CHRIST (Deemed to University), Bangalore

DEPARTMENT OF business-studies-and-social-sciences

business-studies-and-social-sciences

Syllabus for
Master of Arts (English and Cultural Studies)
Academic Year  (2017)

 
1 Semester - 2017 - Batch
Course Code
Course
Type
Hours Per
Week
Credits
Marks
FOC112 SKILL DEVELOPMENT - 2 2 100
MECS131 CULTURAL DEBATES - 4 4 100
MECS132 POETRY - 4 4 100
MECS133 INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES - 4 4 100
MECS141 A POSTWAR POETRY - 4 4 100
MECS141 B ENGLISH AND/IN INDIA - 4 4 100
MECS161 A A SURVEY OF COLONIAL AND PRE-COLONIAL INDIA - 4 4 100
MECS161 B CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY - 4 4 100
2 Semester - 2017 - Batch
Course Code
Course
Type
Hours Per
Week
Credits
Marks
MECS231 READING CULTURE: INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES - 4 4 100
MECS232 NARRATIVE - 4 4 100
MECS233 DRAMA - 4 4 100
MECS241 A CLASSICAL DRAMA - 4 4 100
MECS241 B POPULAR CULTURE IN INDIA - 4 4 100
MECS261 A INDIAN AND TRANSPERSONNAL PSYCHOLOGY - 4 4 100
MECS261 B DIGITAL CULTURE AND ETHICS - 4 4 100
    

    

Introduction to Program:
The Masters of Arts programme in English with Cultural Studies aims to provide an interdisciplinary perspective on literary and cultural texts and contexts. The papers offered provide contemporary perspectives on understanding literature and culture within contemporary and emerging frameworks and paradigms in cultural studies. Texts and ideologies selected for study are aimed at creating discursive spaces within as well as outside the classroom that encourage learners to investigate the contexts in which they live. In keeping with Christ University?s vision of excellence, this course is up to date with the latest theories and application skills in the fields of literary and cultural studies.
Assesment Pattern

Assessment Pattern

 

CIA + ESE

CIA (Weight)

ESE (Weight)

 

70

30

 

Examination And Assesments

Assessment Pattern

 

CIA + ESE

CIA (Weight)

ESE (Weight)

 

70

30

 

FOC112 - SKILL DEVELOPMENT (2017 Batch)

Total Teaching Hours for Semester:30
No of Lecture Hours/Week:2
Max Marks:100
Credits:2

Course Objectives/Course Description

 

This course ensures that the students have the necessary skills that a psychology graduate should have once they graduate out of the program. This course ensures that the students are on par with the students from various international colleges and universities, thereby widening their horizons when it comes to further research or higher education options. 

Course Outcome

  1. Students will have the basic skills that a psychologist should have in addition to academic knowledge.
  2. Students will be well versed in various methods/techniques used in different forms of research.
  3. Students will be well versed in interpersonal and project management skills.
  4. Students will be aware of ethical standards in the universal practice of psychology. 

Unit-1
Teaching Hours:4
Goal setting
 

Definition of a goal; Types of goal; Goal setting; Evaluation of goal setting plan

Unit-2
Teaching Hours:4
Ethics in Research
 

Introduction to Ethics; The Need for Ethics; Universal and Culture Specific Ethical guidelines

Unit-3
Teaching Hours:4
Process Appraisal
 

Introduction to proposal development; Appraisal of the situation; Identification of obstacles and identifying ways to deal with them; Coming up with effective options.

Unit-4
Teaching Hours:4
Effective Writing Skills
 

Effective organization of writing; Usage of language tools; APA guidelines in writing; Citations and References

Unit-5
Teaching Hours:4
Online Resources
 

Exposure to various online resources; Practice on the layout of various web resources; Hands on training to effectively use those resources and evaluation of actual usage.

Unit-6
Teaching Hours:4
Abstract Writing
 

What is an abstract? Purpose of writing an abstract; Components of an abstract; Sample abstracts

Text Books And Reference Books:

.

Essential Reading / Recommended Reading

.

Evaluation Pattern

Students will be evaluated in every session and accordingly they will be marked.

MECS131 - CULTURAL DEBATES (2017 Batch)

Total Teaching Hours for Semester:60
No of Lecture Hours/Week:4
Max Marks:100
Credits:4

Course Objectives/Course Description

 

Course Description:

This course is compulsory core course that shall provide a survey of key debates in the field of Cultural Studies. The course aims to introduce students to the interdisciplinary nature of the domain of cultural studies and also that polemics is fundamental to the field of study. Structured around four important domains, the course closely looks at problematizing representations of genres, nation, identities and truth. 

 

Course Objectives:

 

  • To introduce students to ‘culture’ as an academic field of study;
  • To help develop a dialogue with other areas of study like Gender, Caste, Nation etc;
  • To emphasize the relationship between knowledge and power as being central to understand the nuances of cultural debates

 

 

 

Course Outcome

Learning Outcomes:

At the end of the course, students would be able to:

 

  • Understand ‘culture’ as a contested category
  • Understand debates as being central to the constructedness of ‘culture’
  • Develop a critically sharp outlook towards reading and understanding aspects of culture

Unit-1
Teaching Hours:15
Literary Cultures and the Critical Turn
 

 

This module introduces students to debates surrounding ‘literature’ and cultures of literatures/letters. The objective of the unit is to help students understand the problematics of genres, nomenclatures, and categories and develop a critical aesthetic and a bent of mind to approach aspects of culture. The unit will also look at the critical turn and the emergent cultures of reading, especially in the digital age.  

  1. Terry Eagleton: “What is Literature?”
  2. Michel Foucault: “What is an Author?”
  3. Roland Barthes: “Death of the Author” and “From Work to Text”
  4. Jenny Kidd: “Digital Storytelling and the Performance of Memory”
  5. Meenakshi Mukherjee: “From the Commonwealth to the Postcolonial”
  6. Henry Giroux: “The Politics of Theory, Practice and Clarity”
  7. Simone Chambers: “The Politics of Critical Theory”
Unit-2
Teaching Hours:15
Nation and Representation
 

This module introduces key debates surrounding the idea of the nation. An important debate the unit will deal with is the contested nature of nation and nationalism.

 

  1. Ernst Renan:  “What is a Nation?”
  2. Romila Thapar: From On Nationalism
  3. Aloysius G: From Nationalism without a Nation
  4. Benedict Anderson: From Imagined Communities
  5. Partha Chatterjee: “Whose Imagined Community?”
  6. Stuart Hall: “Cultural Identity and the Diaspora”
Unit-3
Teaching Hours:15
Politics of Identity/ies
 

This module shall introduce students to the politics of identities as an important debate in this technological era. It will also trace this aspect as an important point of discussion within cultural studies

  1. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
  2. Dipesh Chakrabarty: “In Retrospect: Subaltern Studies and the Future Past”
  3. Shahid Amin: From Event, Metaphor, Memory
  4. Vandana Shiva: “Reductionist Science as Epistemological Violence”
  5. Jean Baudrillard: “The Precession of Simulacra”
  6. Donna Haraway: “A Cyborg Manifesto”
  7. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: “Biopolitical Production”
  8. Richard Day: “Who is this We that Gives the Gift? Native American Political Theory and the Western Tradition”  
Unit-4
Teaching Hours:10
Post-Truth / Post-truth
 

This unit will introduce students to some pertinent cultural debates surrounding theory and the ideas of post-truth / Post-Truth.   

 

  1. Stefan Hebrecter and Ivan Callus:  “Introduction: Post Theory”
  2. “Post-theories: Michel Foucault and Jean Baudrillard”
  3. Rupert Read: “Richard Rorty and How Postmodernism Helped Elect Trump”
  4. Sean Coughlan: “What does Post-truth Mean for a Philosopher” (A BBC interview with A C Grayling)
Unit-5
Teaching Hours:5
Student Seminar
 

Students have to work on any key cultural debate to produce a ‘working paper’ by reading any contemporary cultural space. Students can work in tandem with the Cultural Studies course and organise a preliminary student seminar where all students will present their ideas to a constituted panel of experts. Will be a complete student initiative and can be graded for CIA.  

Text Books And Reference Books:

A Textbook compilation of all prescribed essays/texts

Essential Reading / Recommended Reading

Althusser, Louis. On Ideology. Verso Books, 2008.

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Vintage, 1993.

Grossberg, Lawrence. “Cultural Studies in the Future Tense”. Duke UP, 2010.

Martin, Fran, ed. Interpreting Everyday Culture. Arnold Publishers, 2003.

Rampley, Matthew, ed. Exploring Visual Culture: Definitions, Concepts, Contexts. Edinburgh UP, 2005.

 

Rorty, Richard. Achieving our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America. Harvard UP, 1999. 

Evaluation Pattern

Mid Semester Examination:   Section A (10X2=20 marks)

                                                Section B (15X2 = 30 marks)

 

End Semester Examination:   Section A (10X2=20 marks)

 

Section B (15X2 = 30 marks)

MECS132 - POETRY (2017 Batch)

Total Teaching Hours for Semester:60
No of Lecture Hours/Week:4
Max Marks:100
Credits:4

Course Objectives/Course Description

 

This course aims to introduce postgraduate learners to advanced approaches to reading poetry, with the integration of literary readings and interdisciplinary perspectives, particularly with reference to the role of poetry in cultural studies. It is hoped that the reading of poetry through different media—inclusive of emerging media in the digital era – will underscore the significance of critical thinking and autonomous engagement with texts, both of which are skills crucial to our time.

Course Outcome

Learners will be able to:

·   Understand the different cultural and socio-political factors responsible for the creation of such works of art

·   Examine poetry from a variety of contexts and approaches and

·   Develop critical insights into engaging with poetry and its relevance to real-world contexts.

Unit-1
Teaching Hours:10
Understanding Poetry
 

Unit 1: Understanding Poetry                                                                               10 hours

·         Naomi Shihab Nye, “Kindness”

·         Academy of American Poets: Why Poetry Matters Now

·         Wislawa Szymborska - Nobel Lecture: The Poet and the World

·         Bean and Chasar, Poetry After Cultural Studies (2011) – Extracts

·         Adorno, “Two Essays on Poetry and Society”

·         Amitava Kumar, “Poetry for the People” (from Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader)

·         Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts” + Eagleton Chapter 1: Poetry and Criticism

Unit-2
Teaching Hours:15
Innovations: Form and its Subversion
 

Unit 2: Innovations: Form and its Subversion                                                  15 hours

·         Shakespeare, Iambic Pentameter, and the Hendecasyllable: Sonnet 20 (“A woman’s face with nature’s own hand”)

·         Marlowe, “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” + Raleigh, “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd”

·         Emily Dickinson—Inventing the Uncanny

·         Whitman—“The verse that is free” (Chapter from Mary Oliver, The Poetry Handbook)

·         Eliot, “The Wasteland”

·         Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

·         John Donne, “For Whom the Bell Tolls”

·         Walcott, “The Sea is History”

·         Tricia Rose, “Black Texts/Black Contexts”

Unit-3
Teaching Hours:10
Poetry and Storytelling
 

Unit 3: Poetry and Storytelling                                                                             10 hours

·         Soliloquy—“Hamlet” or “Macbeth”

·         Ana Castillo, Watercolour Women, Opaque Men: A Novel in Verse (Extracts)

·         Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”/“Christabel”

·         Keats, “The Eve of St Agnes”

·         The dramatic monologue: Browning

Unit-4
Teaching Hours:10
Poetry in Translation
 

Unit 4: Poetry in Translation                                                                                 10 hours

·         Dipesh Chakraborty, “Nation and Imagination” (from Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader)

·         Faiz Ahmed Faiz, “Don’t Ask Me for That Love Again” and “City of Lights”; Marxism in poetry

·         Neruda or Borges—Selected poems

·         Amrita Pritam, “I Call upon Varis Shah Today”

·         Lal Ded, selected vaakhs from I, Lalla

·         Czeslaw Milosz, “City without a Name”

·         Malaka Badr, “Alexandria”

Unit-5
Teaching Hours:8
Gender and Queer Poetics
 

Unit 5: Gender and Queer Poetics                                                                       8 hours

·         Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “A Poem is Being Written” (from Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader)

·         Audre lorde, “Poetry is Not a Luxury” (from Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader)

·         Maya Angelou, “And Still I Rise”

·         Carol Ann Duffy, Selected poems

·         Kamala Das, Selected poems

·         Sylvia Plath, “Daddy”

·         Adrienne Rich, Selected poems

·         Allen Ginsberg, “Sunflower Sutra”

·         Agha Shahid Ali, “The Veiled Suite”

Unit-6
Teaching Hours:7
Poetry and the Contemporary World
 

Unit 6: Poetry and the Contemporary World                                                     7 hours

·         Zofia Burr, “Of Poetry and Power: Maya Angelou on the Inaugural Stage” (from Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader)

·         Hoskote, “Ghalib at the Winter of the Last Revolt”

·         Pandaemonium: Visual text + Keats, Threshold States (Extract from the Letters) + Richard Holmes, Coleridge as an “Orphan of the Storm” (Extract from Coleridge: early Visions)

·         Bob Dylan—music and poetry

·         Nayyirah Waheed, “Salt”

·         Jeet Thayil, “Not remembering”

·         Sarah Kay, performance poetry

Text Books And Reference Books:

Damon, Maria and Livingston, Ira.Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009.

Essential Reading / Recommended Reading

Arana, R. Victoria. W.H. Auden's Poetry: Mythos, Theory, and Practice. Cambria Press, 2009.

Bean, Heidi R. And Chaser, Mike. Poetry After Cultural Studies. University of Iowa Press, 2011.

Croft, Barbara L. Stylistic Arrangements: A Study of William Butler Yeats' A Vision, Bucknell University Press, 1987.

Eagleton, Terry. How to Read a Poem. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers, 2007.

Firchow, Peter Edgerly. W.H. Auden: Contexts for Poetry. University of Delaware Press, 2002.

Fisher, William J. The American Literature of the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology. New Delhi Eurasia Publishing House Pvt Ltd, 1970.

King, Bruce. Modern Indian Poetry in English. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987. Print.

McDiarmid, Lucy. Saving Civilization: Yeats, Eliot, and Auden Between the Wars. CUP Archive, 1984.

Oliver, Mary. The Poetry Handbook: A Prose Guide to Writing and Understanding Poetry. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994.

Parthasarathy, R. ed., Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Evaluation Pattern

Assessment 1:

Submission of thesis statement and outline

20 marks (20%)

Assessment 2: Mid-Semester Examination

Written exam for 50 marks (25%)

Assessment 3:

Submission of 1,500-word paper

20 marks (20%)

Assessment 4: End-Semester Examination

Written exam for 50 marks (30%)

Attendance

 5%

MECS133 - INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES (2017 Batch)

Total Teaching Hours for Semester:60
No of Lecture Hours/Week:4
Max Marks:100
Credits:4

Course Objectives/Course Description

 

Course Description

 

During the 2014 edition of the Muziris Biennale, the walls of Fort Kochi were splashed with extremely idiosyncratic graffiti paintings by an anonymous artist who goes by the quirky moniker, “Guess Who”. These doodles liberally spiced up with political wit attempted a capricious melding- of Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix and Michael Jackson conjured up in the bodies of the Carnatic music trio; Heath Ledger’s Joker in the vidooshaka’s costume typical of Koodiyattam; Marx and Engels meditating like Sankara and his disciple; Colonel Sanders busy making dosas at a local wayside shop etc., thereby staging a cultural encounter of the East and the West in ways that mutually comment on each other. If as John Berger puts it in his iconic work, Ways of Seeing, “the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled”, how does one understand culture, a word at once passed off as self-explanatory and yet remains elusive in spite of its frenzied currency in contemporary usage. Cultural Studies is a comparatively young area of research and teaching that brings in new perspectives to our notions regarding ‘texts’ and ‘meanings’ and therefore to the study of literatures, cultures and societies. This course seeks to pool together theoretical tools and critical perspectives to interrogate cultural texts of multiple kinds like, advertisements, films, television, newspaper and internet texts and so on that saturate our lives.

Course Objectives: The course seeks to equip students to

 

  • Analyse and explain major theories that both influenced and came out of Cultural Studies and its approach to ‘high’ and popular culture
  • Apply one or more concepts of cultural studies to unique research problems
  • Demonstrate the practicality of cultural studies theory to new situations and practices relevant to the everyday experience of students.

Course Outcome

  • Students will discover the contours of Cultural Studies as a field of inquiry, situating their learning within explorations of the disciplinary and historical context of the field. 
  • Students will learn to use interdisciplinary critical perspectives to examine the diverse and sometimes contested meanings of cultural objects and processes, establishing a basic knowledge of the theoretical paradigms of Cultural Studies. 
  • Students will learn strategies to connect cultural knowledge to everyday life and practices, gaining a preliminary understanding of the relationship of methodology (paradigms for study) to inquiry in Cultural Studies. 
  • Students will learn to develop their analyses of culture through oral and written modes of communication, with an emphasis on the skills of critical analysis and close reading, building a foundation for further study of Cultural Studies theory and praxis.

Unit-1
Teaching Hours:5
Early Ruminations
 

Barthes, Roland (1957). "Myth Today".

Williams, Raymond, (1958) "Culture is Ordinary" from The Everyday Life Reader.

Walter Benjamin (1968) "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Hannah Arendt (ed) Illuminations

Unit-2
Teaching Hours:10
Theory
 

“Introduction.” The Cultural Studies Reader. Simon During (ed). New York, London: Routlege, 1993, 1-25.

Hall, Stuart. (1980). "Encoding/Decoding" extract in NilanjanaGupta.ed. CulturalStudies I

Agamben, Giorgio. “What is an apparatus?” What is an Apparatus and Other Essays. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009, 1-24.

Eric Hobsbawm (1983)"Inventing Traditions," The Invention of Traditions.

 Ella Shohat "From Eurocentrism to Polycentrism," Unthinking Eurocentrism:Multiculturalism and the Media

Arjun Appadurai. Excerpt from Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.

 

Unit-3
Teaching Hours:10
Space, Time, Cities
 

De Certeau, Michel. ”Walking in the city.” The Cultural Studies Reader. Simon During (ed). New York, London: Routlege, 1993, 151-160.

Soja, Edward. “History: geography: modernity.” The Cultural Studies Reader. Simon During (ed). New York, London: Routlege, 1993, 135-150.

Feld, Steven. “Waterfalls of Song: An Acoustemology of Place Resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea.” Senses of Place. Ed. Steven Feld and Keith Basso. New Mexico: School of American Research, 1996. 91-136.

Sen, Jai. “Other Worlds, Other maps: Mapping the Unintended City”. An Atlas of Radical Cartography. Los Angeles: Journal of Aethetics and Protest Press, 2007.

Dube, Saurabh. “Mapping Oppositions: Enchanted Spaces and Modern Places.”

 

Unbecoming Modern: Colonialism, Modernity, Colonial Modernities. Eds. SaurabhDube and IshitaBannerji-Dube. New Delhi: Social Science P, 2006. 76-94. 

Unit-4
Teaching Hours:15
The Body in Culture
 

Butler, Judith (1990) “Performativity’s Social Magic.” Bourdieu, A Critical Reader.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofosky. “The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic”.Epistemology of the Closet. U of California Press, 1990.

Connell, R W "Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept," in Gender &Society, Vol. 19, No. 6, December 2005. P.829-859.

Gilroy, Paul “There ain’t no black in the Union Jack” The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation

Patricia Hill Collins. “Mammies, Matriarchs, and Other Controlling Images”. Black feminist thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Bordo, Susan. “Whose Body Is This? Feminism, Medicine, and the Conceptualization of Eating Disorders.” Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley, U of California P, 1993. 45-70.

 

Guru, Gopal. “Archaeology of Untouchability”. The Cracked Mirror. New Delhi: OUP, 2012.

Unit-5
Teaching Hours:10
The Reel and the ?Real? in Culture
 

Kluge, Alexander, "On Film and the Public Sphere," New German Critique24/25, Autumn, 1981 — Winter 1981. (pp. 206-220).

Kustritz, Anne. (2003). Slashing the romance narrative. The Journal of American Culture.26(3), 371-384.

Creed, Barbara. “The Castrating Mother: Psycho”. The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1993.

Tejaswini Niranjana. “Interrogating Whose Nation: Tourists and Terrorists in Roja”

ChandrimaChakraborty. Bollywood Motifs: Cricket Fiction and Fictional Cricket. Bollywood Motifs

 

Visual Text- Fandry

Unit-6
Teaching Hours:10
Leisure and Culture
 

Bourdieu, Pierre. “Distinction: a Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste”. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984, 1-34.

Engin, H.B. (2013) Barbied Dreams, Barbied Lives: On our backs, in the attics of our

memories, on the shelves’ International Journal of Social Inquiry, Vol 6 (2) p18-37.

Allen, Matthew Harp. “Rewriting the Script for South Indian Dance.” TheDramaReview 41.3 (1992): 63-100.

Mukhopadhyay, Bhaskar. “Between Elite Hysteria and Subaltern Carnivalesque:Street-Food and Globalization in Calcutta”.  The Rumour of Globalization: Desecrating the Global from Vernacular Margins. CUP, 2012.

Weidman, Amanda. “Can the Subaltern Sing? Music, Language and the Politics of Voice”. Singing the Classical, Voicing the Modern. Durham: Duke, 2006.

 

Rushkoff, Douglas. “Apocalypto”. Present Shock: Where Everything Happens Now. New York: Penguin, 2013.

Text Books And Reference Books:

·         Barker, Chris.Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice 3rd ed. Los Angeles: Sage,2008.

·         During, Simon. The Cultural Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2007.

·         Storey, John. An Introduction to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. Virginia:Pretence Hall, 1997.

Essential Reading / Recommended Reading

·         Storey, John, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader. Harlow: Pearson, 2006.

 

·         Milner, Andrew & Jeff Browitt. Contemporary Cultural Theory: An Introduction. London: Routledge, 2006.

Evaluation Pattern

CIA -1 (20 Marks)

Midsemester Exam (50 Marks)

CIA-2 (20 Marks)

Final Exam (50 Marks)

MECS141 A - POSTWAR POETRY (2017 Batch)

Total Teaching Hours for Semester:60
No of Lecture Hours/Week:4
Max Marks:100
Credits:4

Course Objectives/Course Description

 

 

Scholars have theorised that World War II necessitated the development of postmodernism. In poetry, post-World War II writers engaged with form and meaning in ways that had rarely been explored in earlier times. As we move into an era of human history in which violence is ubiquitous and our definitions of self, the nation, and the world require serious thought and revision, we offer Postwar Poetry as a unique module that reflects contemporary concerns and leads learners to reflect critically on issues intrinsic to their identities, lives, and communities.

 

Course Outcome

 

Students will be able to:

 

·    become familiar with the basic history of poetry in the period 1945-the present.

 

·    begin to understand the place of poetry within the cultural market during this period;

 

·    discover the main trends and authors of this time; and

 

·    develop critical insights into engaging with poetry of this period.

 

Unit-1
Teaching Hours:10
Unit I
 

·       Bishop, North & South, A Cold Spring, Questions of Travel; Vendler, “Elizabeth Bishop”, Geography III

·       Brooks, A Street in Bronzeville Annie Allen, The Bean Eaters, In the Mecca, To Disembark, “Interview with Ida Lewis”

Baker, “The Florescence of Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s”

Unit-2
Teaching Hours:10
Unit II
 

·       Olson, “The Kingfishers” and “Projective Verse”

·       Davenport, “Charles Olson”

·       Duncan, “Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar”

Altieri, “Introduction” and “Symbolist and Immanentist Modes of Poetic Thought” from “Enlarging the Temple”

Unit-3
Teaching Hours:10
Unit III
 

·       Ginsberg, “Howl”

·       Rich, “Diving Into the Wreck”, “The Dream of a Common Language”, “Writing as Re-Vision”

·       Ashbery, “Clepsydra,” “The Double-Dream of Spring”

·       O’Hara, “Meditations in an Emergency,” “The Day Lady Died,” “You are Gorgeous and I’m Coming,” “To the Film Industry in Crisis”

Bloom, “John Ashbery: The Charity of the Hard Moments”

·       Perloff, “Barthes, Ashbery, and the Zero Degree of Genre”

Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, “Daffy Duck in Hollywood”

Unit-4
Teaching Hours:10
Unit IV
 

·       Bernstein, Controlling Interests, “Semblance”

·       Bob Perelman, “Language Writing and Literary History” from “The Marginalization of Poetry”

·       Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”

Moss, Tokyo Butter.

Unit-5
Teaching Hours:20
Unit V
 

·       Faiz Ahmed Faiz, The Rebel’s Silhouette

·       Anna Akhmatova

·       Carol Ann Duffy

·       John Burnside, from “A Lie about My Father”

·       Agha Shahid Ali, “The Country without a Post Office”

Ali, Introduction to “Ravishing (Dis)Unities”

·       Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Ayodha Cantos

·       Ranjit Hoskote, “The Cartographer’s Apprentice”

Seth, Golden Gate

Text Books And Reference Books:

 

Required Texts

 

·       Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems

 

·       Gwendolyn Brooks, Blacks

 

·       Allen Ginsberg, Howl

 

·       Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language

 

·       John Ashbery, The Mooring of Starting Out: The First Five Books of Poetry

 

·       John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

 

·       Charles Bernstein, Controlling Interests

 

·       C.D. Wright, Deepstep Come Shining

 

·       Thylias Moss, Tokyo Butter

 

·       Carol Ann Duffy

 

·       John Burnside

 

·       Agha Shahid Ali, The Country without a Post Office

 

·       Agha Shahid Ali, Ravishing (Dis)Unities

 

·       Michael Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

 

 

 

Essential Reading / Recommended Reading

 

·       Vikram Seth, Golden Gate

 

·       Rukmini Bhaya Nair, Ayodha Cantos

 

·       Faiz Ahmed Faiz, The Rebel’s Silhouette

 

·       Anna Akhmatova

 

·       Pablo Neruda

 

·       Czeslaw Milosz

 

·       Ranjit Hoskote, “The Cartographer’s Apprentice”

 

·       Handouts of poems by other authors

 

·       Critical essays—will be provided by course facilitator.

 

 

 

Evaluation Pattern

 

Testing Pattern

CIA 1: 20 Marks

 

CIA 2:- MSE: 50 marks (Weightage 25%)

CIA 3: 20 Marks

 

ESE: 50 marks (Weightage 30%)

 

 

 

Pattern: MSE and ESE

 

Section A: 2 x 10 = 20 (Conceptual + Application)

 

Section B: 1 x 15 = 15 (Conceptual + Application)

 

Section C: 1 x 15 = 15 (Application)

 

Total marks = 50

 

MECS141 B - ENGLISH AND/IN INDIA (2017 Batch)

Total Teaching Hours for Semester:60
No of Lecture Hours/Week:4
Max Marks:100
Credits:4

Course Objectives/Course Description

 

This course is an introductory survey of English in India. It aims to unravel the social life of English amidst the politics of language in India.

•To create a disciplinary awareness of English in India

•To familiarize with the social life of English in India

•To understand the politics of language in India

Course Outcome

Learners will have an understanding of politics of language.

Learners will be able to critically appreciate the role of English in Indian social and political life.

Learners will be able to trace the history of English in India.

 

Unit-1
Teaching Hours:15
English in disciplines
 

This unit provides a brief overview and survey of the development of English as a discipline 

1. Terry Eagleton “The Rise of English”

2. Gayathri Spivak “The Burden of English”

3. Satish Poduval, “To be in Eng. Lit., Now That … the Voyage Out”

4. Ania Loomba “Teaching the Bard in India”

5. Padmakumar M M et al, “Narrativising an English Department” from Artha: Journal of Social Sciences, Christ University Centre for Publications 5(3), 2016

 

Unit-2
Teaching Hours:15
English and Colonization
 

This unit provides a survey of the modes of English transmission in India during colonization. Readings from colonial documents would be central to understanding the debates in this unit

Charles Grant; 

Macaulay’s Minute (vis-à-vis Chandra Bhan Prasad; Guha “Macaulay’s Minute Revisited” in The Hindu)

Wood’s Despatch; 

Roy’s letter to Lord Amherst

Gauri Vishwanathan Masks of Conquest

 

Unit-3
Teaching Hours:15
English and Caste
 

This unit introduces the social life of English in India especially in the context of caste. It will aim to bring forth debates regarding English and caste 

M, Dasan, “Englishing Dalits: Problems and Perspectives”

Rita Kothari “Caste in a Casteless Language: English as a language of Dalit Expression”

Probal Dasgupta “Sanskrit, English and Dalits” EPW, 35 (16), 2000.

 

Unit-4
Teaching Hours:15
English and Cosmopolitanism in India
 

Selections from Chutneyfying Hinglish by Rita Kothari

“Towards Global Englishes and World Englishes” from Suman Gupta’s Philology and Global English Studies

Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh

 

 

Text Books And Reference Books:

Ghosh, Amitav. Sea of Poppies, Penguin, 2008.

Kothari, Rita and Snell, Rupert (ed). Chutnefying English: The Phenomenon of Hinglish, Penguin, 2011.

Tharu, Susie. Subject to Change: Teaching Literature in the Nineties. Orient Longman, 1998. 

Essential Reading / Recommended Reading

Ghosh, Amitav. Sea of Poppies, Penguin, 2008.

Joshi, Svati. Rethinking English: Essays in Literature, Language, History. OUP, 1994.

Kothari, Rita and Snell, Rupert (ed). Chutnefying English: The Phenomenon of Hinglish, Penguin, 2011.

Marathe, Sudhakar and Mohan G. Ramanan. Provocations: The Teaching of English Literature in India. Orient Longman, 1994.

Mukherjee, Alok. This Gift of English: English Education and the Formation of Alternative Hegemonies in India. Orient Blackswan, 2009.

Rajan, Rajeshwari Sunder. Lie of the Land: English Literary Studies in India. OUP, 1992. 

Tharu, Susie. Subject to Change: Teaching Literature in the Nineties. Orient Longman, 1998. 

Trivedi, Harish and Devendra Kohli. The Heritage of English. Macmillan, 1995.

--Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India, Manchester University Press, 1993.

Uma, Alladi et al. English in the Dalit Context, Orient Blackswan, 2014. 

 

Evaluation Pattern

1.  Write a report on comparing the politics of Language in pre- and post-independence in India. (20 Marks)

Application of theoretical models discussed in the class.

Word Limit: 2000

2. The pair of papers represents on-going debates in the field.  Read the papers, explain the position of the authors in the first paper, and read the reaction in the second paper.  Do you feel both papers make valid points (which?) and after a critical reading, who would you agree with most? 

1. Rita Kothari “Caste in a Casteless Language: English as a language of Dalit Expression”

2. Probal Dasgupta “Sanskrit, English and Dalits” EPW, 35 (16), 2000.

Evaluation will be done as per the rubrics for the assessment.

Word limit: 3000

 

MECS161 A - A SURVEY OF COLONIAL AND PRE-COLONIAL INDIA (2017 Batch)

Total Teaching Hours for Semester:60
No of Lecture Hours/Week:4
Max Marks:100
Credits:4

Course Objectives/Course Description

 

 

The course intends to introduce the learner to the basic themes and historiographical debates in Indian history. It is designed to give the learner a brief overview of the multiple narratives of the ‘Indian past’. The intention of the course is to make the student aware of the complexities in reconstructing the past of a nation and to enable the learner to problematize the past as a non-monolithic entity.

 

 

Course Outcome

The course will enable the learner to frame research questions and problematize the past. It will also enable them to understand the transitions that has marked the past(s) of India , hence providing context to the multiple literary traditions and trends in Indian writing and thought. 

Unit-1
Teaching Hours:8
About Indian History
 

a)      Framing the region – India, Bhārata, Hindustan, Āryāvarta ?

b)     History and  Identity

c)      Narrating the past – sources, periodization; multiple pasts 

Unit-2
Teaching Hours:16
Approaches to Early India
 

a)      Archaeological dilemmas – Indus Valley Civilization – The State Conundrum in History

b)     Social formation and their transitions - Vedic Age – The Aryan Debate- Historiographical Challenges

c)      Religion and State in Early India –Mauryas, Guptas and the Colās

Unit-3
Teaching Hours:12
An Introduction to Medieval India
 

a)      Time as a construct - The Early medieval phase in North and South India

b)     Indian Feudalism?

c)      Revisiting the Empire: The Sultanate and the Mughals

      The Indian Ocean and its many histories

Unit-4
Teaching Hours:12
Framing the Nation
 

a)      Mapping the world – Colonialism and Imperialism-The Early Modern World –Spread of education –census and survey

b)     Challenges and Critiques - Early resistance movements and colonial responses

      Imagining the nation –Gandhiji, Ambedkar, Nehru and Jinnah

Unit-5
Teaching Hours:12
Other Histories
 

a)      Gender as a theme and analytical tool

b)     Dissent as a framework – lower class and caste movements

c)      From the fringes – Tribal histories, partition narratives, history and oral tradition, history and folklore

Text Books And Reference Books:

Romila Thapar, Early India,; From the Origins to AD 1300, 2003

Irfan Habib , Essays in Indian History;Towards a Marxist Perception, 2002

Ranajit Guha, ed., A Subaltem Studies Reader, 1997

Bipan Chandra, Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India, 1979

Kumkum Roy, ed., Insights and Interventions; Essays in honour of Uma Chakravarti,2011

 

 

Essential Reading / Recommended Reading

Shereen Ratnagar, Understanding Harappa; Civilization in the Greater Indus Valley,2001

R. S. Sharma, Material Culture and Social Formations in Ancient India,1983.

Thomas Trautmann, The Aryan Debate, Debates in Indian History and Society,2007

R.S. Sharma, Indian Feudalism (circa 300 – 1200),   1980

Bipan Chandra, Nationalism and Colonialism in Modern India,  1979.

Roy, K., ed. Women in Early Indian Societies, 1999

Suvira Jaiswal, Caste: Origin, Function and Dimensions of Change, 1998.

B.D.,Chattopadhyaya,  Representing the Other? Sanskrit Sources and the Muslims (eight to

fourteenth century),1998

Ronald B Inden, Imagining India, 1990

C .B.Asher and C. Talbot, eds. India before Europe, 2006

R.M.Eaton, Essays on Islam and Indian History, 2000

G Michell and J.M.Fritz. New Light on Hampi: Recent Research at Vijayanagar, 2001

Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam in India, c.1200-1800, 2004.

Ruby Lal, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World, 2005.

Athar Ali, Mughal India, Studies in Polity, Ideas, Society & Culture, New Delhi,2006

Evaluation Pattern

CIA - Evaluation Pattern

Assignment

Presentation

Test

Mid Semester

20

10

10

25

 

Mid Semester Examination

Section A

Section B

Total

2X15=30

2X10=20

50

 

End Semester Examination

Section A

Section B

Total

2X10=20

2X15=30

50

 

 

MECS161 B - CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY (2017 Batch)

Total Teaching Hours for Semester:60
No of Lecture Hours/Week:4
Max Marks:100
Credits:4

Course Objectives/Course Description

 

The course offers research orientation on various cultural issues in global context and provides an understanding of the culture and psychological processes. Sensitivity towards the importance of an interdisciplinary approach in psychology is generated. 

Course Outcome

Course Objectives and Learning Outcomes

  1. To understand the interface between psychology and culture. 
  2. To orient students on how culture is shaping human behaviours.
  3. To orient students on how cultural psychology variables can be used in applied settings. 

Unit-1
Teaching Hours:10
Introduction to Culture and Psychology
 

Culture- Definition- Importance, Interface between Psychology and Culture; Cultural difference; Culture and Human Behavior, Ethics and Emics; Scope of Cultural Psychology. 

Unit-2
Teaching Hours:15
Enculturation and Developmental Process
 

Enculturation and Socialization, Sensitive periods for Cultural Socialization, Childhood Experiences Differences across Culture, Culture, Parenting and Families, Culture and Peers, Culture and Educational System. Culture and Temparament, Culture and Attachment, Cognitive Development and Culture. Morality religion and justice. 

Unit-3
Teaching Hours:15
Culture, Self, Identity and Personality
 

Self as an organizing construct in Behavioural Science and Social Science. Self as a psycho social dynamic processing system. Culture and Self, Culture self esteem and self enhancement, Culture and Identity. Culture and Personality. Motivation and Culture. 

Unit-4
Teaching Hours:10
Cultural influence on Cognition, Perception and Emotions
 

Reasoning styles, Analytic and holistic thinking, Creative Thinking, Attention, Attribution, Talking and Thinking, Lingustic Relativity, Variation of Emotional Experience across Culture, Emotion and Language, Cultural variation in subjective wellbeing and happiness.  

Unit-5
Teaching Hours:10
Culture and Society
 

Interpersonal Attraction and Social Relationship, Culture, language and communication, Mate selection, Love and marriages across cultures, Culture on conformity, compliance and obedience, Culture and Intergroup relations, Culture and Aggression, Living in multicultural worlds. 

Text Books And Reference Books:

Heine, Steven J (2015) Cultural Psychology: Third International Student Edition: New York, W. W. Norton & Company

Essential Reading / Recommended Reading

Leary, M, R & Tangney, J, P (2012) Handbook of Self and Identity; New York: Guilford Press.

Matsumoto D, Juang, L. (2016) Culture and Psychology: New York: Cengage Learning

Evaluation Pattern

CIA Evaluation pattern

Assignment

Case study/ Exhibition/ Activity/ Field work

Presentation

 Quiz/ Objective Tests

Mid semester

10

10

10

10

25

  Mid Semester Examination

Section A

(Definition)

Section B

(Short note)

Section C

(Essay)

Section D

(Case Question)

Total

2×10=20

2×5=10

1×10=10

1×10=10

50

 

End Semester Examination

Section A

(Definition)

Section B

(Short note)

Section C

(Essay)

Section D

(Case Question)

Total

2×10=20

2×5=10

1×10=10

1×10=10

50

 

 

MECS231 - READING CULTURE: INTERDISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES (2017 Batch)

Total Teaching Hours for Semester:60
No of Lecture Hours/Week:4
Max Marks:100
Credits:4

Course Objectives/Course Description

 

This paper in the second semester covers the concept of literary and cultural studies. It engages with the domains of cultures and their narratives that one engages with in the field of cultural studies. It attempts to situate cultural studies as an interdisciplinary field of theory and praxis and will enable students to understand with the problematic of culture and society. 

This course will enable students to

  • attempt a cultural critique of the disciplines
  • develop and critically apply their knowledge and understanding of theoretical and critical debates in Cultural Studies, as well as of key historical developments in intellectual debates
  • garner a range of skills in independent research, and critical analysis
  • gain an insight into these contemporary debates in the Indian scenario. 

 

Course Outcome

Students will be able to

  • locate the intersections of culture and its domains of study
  • develop a critical engagement with questions of culture

Unit-1
Teaching Hours:15
Literary Studies and Cultural Studies
 

Literary Studies and Cultural Studies                                               15 hrs                 

Richard Hoggart: From Uses of Literacy

Susie Tharu and K. Lalita: “Empire, Nation and the Literary Text” 

Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak: from Death of a Discipline

Unit-2
Teaching Hours:15
Culture and History
 

Culture and History                                                               

Dipesh Chakrabarty: “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History”

Sumit Sarkar: “The Many Worlds of Indian History” 

Hayden White: From Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism

Unit-3
Teaching Hours:10
Culture and Economy
 

Unit III:

Culture and Economy                                                                                                       

Lakshmi Subramanian: “Banias and the British: The Role of Indigenous Credit in the Process of Imperial Expansion in Western India in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century”

Rajat Kanta Ray: “Asian Capital in the Age of European Domination: The Rise of the Bazaar, 1800-1914' 

Amitav Ghosh: “Categories of Labour and the Orientation of the Fellah Economy” from The Imam and the Indian.

Unit-4
Teaching Hours:10
Culture and Society
 

Culture and Society                                   

Clifford Geertz: “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture”

James Clifford: “On Ethnographic Authority”

Unit-5
Teaching Hours:20
Culture and Law
 

Culture and Law                                                                                        

 Rajni Kothari: ‘Caste in Indian Politics: Introduction’

G. Ram Reddy: G. Haragopal: The Pyraveekar: ‘’The Fixer’ in Rural India’

Veena Das: ‘The Figure of the Abducted Woman - The Citizen as Sexed’

Rosemary Coombs: “Contingent Articulations: A Critical Cultural Studies of Law”

Pramod K Nayar: from Writing Wrongs: Cultural Construction of Human Rights

Text Books And Reference Books:

Compulsory Books:

 

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller

Time’s Arrow

The Glass Palace

Essential Reading / Recommended Reading

Abbot, H. Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. CUP. 2002.

Cobley , Paul. Narrative. Routledge, 2001.

Dorairaj. A. Joseph. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Satya Nilayam. 2011.

Freeman, M. 'Mythical time , historical time, and the narrative fabric of the Self’ Narrative Inquiry 8 (1): 27-50, 1998.

Genette, G. Narrative discourse Basil Blackwell, 1982.

Jenkins, H. Textual Poachers: Television and Participatory Culture, Routledge, 1992.

Kothari, Rita and Rupert Snell, eds. Chutnefying English: The Phenomenon of English. New Delhi: Penguin, 2011.

Lothe ,J. Narrative in fiction and film : An Introduction Oxford University Press, 2000.

Murray.Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in  Cyberspace,MIT Press, 1997.

Nandy, Ashis. “Gandhi after Gandhi after Gandhi.” The little magazine. Vol. I: Issue 1. n.d.    Web.  15 Jan 2013.

Ong,W.J Orality and Literacy : The Technologies of the word, Methuen, 1982.

Ricoeur, P.  'Narrative time' in W.J.T.Mitchell (ed.) On Narrative University of Chicago Press. 1981.

Snyder, I.'Beyond the hype: reassessing hypertext' in Page to Screen: Taking Literacy in the electronic era, Routledge. 1998.

Toker, I. Eloquent reticence: withholding information in fictional narrative. University press of Kentucky. 1993.

Evaluation Pattern

CIA 1: 20 marks

MSE: Written Exam for 50 marks

CIA 2: 20 Marks

ESE: Written Exam for 50 Marks

MECS232 - NARRATIVE (2017 Batch)

Total Teaching Hours for Semester:60
No of Lecture Hours/Week:4
Max Marks:100
Credits:4

Course Objectives/Course Description

 

This course introduces students to the modes of narratives, both in its textual sense and beyond. The course aims to familiarize students with methods and approaches to reading and understanding aspects of narrative and narratology.

 

Course Outcome

Objectives/Learning Outcomes:

The paper attempts to make our students get a critical sense of

  • the fundamentals of story telling
  • the process of story telling
  • different narrative forms
  • our ways of ordering
  • how we construct meaning through narratives
  • how the processes of interpreting narratives operate
  • how narratives shape any discourse

Unit-1
Teaching Hours:10
Introducing Narrative
 

 

Introducing Narrative

 

 

 

General Introduction to the Course

 

General Introduction to Narrative and Narratology from A. V. Ashok’s Narrative and Hours of Enchantment

 

Unit-2
Teaching Hours:20
Reading Genres
 

 

Reading Genres (20 hrs)

 

This unit introduces some modalities of reading genres both fiction and non-fiction from the point of view of the concepts discussed in Unit 1

 

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino

 

Time’s Arrow: or The Nature of the Offence by Martin Amis

 

In an Antique Landby Amitav Ghosh

 

Unit-3
Teaching Hours:10
Reading Disease
 

Reading Disease                                                                                                      (10 hrs)

This module will introduce students to understanding the narrativisation of Health and Disease.

 

Selections from Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde

Pramod Nayar. “Autobiogenography, Genomes and Life Writing”

Unit-4
Teaching Hours:10
Reading Violence
 

Reading Violence                                                                                                    (10 hrs)

This module will introduce students to how violence is narrativised especially in the 20th and 21 century.

 

Ashis Nandy “The Ambivalent Homecoming of the Homopsychologicus”

Veena Das, “Suffering, Legitimacy and healing: The Bhopal Case”

Selections from Roma Chatterjee and Deepak Mehta. Living with Violence: An Anthropology of events and Everyday Life

Unit-5
Teaching Hours:10
Reading Archives
 

Reading Archives                                                                                                    (10 hrs)

This module will introduce students to the narrativisation of archives and archival objects. A trip to the Government Musuem, Bangalore is a part of this module.

 

David Greetham, “Who’s in, Who’s Out: The Cultural Politics of Archival Exclusion”

Gayathri Spivak, “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives”

Text Books And Reference Books:

Abbot, H. Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. CUP. 2002.

Cobley , Paul. Narrative. Routledge, 2001.

Dorairaj. A. Joseph. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Satya Nilayam. 2011.

Freeman, M. 'Mythical time , historical time, and the narrative fabric of the Self’ Narrative Inquiry 8 (1): 27-50, 1998.

Genette, G. Narrative discourse Basil Blackwell, 1982.

Jenkins, H. Textual Poachers: Television and Participatory Culture, Routledge, 1992.

Kothari, Rita and Rupert Snell, eds. Chutnefying English: The Phenomenon of English. New Delhi: Penguin, 2011.

Lothe ,J. Narrative in fiction and film : An Introduction Oxford University Press, 2000.

Murray.Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in  Cyberspace,MIT Press, 1997.

Nandy, Ashis. “Gandhi after Gandhi after Gandhi.” The little magazine. Vol. I: Issue 1. n.d.    Web.  15 Jan 2013.

Ong,W.J Orality and Literacy : The Technologies of the word, Methuen, 1982.

Ricoeur, P.  'Narrative time' in W.J.T.Mitchell (ed.) On Narrative University of Chicago Press. 1981.

Snyder, I.'Beyond the hype: reassessing hypertext' in Page to Screen: Taking Literacy in the electronic era, Routledge. 1998.

Toker, I. Eloquent reticence: withholding information in fictional narrative. University press of Kentucky. 1993.

Essential Reading / Recommended Reading

Abbot, H. Porter. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. CUP. 2002.

Cobley , Paul. Narrative. Routledge, 2001.

Dorairaj. A. Joseph. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Satya Nilayam. 2011.

Freeman, M. 'Mythical time , historical time, and the narrative fabric of the Self’ Narrative Inquiry 8 (1): 27-50, 1998.

Genette, G. Narrative discourse Basil Blackwell, 1982.

Jenkins, H. Textual Poachers: Television and Participatory Culture, Routledge, 1992.

Kothari, Rita and Rupert Snell, eds. Chutnefying English: The Phenomenon of English. New Delhi: Penguin, 2011.

Lothe ,J. Narrative in fiction and film : An Introduction Oxford University Press, 2000.

Murray.Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in  Cyberspace,MIT Press, 1997.

Nandy, Ashis. “Gandhi after Gandhi after Gandhi.” The little magazine. Vol. I: Issue 1. n.d.    Web.  15 Jan 2013.

Ong,W.J Orality and Literacy : The Technologies of the word, Methuen, 1982.

Ricoeur, P.  'Narrative time' in W.J.T.Mitchell (ed.) On Narrative University of Chicago Press. 1981.

Snyder, I.'Beyond the hype: reassessing hypertext' in Page to Screen: Taking Literacy in the electronic era, Routledge. 1998.

Toker, I. Eloquent reticence: withholding information in fictional narrative. University press of Kentucky. 1993.

Evaluation Pattern

CIA 1: 20 marks

MSE: Written Exam for 50 marks

CIA 2: 20 Marks

ESE: Written Exam for 50 Marks

MECS233 - DRAMA (2017 Batch)

Total Teaching Hours for Semester:60
No of Lecture Hours/Week:4
Max Marks:100
Credits:4

Course Objectives/Course Description

 

This course engages students with the dramatic traditions and texts. It will trace the evolution of drama over the ages while also looking at the sub-genres of the dramatic form. The course will deal with texts of importance in different sub genres of drama. It will also focus on the aesthetic and the political dimensions of the art form.

The objective of this paper is to attempt to help students

  • Read and understand classical works of drama over the ages
  • Understand the evolution of the dramatic form
  • Acquaint themselves with the social function of drama
  • Analyse the influence of drama in other forms of artistic expressions 

 

Course Outcome

The course will enable students acquaint themselves with key dramatic texts from different sub-genres. It will lay the platform for further research for students interested in the drama and theatre.

Unit-1
Teaching Hours:20
Tragedy
 

Tragedy                    

  1. Antigone/ Oedipus Rex - Sophocles
  2. Euripedes - Bacchae
  3. Othello/Macbeth-Shakespeare
  4. Andromaque- Jean Racine
  5. Murder in the Cathedral- T S Eliot
  6. Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller
  7. Streetcar Named Desire- Tennessee Williams
Unit-2
Teaching Hours:20
Comedy
 

Comedy                                                                                                                                 20 Hrs

  1. Aristophanes- Frogs
  2. Ben Jonson- Volpone
  3. Twelfth Night/As You Like It/ A Midsummer Night’s Dream- Shakespeare
  4. Moliere- Misanthrope
  5. School for Scandal – R B Sheridan
  6. Importance of Being Ernest – Oscar Wilde
Unit-3
Teaching Hours:10
Political Plays
 

 Political Plays

  1. Trojan Women-Euripedes
  2. Richard III- Shakespeare
  3. Prometheus Unbound – P B Shelley
  4. Cherry Orchard – Anton Chekhov
  5. Henrik Ibsen – Doll’s House
  6. Life of Galileo – Bertolt Brecht
  7. Eugene  O’Neil – Emperor Jones
  8. Any Play-Federico Garcia Lorca
Unit-4
Teaching Hours:10
Plays Based on Movements in Theatre
 

Plays Based on Movements in Theatre

  1. Look Back in Anger – John Osborne
  2. Waiting for Godot- - Samuel Beckett /Rhinoceros- Eugene Ionesco
  3. Girish Karnad – Tughlaq
  4. Wole Soyinka – Death and the King’s Horseman
  5. Amiri Baraka – Dutchman
  6. I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem
  7. Aime Ceasar – Tempest
  8. Mahesh Dattani – Dance Like a Man
Text Books And Reference Books:

Further Reading: Aristotle’s Poetics, Martin Esslin – Theatre of the Absurd, Antonin Artaud – Theater of Cruelty, Constantin Stanislavski – Essays from various texts.

Essential Reading / Recommended Reading

Further Reading: Aristotle’s Poetics, Martin Esslin – Theatre of the Absurd, Antonin Artaud – Theater of Cruelty, Constantin Stanislavski – Essays from various texts.

Evaluation Pattern

CIA 1: 20 marks (20%)

MSE: 50 marks (25%)

CIA 3: 20 marks (20%)

ESE: 50 marks (30%)

MECS241 A - CLASSICAL DRAMA (2017 Batch)

Total Teaching Hours for Semester:60
No of Lecture Hours/Week:4
Max Marks:100
Credits:4

Course Objectives/Course Description

 

The course will familiarize students with classical drama through texts from ancient Greece, Latin Rome, Sanskrit texts as well as essays on various theatrical forms all over the pre-modern world. The course would provide the students first-hand experience of texts that are known to students mostly through their references in other texts. It also briefly looks at the unwritten and non-verbal dramatic traditions of the distant past.

The objectives of this paper is to attempt to help students

  • To read and appreciate classical texts from different world traditions
  • Gauge the extend of influence these texts have in contemporary literature and culture
  • Develop a nuanced understanding of the connections between different dramatic traditions
  • Develop newer ways of reading and analyzing classical texts
  • Rethink the dramatic form itself by looking at the unwritten and non-verbal forms of dramatic expression

 

Course Outcome

Students will be equipped with a basic knowledge of the classical dramatic world. The readings of selected texts will help them evaluate the importance of the classics. Rather than depending on the opinions of other scholars students will form their independent views on the merits of classical dramatic traditions and texts. The course would also provide the necessary impetus for students desirous of studying classics for research.

Unit-1
Teaching Hours:15
Greek Drama
 

Greek Drama                       

  1. Aeschylus – Orestia (One Play)
  2. Sophocles: Theban Plays (One Play)
  3. Euripides: Any Play
  4. Aristophanes: The Wasps/ The Acharnians/ The Birds
  5. Menander: Dyskolos
Unit-2
Teaching Hours:15
Roman Drama
 

Roman Drama                                                                      10 Hrs

  1. Terence: Andria
  2. Plautus: Amphitryon
  3. Seneca: Hercules Furens/ Phaedra
Unit-3
Teaching Hours:15
Indian Dramatic Tradition
 

Indian Dramatic Tradition

  1. Kalidasa - Abhijnanashakuntalam
  2. Bhasa – Urubhanga/
  3. Bharata - Natysastra (Excerpts)
Unit-4
Teaching Hours:15
Overview of Other Theatrical Traditions
 

Overview of Other Theatrical Traditions

  1. Egyptian Tradition
  2. Chinese
  3. Japanese
  4. African Theatrical Forms
  5. Medieval Mystery Plays
Text Books And Reference Books:

Prescribed plays

Essential Reading / Recommended Reading

Prescribed plays

Evaluation Pattern

CIA: 70% including a Mid-Semester examination for 50 marks (5 essays each carrying 10 marks)

ESE will be a written exam for 50 marks (5 essays each carrying 10 marks)

 

MECS241 B - POPULAR CULTURE IN INDIA (2017 Batch)

Total Teaching Hours for Semester:60
No of Lecture Hours/Week:4
Max Marks:100
Credits:4

Course Objectives/Course Description

 

This course Popular Culture in India will introduce students to the area of popular culture studies within academia. It will trace the trajectories and concerns that determine this area and also the field of study in general. It will specifically acquaint the students and help them engage with forms of popular culture in India and help them read these popular culture forms as ‘texts’ – signifying systems that produce meanings in specific ways. It will look at the politics of the production, dissemination and consumption of these texts.

The objective of this paper is to attempt to help students

  • Engage with popular culture as an academic domain
  • Understand popular culture and read popular culture forms
  • Acquaint themselves with the history of popular culture studies
  • Understand and read popular culture forms in India
  • Understand the political in the popular.

 

Course Outcome

Students are expected to historically understand popular culture studies, understand popular culture texts and be able to read and interpret popular culture ‘texts’ and problematize them. They are expected to understand these ‘texts’ as mediated and ideological formations.

Unit-1
Teaching Hours:15
Popular Culture and Popular Culture Studies: General Perspectives
 

Popular Culture and Popular Culture Studies: General Perspectives                

  1. Leo Lowenthal: “Historical Perspectives of Popular Culture”
  2. Leo Lowenthal: “The Debate Over Art and Popular Culture: A Synopsis”
  3. John Fiske: “Understanding the Popular”
  4. Stuart Hall: “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular’”
  5. Leo Lowenthal: “Popular Culture: A Humanistic and Sociological Concept”
  6. Guy Debord: “Society of the Spectacle”
Unit-2
Teaching Hours:10
Situating Popular Culture in India
 

Situating Popular Culture in India                                                                         10 Hrs

  1. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake: “Introduction”
  2. Ram Punyani: “India: Religious Nationalism and Changing Profile of Popular Culture”
  3. Sara Pendergrast: “Clothing, Headgear and Body Decorations in India”\
  4. K. Moti Gokulsing: “What is an Indian Soap Opera?”
  5. Rajiv Malhotra: “Order and Chaos”
Unit-3
Teaching Hours:10
Indian Cinema and Music
 

Indian Cinema and Music

  1. Shakuntala Banaji: “Hindi Films: Theoretical Debates and Textual Studies”
  2. Asha Kasbekar: “Music”
  3. Peter Kveto: “Private Music: Individualism, Authenticity and Genre Boundaries in the Bombay Music Industry”
  4. Anna Morcom: “Indian Popular Culture and its ‘Others’: Bollywood Dance and Anti-Nautch in Twenty-First-Century Global India”
Unit-4
Teaching Hours:5
Popular Culture of the Streets
 

Popular Culture of the Streets

  1. Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay: “The Discreet Charm of Indian Street Food”
  2. Frederick Norohna: “Who’s Afraid of Radio in India?”
  3. Boria Majumdar: “Soaps, serials and the CPI(M), Cricket Beats Them All: Cricket and Television in Contemporary India
Unit-5
Teaching Hours:20
Other Forms of Popular Culture
 

Other Forms of Popular Culture                                                                            20 Hrs

  1. Pramod K Nayar:  “Star Power: The Celebrity as Power”
  2. Shehina Fazal: “Emancipation or Anchored Individualism?: Women and TV Soaps in India”
  3. Nalin Mehta: “Breaking News, Indian Style’: Politics, Democracy and Indian News Television”
  4. Karline Maclain: “Gods, Kings and Local Telugu Guys: Competing Visions of the heroic in Indian Comic Books”
Text Books And Reference Books:

Compilation of prescribed texts.

Essential Reading / Recommended Reading

Shoma, Munshi: Remote Control: Indian Television in the New Millenium

K Moti Gokulsing: Soft-Soaping Inida: The World of Indian Televised Soap Operas

Asha Kasbekar: Popular Culture: India!

Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake: Popular Culture in a Globalised India

Evaluation Pattern

CIA: 70% including a Mid-Semester examination for 50 marks

ESE will be a written exam for 50 marks

MECS261 A - INDIAN AND TRANSPERSONNAL PSYCHOLOGY (2017 Batch)

Total Teaching Hours for Semester:60
No of Lecture Hours/Week:4
Max Marks:100
Credits:4

Course Objectives/Course Description

 

The course provides a brief outline to the Indian and transpersonal Psychological concepts. The course aims to provide student different perspectives of self development in physical, social and spiritual realm. The term Indian Psychology refers to the study of psychologically relevant materials in ancient Indian thought. Usually this term does not cover modern developments in Psychology in India.  Indian Psychology is an approach to psychology that is based on ideas and practices that developed over thousands of years within the Indian sub-continent. Transpersonal psychology is a sub-field or "school" of psychology that integrates the spiritual and transcendent aspects of the human experience with the framework of modern psychology. It is also possible to define it as a "spiritual psychology". Appreciative understanding of the concepts in these two fields enables the student to do a better professional psychological practice.

Course Outcome

The course provides a brief outline to the Indian and transpersonal Psychological concepts. The course aims to provide student different perspectives of self development in physical, social and spiritual realm. The term Indian Psychology refers to the study of psychologically relevant materials in ancient Indian thought. Usually this term does not cover modern developments in Psychology in India.  Indian Psychology is an approach to psychology that is based on ideas and practices that developed over thousands of years within the Indian sub-continent. Transpersonal psychology is a sub-field or "school" of psychology that integrates the spiritual and transcendent aspects of the human experience with the framework of modern psychology. It is also possible to define it as a "spiritual psychology". Appreciative understanding of the concepts in these two fields enables the student to do a better professional psychological practice.

Unit-1
Teaching Hours:15
Definitions and Nature
 

Definitions and Nature:                                                                             (10 Hours)

Indian, Transpersonal Psychology. Current research in Indian and Transpersonal Psychology.

Unit-2
Teaching Hours:15
Major schools of Indian psychology
 

Major schools of Indian psychology:                                                                  (15 Hours)

 Veda, Upanishad, Sankhya-Yoga, Nyaya- Vysheshya, Meemamsa, Vedanta, Ayurveda, Buddhism, Jainism, Sufism

Unit-3
Teaching Hours:15
Major schools of Indian psychology
 

Major schools of Indian psychology:                                                                  (15 Hours)

 Veda, Upanishad, Sankhya-Yoga, Nyaya- Vysheshya, Meemamsa, Vedanta, Ayurveda, Buddhism, Jainism, Sufism

Unit-4
Teaching Hours:15
Major schools of Indian psychology
 

Major schools of Indian psychology:                                                                  (15 Hours)

 Veda, Upanishad, Sankhya-Yoga, Nyaya- Vysheshya, Meemamsa, Vedanta, Ayurveda, Buddhism, Jainism, Sufism

Text Books And Reference Books:

Cornelissen M, Misra, & Varma (2010) Foundations of Indian Psychology Volume 1: Theories and Concepts: Pearson India

Richard Dewey Mann (1984) The Light of Consciousness: Explorations in Transpersonal Psychology: Suny Press.

Essential Reading / Recommended Reading

Cornelissen M, Misra, & Varma (2010) Foundations of Indian Psychology Volume 1: Theories and Concepts: Pearson India

Richard Dewey Mann (1984) The Light of Consciousness: Explorations in Transpersonal Psychology: Suny Press.

Evaluation Pattern

MSE/ESE Pattern:
Section A: 2 x 10 = 20 (Conceptual + Application)

Section B: 1 x 15 = 15 (Conceptual + Application)

Section C: 1 x 15 = 15 (Application)

Total marks = 50

MECS261 B - DIGITAL CULTURE AND ETHICS (2017 Batch)

Total Teaching Hours for Semester:60
No of Lecture Hours/Week:4
Max Marks:100
Credits:4

Course Objectives/Course Description

 

This course refers to patterns of behaviour used when on the Internet, sided both by law and personal philosophy. The majority of the emerging research illuminates how users engage with digital media, relatively little attention has been given to moral and ethical issues. Digital users use the internet primarily as a tool for both social interaction and information sharing, two acts that encompass the concepts of morality. Because the Internet functions as a global networking platform, it links people of various culture, age, gender and sexual preferences. This necessitates the need to examine the proper and improper ways of social interactions and sensitivities to those who do not share the same cultural and religious upbringing or opinion.

 

The digital space provides tools to modify, to inform or to keep information away (with ulterior motives). It can be used for propaganda or for a social cause. It can be used for security and for control and surveillance. The discourse around digital culture and ethics does not just narrow down to a battle between good and evil. The field of digital ethics also finds a common ground for what could be ‘acceptable’ in terms of digital conduct. This paper looks to understand ethical ambivalences and uncertainties, which are also equally significant. Moreover, the information age and emerging technologies are challenging and transforming about ideas about morality, privacy, friendship, social etiquette, freedom and democracy, and a host of other pertinent issues.

 

This course will draw on critical theories and case studies to address and understand these changing moral and ethical concerns of the information age.

 

Course Outcome

1.      Understanding basic ethical concerns of the information age focusing on digital morality and ethics

2.      Equip students with changing perspectives on digital professional ethics, ethos and codes

3.      Familiarize students with theories and practices of online cultural and political issues such as privacy, surveillance, hacktivism, freedom and democracy

4.      Enable students to critically understand and appreciate online ethical issues, dilemmas and ambivalences to address personal and professional challenges and responsibilities in their future careers.

Unit-1
Teaching Hours:20
Introduction to Ethics
 

Introduction to Ethics                                                                     20 hours

 

·         What is Ethics

·         Indian Ethics

·         What is online ethics?

·         Digital Media Ethics

Unit-2
Teaching Hours:20
Internet and Issues of Information Age
 

Internet and Issues of Information Age                                                   20 hours

 

Privacy in the Electronic Global Metropolis

·         Is Privacy a Universal Values

·         Gendered Privacy

·         Nativity

·         The privacy of the poor

·         Privacy is not privatization

·         Citizenship in Global Metropolis

 

Copying and Distributing via Digital Media

·         Copyright

·         Global Perspective

Unit-3
Teaching Hours:20
Anonymity and Digital Censorship
 

Anonymity and Digital Censorship                                                        20 hours

 

·         E-Ethics and Generation Y attitudes

·         Internet related Misbehaviour

·         Ethics and Order on the Internet

·         Making Things Real

·         Hacktivism

·         Digital Democratization Politics

Unit-4
Teaching Hours:20
Digital Advertisement and Ethical Issues
 

Digital Advertisement and Ethical Issues                                          20 hours

·         The “Missing Middle”

·         Rhetoric and Reality

·         How Wide a Gate?

Text Books And Reference Books:

1.      Mass Communication in India.  Keval J. Kumar 4th Edition, Jaico Publishing House.

2.      The Culture of Connectivity. A Critical History of Social Media, Jose Van Dijck, Oxford University Press

3.      Intercultural Communication. The Indian Context. Ramesh N.Rao and Avinsah Thombre, Sage Publications.

Essential Reading / Recommended Reading

1.      Mass Communication in India.  Keval J. Kumar 4th Edition, Jaico Publishing House.

2.      The Culture of Connectivity. A Critical History of Social Media, Jose Van Dijck, Oxford University Press

3.      Intercultural Communication. The Indian Context. Ramesh N.Rao and Avinsah Thombre, Sage Publications.

Evaluation Pattern

While lectures and case studies will be used to deliver the sessions, student projects also form an equally important component of pedagogy. Students are expected to go through the readings relevant for each lecture and class discussions.

 

·         Small Group Video assignments (Assessing the ability of the students to locate appropriate media theories in their media ubiquity)

·         Mid Semester Exams

·         Individual Assignment

·         End Semester-  50 marks

 

Exam  Pattern:
Section A: 2 x 10 = 20 (Conceptual + Application)

Section B: 1 x 15 = 15 (Conceptual + Application)

Section C: 1 x 15 = 15 (Application)

Total marks = 50