inquiry on the process and role of critical thinking in the discipline and in the larger context of society and nation.

Course Objectives

The course is designed to:

• enhance skills required for knowledge acquisition
• develop a comprehensive knowledge of the variety of research practices in the discipline
• hone and nurture their critical thinking abilities

Meaning making is a complex process and has been a point of global interest or investigation for a range of academic disciplines the most prominent among which are Philosophy, Psychology, Neurology, and Linguistics. While a linguist is always interested to find out the logic behind the construction of meanings to the factors that obstruct the same, a psychologist tries to understand, position and negotiate the idea of self in relation to others in the process of construction of meanings. While a philosopher is busy deciphering why something means what it means, a neurologist’s chief focus is on the function of neurons in the construction of meanings. The very act of meaning-making is therefore highly interDisciplinaryglobal learning; and, even when considered from a chiefly linguistic perspective (which is the focus of this course), the process of meaning-making can’t be positioned in the domain of either Semantics or Pragmatics or Semiotics; it is rather a by-product of all the fields. While Semantics is the systematic study of meanings which to a great extent is scientific, Pragmatics and Semiotics are concerned with the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Just like a work of art can’t be studied out of the context (sorry! New Criticism), an utterance produced at any point in time can’t be analysed out of the sociocultural context of its origin. The chief entailment arising from the proposition therefore is - this course aims to provide learners with an understanding of the basic principles in Linguistics mostly in the domain of Semantics, Pragmatics, and Semiotics which are directly involved with the process of meaning-making. That in turn helps in the development of critical and analytical skills, as learners will be required to analyse and understand the complex process of meaning-making. Through the course, learners will also develop global learning skills in interpreting and contextualizing the meaning of language, which can be useful in various day-to-day environments and fields such as communication, marketing, and language translation, and will also enhance the employability of the participants. Additionally, the interDisciplinaryapproach of the course can help in the development of interDisciplinaryskills and the ability to think outside of Disciplinaryboundaries and will give participants a global perspective and a new understanding of human values.

The paper initiates the students to unlearn some of their conventional notions about what is literature; introduces them to a varied school of literary and cultural theory; and equips them to frame their own sense of 'literature' and 'theory’ and ‘society’.The course aims to equip students to ask the right kind of questions about events around them in the local, regional, national and international contexts; to understand the nature of the societies and cultures that one is part of; recognise one’s subjectivities and ideological positionings; to conceptualise and evaluate one’s positions vis-à-vis the problematics of race, caste, class, gender, environment, the digital and technology. 

The course aims to delve into the fascinating world of folklore and the manner in which it has developed into an academic field. It will orient students to the concepts and theories of folklore studies and help them understand how various genres of folklore act as symbolic representations of socio-cultural history and reality. Beginning with the issues in the definition of folklore the students will be directed to the analysis of folktales, myths, and fairy tales. They will be made aware of the fact that the evolving of folklore is a continuous process and in rural and urban lives new folk beliefs and customs continue to form. From certain overarching themes that bring together cultures to motifs that can be radically specific, this course will attempt to evaluate the complex dynamics of folklore and the role it plays in contemporary lives. The students will be exposed to aspects of urban folklore, folklorism and applied folklore. They will also be introduced to the techniques and skills of a folklorist such as documenting, archiving and research pertinent to the preservation and transmission of folklore. 

The study of discourse is essentially the study of language in its natural habitat. We use language in a variety of contexts, to fulfill a broad range of communicative and social goals. In this course we will examine how contexts and functions of use influence linguistic form. The course is divided into three broad sections. First, the ‘macro-structure’ of discourse: the organization of different kinds (genres) of language, such as conversation, narrative, and institutional dialogue. We will analyze re-occurring patterns of structure and discuss how they are shaped and motivated by communicative and social functional goals. Second,the course focuses on how speakers routinely perform social action through discourse, such as disclaimers, offers, refusals, and questions. The role of Discourse Markers in structuring discourse will be examined. We will also investigate the relationship between discourse and identity, discourse and ideologies, and the social nature of common features of spoken language: ‘reported speech’, dialogicality, framing, and discourse norms. We will analyze how these contribute to discourse structure, and how they reflect, manage, and construct social interaction. Finally, the course will examine ‘microstructure’—the role of discourse and interaction in motivating and explaining grammar and meaning. We will discuss the way in which grammatical structures are functionally brought about by the communicative and social aspects of discourse.  

Course Description: The course explores the confluence of culture nad psychology to understand how varied cultures shapes human behaviour and attitudes. This includes the role of psychology in literature as well. Students will have an insight as how does one's culture impacts the perceptions, attitudes, thinking, personality, self and language of an individual reflected in works of varied authors. Through a combination of lectures, readings, disacussions, and experiential exercises, students will not only gain an understanding of cultural differnces but also develop cultural sensitivity.

Course Objectives: This course aims to

●      Orient students on how culture is shaping human behaviors.

●      Understand the basis of cultural variations in the East and the West.

●      Understand the limitations of Western approaches to explore Eastern perspectives in psychology.

●      Understand the interface between psychology and literature in cultural context.

Understand the major research methods used in cultural psychology.

This course has been designed to enable the students to acquire skills that would help them in the process of knowledge acquisition. Through this engagement, it will revisit and question different notions of knowledge and how it is constructed, created, disseminated, and acquired. The course would also enable the students to understand various research practices that are the focal point of the discipline. Also central to the course is an inquiry on the process and role of critical thinking in the discipline and in the larger context of society and nation.

Course Objectives

The course is designed to:

• enhance skills required for knowledge acquisition.
• develop a comprehensive knowledge of the variety of research practices in the discipline.
• hone and nurture their critical thinking abilities.

Postcolonialism may be defined, following Robert Young, as the perspective provided by theories that analyze the material and epistemological conditions of postcoloniality and seek to combat the continuing, often covert operation of an imperialist system of economic, political and cultural domination. This course will examine major literary and filmic texts through the lens of postcolonial theories. It will enable readers to, as John McLeod puts it, read local, regional, national and global literatures that have been produced by people from countries with a history of colonialism. The course especially focusses on aspects of human values and gender in connection with the workings and legacy of colonialism, and resistance to it, in either the past or the present. The course will develop critical skills that will enable students to use postcolonial theories to discuss the ways in which the literary forms of fiction, film and autobiography both depict and question postcolonial realities in nations ranging from India to Nigeria.

The course aims to help students

• To familiarize with the function and value of literature from a postcolonial perspective.

• To develop the student’s capacity to think critically about postcolonial literatures in a comparative framework.

• To understand the construction of nation and national culture, the role of education and language, and hybridity, gender, and the disenfranchised in the formation of colonial and postcolonial identities.

• To understand how the genres or forms in which writers treat postcolonial issues shape their representation of postcolonial

The purpose of this compulsory course is to introduce the concepts of language teaching and learning within classroom spaces and beyond, help students understand how pedagogic spaces are constructed and what their social implications are. The course also intends to explore issues related to assessment in formal as well as semi-formal settings. Through the development of a nuanced understanding about the language teaching and learning scenario at the local, regional, national, and global contexts, the learners would be able to hone skills and professional ethics in the domain of teaching and learning thereby enhancing their opportunities of employability and entrepreneurship in the field. The course has been conceptualized with the following objectives:

• Introduce the learners to the theories, debates, and dominant discourses in the domain of language teaching and learning.

• Familiarize the learners with the dominant methods and practices of language teaching and learning as well as the policies in the field.

• Create an awareness of the linguistic competencies of the learners and thereby enhance their understanding of the critical approach to pedagogy through an experiential approach

This course aims to address the ecological crisis which has become a defining feature of the current epoch. Conceived from an English Studies perspective, the course maps the ecological crisis and various associated movements through narratives. Through such a conceptualization, the course proposes to expose students to a wide variety of debates and discussions on ecological crisis and awareness drawing texts from different literary cultures and perspectives. The course also attempts to understand ecological crises as stemming from various socio-cultural and political entanglements with ecology. The texts in the course will give the students an overview of the global, national and regional discourses and debates pertaining to ecology and sustainability, thus helping them decode the global and local issues related to ecological violence and their interconnections. To give a multidimensional comprehension of various issues dealt through narratives, field visits are also included to the course structure.

Through classroom discussions, textual analysis, individual and group assignments, the course enables students to develop their critical thinking, analytical skills and raise awareness of nuances of ecological debates. The course thus aims to sensitize students about the environmental and social issues thereby enabling them to work with start-ups, NGOs and in other areas where social and environmental sensitivity and critical thinking are necessary. Texts range in focus and scope from regional, local, national, and global contexts and include engagement with cross-cutting issues such as gender and environmentalism.

The course aims to:

• Develop critical thinking and analytical skills through argumentative writing and class discussions.

• Create awareness of the ecological crisis through literary and visual narratives that expose the students to various local, regional and global issues.

• Analyse the questions of gender, race and ethnicity and their relevance in ecological discourses through various theoretical engagements.

• Examine the local environment and the questions of sustainability through field visits and field journals.

This paper introduces students to key themes and concerns in Indian Literatures, primarily at national and regional levels. This is a survey course that serves as an introduction to main issues and concepts in Indian Literatures around cross cutting issues such as gender, caste, class, nation etc. Categories and nomenclatures are debated and challenged in and through the selections. The course is a mix of traditional as well as contemporary literatures written both in English as well as other regional languages translated into English and will develop theoretical, analytical and critical reading skills in students.

• To understand the complexities of cultural, economic, political and social forces and their impact on the production of literatures in India of different classes and backgrounds.

• To understand the religious, caste, gender, colonial, national and regional constructs in India through its literatures and thereby develop sensitivity and add to the core value of love for fellow beings.

• To become aware of methods of interpreting literary texts in the contemporary context

This course introduces students to the different aspects of translation and the factors involved in the process of translation. The course aims to familiarize students with the various roles translation plays in carrying a culture forward and its implications afterwards. The course provides linguistic skills, multicultural competence, and other necessary skills to be professional in the field.

Each language is a repository of history and knowledge as well as the culture of a group of speakers. This course surveys the social and cultural contexts of languages in the world. It examines the ways in which a human language reflects the ways of life and beliefs of its speakers, contrasted with the extent of language's influence on culture. A wide variety of cultures and languages are examined. The course will focus on topics such as identity, social factors of language use, language vitality, language structures and issues of globalization.

This course has been conceptualized to introduce students to the genre of graphic narratives in the form of comics, novels, cartoon strips, graffiti etc. The course aims to equip students with skills to engage with graphic narratives as ‘texts’ or ‘signifying systems’, will provide them with tools to read graphic narratives and critique them as informed readers of graphic narratives. It will enable them to treat and study graphic narratives as ‘serious art’ and also und to understand the academic implications of studying such texts.

This course introduces students to the key terms, analytical techniques, and interpretive strategies commonly employed in cultural studies.

The emphasis is on interdisciplinary approaches to exploring how cultural processes and artefacts are produced, shaped, distributed, consumed and responded to in diverse ways. Through various class discussions, research and writing, students investigate these varied dimensions of culture; learn to understand them in their broader social, aesthetic, ethical, and political contexts.

The course has been designed keeping in mind the latest trends and practices in the discipline and a larger extent in the educational system. The course will introduce students to some of the established areas like content writing and publishing, translations, etc. as well as emerging areas like digital humanities, citizen journalism, etc.. The focus here is to help students acquire and nurture skills that are integral for their personal and professional growth.

Course Objectives

The course is designed to:

1. Introduce students to emerging trends in the discipline

2. Familiarize them with some of the industries associated with the discipline

3. Enhance skills that could translate academic learning to professional excellence

Gender Studies is an academic area of study that critically examines how gender shapes our identities, social interactions and experiences of everyday living. Through exposure to interDisciplinaryperspectives, students develop a framework for thinking about power relations and the ways in which those relations are shaped and challenged by intersecting constructions of gender, sexuality, sexual orientation and their configurations in various power structures. Interrogating everyday experiences, social and political institutions, literary and philosophical contributions, past and present ideas and world events, the course seeks to provide students with tools to engage with and critically analyse these areas. Further, the course seeks to give a major political spin by interpellating Western theory with gender sensitive experiences curated across India so that students learn to reflect on these more immediate narratives against the dynamic possibilities of theory. 

• Introduce key concepts and movements in the field of gender studies.

• Familiarise learners with the gender dynamics operating within various structures of society.

• Equip learners to competently understand and apply concepts and terminology relating to gender and sexuality. • Enable learners to critically examine how normative power structures situate them in various societies in their academic and public discussions. 

This paper introduces students to an emerging and significant field of study in understanding the problems and perspectives of Dalits. The course aims to help students familiarize themselves with the politics of caste across culture, literature and thought. 

This course introduces the notion of (post)/multilingualism, and how it is perceived and represented in different ways in the Indian context. Moreover, why multilingualism should matter to you. Multilingualism can best be studied from an interDisciplinaryperspective. You will explore various dimensions of Multilingualism from how people become multilingual, what the processes involved, what are the benefit and challenges of multilingualism to the contemporary concerns and issues in the field. The course is designed in such a manner that each unit will have four-five articles/chapters from different books on a dedicated theme. The effort is to familiarize students with how multilingualism is interDisciplinaryin nature, and thus, has a very important role to play in various social, political, and educational matters. The course aims to impart skills like critical skills, linguistics skills, multicultural skills, innovative teaching methods in language teaching, etc. 

The centrality of narratives in engaging with trauma and suffering is very significant to note. With the understanding that one of the ways through which people, across the world and cultures, deal with traumatic experiences is by narrativizing it, the course introduces various frameworks through which trauma narratives can be engaged. This course will provide students with narrative approaches to engagement with trauma that will enable them to be more sensitive in their engagements and interactions, imbibing humane values like empathy and consideration, to people from across cultures. The focus on storytelling as a mode to cure illness and trauma, thus leading to intersections between the body and narrative representation of the body, is introduced in the course and develop skills of creativity and narrativizing. The objectives of this paper are to:

• introduce learners to trauma narrative and its Disciplinaryformation. • familiarize learners to analytical frames to engage with the narrative representations of trauma. • enable learners to identify the cross-Disciplinaryand interDisciplinaryapproaches to engaging with trauma

All human beings experience a significant illness or disability at some point in life; yet economic, political, social, and cultural factors complicate the medical frameworks through which societies normally address disabled bodies. The introduction to the course will bring new voices into existing conversations and allow students to initiate new lines of inquiry into how "disability" shapes, and is shaped by, literary texts. Critical engagement with the course reveals the formation and hegemony of normalcy in literary works. It traces the meanings of disability that are not constant, but vary from work to work, just as in reality they vary with bodily condition, time, and place. Probing representations of such characters and revealing hidden patterns and expanding the way canonical narratives are read. This course is conceived to explore literature and literary topics from a disability studies perspective which thrive to understand the human values of vulnerable bodies and disabled bodies. The aim of this course is to provide a general introduction to Disability Studies as they apply to the study of literature, particularly fictional narratives, but with some emphasis also on autobiography and poetry. It also includes critical essays on contemporary focus with human values such as body modification, narratives on ageing, narrative on body shaming etc. 

Whether it is the latest video game that everyone is raving about or the newest retelling of a superhero flick that has set a new benchmark in popularity, popular culture pervades our everyday lives. It is critically important to study popular culture in order to assess its social, political, cultural and economic impact on society. This course will demonstrate to students the overall importance of popular culture in their lives. Taking textual and visual materials from the local, regional, national and international contexts, the course will explore the way in which popular culture is defined, interpreted and disseminated at various levels. How it operates within axes of intersectionalities like gender, class, race, caste, ecology, the human, technology and the posthuman. This academic inquiry into the nuances of popular culture, will equip the students with critical thought and analysis required to decode and dissect the ethics, values and codes ingrained in the cultural productions. Such a decoding will help them understand the way in which questions of gender, race, class, sustainability can be examined and evaluated through popular discourses. The course through textual engagements, class discussions, individual and group assignments aim to develop analytical skills, critical thinking, creativity and initiative among students. This course will enable students to develop keen insights on the way in which popular culture impacts and informs our daily lives. With a focus on the theoretical and practical aspects of popular culture, the course will equip the students with critical thinking analytical skills along with communication skills that can be professionally used in media management, academic research and a variety of other areas

This course introduces students step by step to the skills involved in the study of film. It gives priority to the students’ point of entry by creating a concrete platform, thereby valuing any initial filmic knowledge they bring as the best place to start from. It aims to foster an approach to film that will enable the study of any film as a valuable artefact, and thereby encourage personal response, active research, the practical application of learning, and greater diversity in study, allowing interests and enthusiasm a place in education. Individual chapters address the following key areas. The course aims to help students • To learn the basic language of cinema and thereby take a more analytical approach to their whole experience of cinema • to appreciate, understand and read films as audio-visual texts and to to read and write critically about them • Introduce students to the diverse forms and types of films and movements. Films will be screened regularly to explain the concepts to students. The films screened will be the primary texts and not mere contexts to teach the concepts

Horror narratives are a seminal part of popular culture and they have socio-cultural impacts at local, regional, national, and global levels. The course aims to study the genre horror as one among the many forms of cultural production. The course will introduce students to the genre of horror and equip students to develop critical engagement with Horror narratives and their contexts and how it shapes human values. The primary focus of the course will be horror fiction and films. The horror genre will be studied as a platform that addresses cross cutting issues of race, social unrest, sexuality, class, gender, religion and science etc.

The Dissertation in English Literature provides the opportunity to carry out a more sustained piece of independent research and to produce a more developed and lengthier piece of academic writing than previously attempted in undergraduate study. It can be on any aspect of English literary studies. This course will lead towards the development of research skills, analytical skills, critical reading skills, critical thinking skills, and editing skills, and enable them to deal with various sensitive cross-cutting issues like gender, sustainability, human values, professional ethics, etc. The student can undertake any one of the following kinds of dissertations: Literary or Cultural Studies Dissertation: A literary or cultural studies dissertation must include a 30-40 pages focused essay, a comprehensive written bibliography. The essay must demonstrate a grasp of relevant creative and critical perspectives in the chosen field, moving beyond a mere summary of what others have said to make an original contribution to critical thought on the student's chosen topic. Electronic or Multimedia Work: A student who wishes to produce this kind of thesis (hypertext, web site, video or audio documentary, etc.) must create an intrinsically electronic or multimedia project. The work must be one that could not possibly be produced in the conventional manner; in other words, its electronic nature must be essential to its theme or subject matter. The work must be accompanied by an annotated bibliography and a 15-20 page written overview. The bibliography should contain sources demonstrating mastery of relevant critical perspectives and arguments in the field. The overview should supplement the work by analyzing the critical context. This analysis should not attempt a point-by-point translation of the work into written form, but should instead engage in a critical dialogue with contemporary works, both theoretical and creative, on the student's subject and method. The project aims to • Introduce learners to various stages of research by enabling learners to be involved in guided research works. • Enable learners to critically engage with social political context related to local, national and gobal context. • Familiarize learners with various research tools, methodologies, and theoretical frameworks. • Support learners to develop critical thinking and research skills by working on dissertation

The course has been designed keeping in mind the latest trends and practices in the discipline

and a larger extent in the educational system. The course will introduce students to some of the established areas like content writing and publishing, translations, etc. as well as emerging areas like digital humanities, citizen journalism, etc.. The focus here is to help students acquire and nurture skills that are integral for their personal and professional growth.

Course Objectives

The course is designed to:

1. Introduce students to emerging trends in the discipline

2. Familiarize them with some of the industries associated with the discipline

3. Enhance skills that could translate academic learning to professional excellence