Literary Criticism and Academic Writing Mod 4 and 5 ARN
Modules 4 and 5 of the first-semester course Literary Criticism and Academic Writing.
Chaucer and the Roots of English
The course seeks to provide the student with knowledge of the growth of English language and literature up to the Renaissance period. It also introduces the student to the socio-cultural background of the late Medieval period in English Literature and sensitises him/her to the major literary works and genres of this period.
WRITINGS OF THE RENAISSANCE
The course is designed to help the student form a comprehensive understanding and
theoretical footing to the Renaissance, especially as it is manifested in England. The
student has to familiarize himself/herself with the underlying episteme of the age and also
understand how it departed from its predecessor—the Middle Ages—following
innovations and inventions in every field. At the same time, it is imperative to see how the
age critically gains perceptions about how it marginalized certain sections.
Chaucer and the Roots of English
The course seeks to provide the student with knowledge of the growth of English language
and literature up to the Renaissance period. It also introduces the student to the sociocultural background of the late Medieval period in English Literature and sensitises
him/her to the major literary works and genres of this period
Revolution and the Enlightenment
This course is aimed to familiarize the students with the English literature of the Eighteenth Century and to provide them with analytical/critical perspectives on the social, cultural and intellectual climate of
the period. Students will be able to know how the literature of the Revolution
and Enlightenment was able to make a significant contribution in the domain of literature..
Texts and Performance
The objective of the course is to facilitate an understanding of the different approaches to dramatic writing and playing and how these approaches demand specific kinds of responses to the dramatic text in terms of the performative and the theatrical.
American Literature
The objectives of the course include an introduction to the most important branch of English Literature of the non-British tradition. It seeks to provide an overview of the processes and texts that lead to the evolution of American Literature as an independent branch of school of literature.
MODES OF FICTION
The main objective of this course is to familiarize the student with the various modes of narrative fiction attempted across centuries, continents and languages. It is expected that the pupil will be introduced to the various schools influences and narrative devices that shaped narrative fiction in its present form.
American Literature
The course covers the entire period from the time of early settlers, through the westward movement to the contemporary period. American literature is integrally connected with the experiences of a people struggling to establish themselves as a nation. Questions of individualism, quest for identity, political freedom from Britain and cultural freedom from the European tradition have marked American literature from time to time. The emergence of black literature and other ethnic traditions is another major hallmark of American writing. American Renaissance, American War of Independence, Transcendentalism, American Romanticism, Dark Romanticism, Frontier Experiences, the Civil War, Modernism, Feminism, Regional patterns—Southern Writers—New England Writers—Western Writers—Mid-Western Writers, Ethnicity—Jewish, Native, Mountain Literature, Great Depression and the Great Dust-bowl disaster would be some of the thematic concerns of the course.
Cultural Studies 16P3ENGT12
This course is designed to impart the learners with the rudimentary principles of Cultural Studies. It introduces the learner to certain seminal theoretical notions in this discipline and helps them acquire skills for a scientific analysis of culture.
Gender Studies
This course aims at making the students familiar with the emergence and growth of the notion of gender as a concept central to the reading of literature. It introduces a wide variety of theoretical, critical and creative works that define and redefine the concept as it is understood in contemporary society.
AMERICAN LITERATURE
The often-idiosyncratic strength, boldness, and ambition of American poetry derive from two interrelated factors: its problematic and often marginalised relation to American society, and the lack of a defined and established literary class, culture, and audience. The resistance has been visible in the poetry of some of the greatest of American poets. An introduction to modern and contemporary American poets, with an emphasis on experimental verse, from Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman etc. Participants (who need no prior experience with poetry) will learn how to read from a critique point of view.
Gender Studies
Is gender a role that one grows into? Do individuals become man and woman rather than are born man and woman? We learn autobiographies of individuals who have defied stereotypes by daring to cross the boundaries and to be betwixt and between the desirable and the desirous.
TEXTS AND PERFORMANCE
GENDER STUDIES
What is the relationship between sex and gender? How does the gendering of bodies shift across disciplinary and cultural contexts? How did the theorizing of gender performativity in the 1990s by Judith Butler open up intellectual trajectories for queer and transgender studies? What is the future of gender as an organizing rubric for social life and as a mode of intellectual inquiry?
GENDER STUDIES (16P3ENGT13)
The objectives of this course include making the student familiar with the emergence and growth of the notion of gender as a concept central to the reading of literature. It introduces a wide variety of theoretical, critical and creative works that define and redefine the concept as it is understood in contemporary society. At the completion of the course, students should be able to understand gender as a complex concept that is influenced and (re) shaped by history, the current moment, culture, and society; and engage with gender as a concept that is not fixed but fluid. Students should also be able to cite and use important theories and methodologies to analyze texts.
American Literature
The objective of the course include an introduction to the most important branch of English Literature of the non-British tradition. It seeks to provide an overview of the process and texts that led to the evolution of American Literature as an independent branch or school of literature.
Literary Criticism
The objective of the course is to familiarize the students with origin and development of literary criticism as well as to introduce to them the key concepts in literary criticism through a reading of the select texts. The course is also intended to equip them with the theoretical and practical aspects of academic writing.
Chaucer and Roots of English
The course seeks to provide the student with knowledge of the growth of English language and literature up
to the age of Chaucer. It also introduces the student to the social cultural and intellectual background of the
late Medieval period in English Literature and to sensitize him/her to the major literary works of the period.The socio-cultural situations during the centuries preceding Chaucer should provide a solid footing for the
study of Chaucer and the English literature that came after him. The evolution of English from Old English
to Middle English must gain focus here. The development of English into the language used by Chaucer
and his contemporaries—both the literary men and the general public—from Indo-European has to be
discussed with special emphasis on the Germanic sub-family to which English belongs. How Celtic Britain
changed into Anglo-Saxon and later Norman England and how the English triumphed over the French by
the time of Chaucer form the backdrop to this course. In other words, the history of England has to be seen
as a history of power struggles. The Celts who were suppressed by the Anglo Saxons, resurface in the
Arthurian legends, Scottish and Irish literatures and in the Irish literary renewal centuries later. Danish and
Norman invasions also find linguistic and literary repercussions in English history.