English Department

Course-Specific Objectives & Outcomes (CsO)

SEMESTER I

Core Course 1: Indian Classical Literature

Objectives: The objective of this course is to introduce the students and build their sensibility to the rich heritage of Indian Classical Literature which happens to be in the classical Indian language of Sanskrit. Apart from three units containing such classical Indian literature, the course also includes an ‘Ankiya Nat’ by Srimanta Shankardeva (originally written in the Brajavali language) to acquaint the students with one of the greatest religious performance-art form of medieval Assam.

Outcomes: After studying this course the students are expected to be able:-

1. To understand the significance of Indian Classical literature and its deep-seated relationship with and influence on the Indian psyche.
2. To understand and relate the influence of those classics on Indian story-telling and narratives in general.
3. To discuss the key points of interest of those texts as classics.

Core Course 2: European Classical Literature

Objectives: The objectives of this course is to introduce the students to the classical literature written in Greece and Rome in the Latin language during the pre-Christian times of Europe. As texts produced in the earliest civilizations in Europe, these classics have heavily impacted literature written in different countries in Europe, including England.

Outcomes: After completing this paper, the students are expected to be able:-

1. To have a comprehensive idea about the nature of classical European literature and its influence on Western literature.
2. To understand the birth of genres like comedy, tragedy, epic, satire, etc. and trace their influence on English Literature in general.

SEMESTER II

Core Course 3: Indian Writings in English

Objectives: Wide ranges of themes are dealt within Indian Writing in English. While this literature continues to reflect Indian culture, tradition, social values and even Indian history through the depiction of life in India and Indians living elsewhere, recent Indian English fiction has been trying to give expression to the Indian experience of the modern predicaments. The aim of this course is to introduce learners to Indian Writing in English from the colonial to the postcolonial period. Issues such as identity politics, gendered differences, home, dislocation, language among others shall be underscored with the intention to understand the diversity of Indian culture and tradition across spatiality.

Outcomes: After completing this course the students are expected to be able:-

1. To explain concepts like partition, home, dislocation, identity, diaspora, etc. and track them in the context of the Indian English novel and poetry.
2. To understand and explain the differences of Indian Writings in English from literatures of other nations written in the English language.
3. To understand the unique characteristics of the Indian novel and poetry.
4. To get a sense of the modernist turn in Indian literature written in English.

Core Course 4: British Poetry and Drama: 14^th to 17^th Centuries

Objectives: The objective of this course is to acquaint the learners with
British poetry and drama from Chaucer to Shakespeare. The texts prescribed relate to the Age
of Chaucer, Pre-Elizabethan and Elizabethan periods. Shakespeare figures predominantly in
this course, with a tragedy, comedy and two sonnets prescribed. Marlowe’s play encapsulates
the spirit of the Renaissance, thereby placing the Elizabethan period in a proper perspective.

Outcomes: After completing this course the students are expected to be able:-

1. To express their understanding of religious and political thought informing the literature of the concerned period.
2. To point out the nature of Elizabethan dramatic forms like tragedy and romantic-comedy.
3. To show their understanding of Renaissance Humanism and its influence on the literature of the contemporary times.

    

   SEMESTER III

Core Course 5: American Literature

Objectives: The objective of this course is to introduce the learners to
American literature, a field that could be considered as comparatively recent in formulation,
when compared to the literature of Britain and Continental Europe.

Outcomes: After completing this course the students are expected to be able:-

1. To show clarity with concepts and issues like the American Dream, slavery in the U.S, realism, etc.
2. To discuss the different forms of American Poetry.
3. To understand and explain even briefly the historical context and the development of American literature from it.
4. It is hoped that learners would get a feel of American literature and they will be able to understand the poetics and politics of a literature characterised both by liberal and reactionary ideals.

Core Course 6: Popular Literature

Objectives: The objective of this course is to acquaint learners with popular literature, such as crime thriller, graphic fiction, children’s literature and so forth, generally regarded by purists to be „low-brow‟ and meant for easy mass consumption. However, it would be wrong to assume such a position insofar as the lines of distinction between what is literary and what is popular tends to be blurred.

Outcomes: After completing this course the students are expected to be able:-

1. To appreciate the presence of a creative space and process that has the potential to affect readers to a degree that high-brow literature cannot achieve due to its propensity to target only a niche audience.
2. To understand concepts like the nonsense genre, graphic literature, coming of age, difference between the canon and the popular, identity, etc. in relation to the prescribed works of literature.
3. To have an idea of the genres that comes under the realm of popular literature.

Core Course 7: British Poetry & Drama: 17^th & 18^th Centuries

Objectives: The objective of this course is to acquaint the learner to the English literature of the Seventeenth and the Eighteenth century, which was dominated by epoch-making political events, such as the Puritan Interregnum and the Restoration. These events were responsible for ushering in changes in the thought-processes of poets like Milton and Pope, dramatists like Webster and Behn, and so forth.

Outcomes: After the completion of this course, learners will be in a position:-

1. To understand the ways in which English drama and poetry began to emphasize on the importance of adhering to classical norms and forms.
2. To be able to show their understanding on forms like comedy of manners, mock-epic, etc. and retain the names of their most prominent practitioners of the period.
3. To understand the political and socio-cultural climate of England of the concerned times and trace their influence on the emerging ideas and literature.
   

   
   SEMESTER IV

Core Course 8: British Literature: 18^th Century

Objectives: The objective of this course is to lead the learners into understanding the socio-cultural, political and intellectual climate prevalent in the first half of the 18^th century England and the literary forms these influences helped arise. Since, this period is also referred to as the Age of Enlightenment; ‘reason’ became the locus from which human’s actions and cognition issued forth. Therefore, another aim of prescribing this course is to make the students understand the fundamental philosophical shift ushered in, in the wake of the culture of positivism that set in during this period.

Outcomes: After completing this course the students are expected to be able:-

1. To understand the spirit of the age, as well as the literature embodying this spirit.
2. To show their understanding on the enlightenment; on concepts like Neo-classicism; on representative forms of the age like the periodical, the novel, etc.
3. To be able to mark how distinctively 18^th century British literature majorly focuses on the city.

Core Course 9: British Romantic Literature

Objectives: The objectives of this course is to introduce the students to the highly imaginative, rhetorical, emotive, visionary, metaphysical, epical, sensuous aspects of the works, especially poetry, gave tremendous heft to this literature celebrating Nature in all its beauty, majesty and terror.

Outcomes: After completing this course the students are expected to be able:-

1. To know and appreciate the values of a literature characterised by emotion, passion, love towards nature, exerting of imagination and so forth in order to create literature.
2. To clearly point out and connect the nature & characteristics of romantic literature with the texts/works prescribed in the course.
3. To understand the influence of the revolutionary zeal of the times and its influence on romantic literature.
4. To have an understanding of the newly emergent fictional and poetic forms of the period.

Core Course 10: British Literature: 19^th Century

Objectives: The objective of this course is to introduce the learner to this period, especially after 1837, which is termed as “Victorian” literature – a term that evokes notions of propriety, prudishness, censorship, among others, that was in sharp relief against the spirit of the erstwhile Romantic period. The course aims to make the learner get a sense of how the nineteenth-century is emblematic of a certain spiritual crisis that had set in due to the powerful impact of scientific ideology. Moreover, utilitarian values exhorting personal aggrandisement at the cost of social responsibility became the practice of daily lives of the people.

Outcomes: After completing this course the students are expected to be able:-

1. To understand the philosophical shift that came about due to the crises of faith pertaining to the culture of positivism that manifested its full presence during the Victorian period.
2. To understand concepts like utilitarianism, surplus value, Victorian prudishness, survival of the fittest etc., and will be able to analyse it along these lines in the texts prescribed.
3. To clearly point out the prevalent literary forms of the period and their nature.

SEMESTER V

Core Course 11: Women’s Writings

Objectives: The objective of this course is to introduce learners to women’s writing, and in doing so attempting to underline the manner in which power operates to silence women from articulating their views. Apart from that, the course would also try to situate women’s writing in a space that transcends or upends the male writing tradition through various (subversive) ways.

Outcomes: After completing this course the students are expected to be able:-

1. To understand and be sensitised about gender-related issues, and would be able to see things from the perspective of the Other.
2. To have a clear understanding on issues and concepts like Patriarchy, Sexual Politics, Race, Caste and Gender, Social Reform and Women’s Rights. Etc.
3. To keep track of the literary forms through which women’s concerns have been expressed.

Core Course 12: British Literature: The Early 20^th Century Literature

Objectives: The objectives of this particular course is to chart the numerous philosophical trajectories resulting from a war-torn world and its psychological impact upon the western world which was also changing rapidly due to capitalism. These contexts found expression in modernism through early twentieth-century texts, particularly novels and poetry.

Outcomes: After completing this course the students are expected to be benefitted in terms of:-

1. Getting acquainted with concepts like stream-of-consciousness, Oedipus complex, avant-garde, gyre, interior monologue, among many others.
2. Learning about the major practitioners of modernism in literary forms and art as well.
3. Being able to trace the use of myth in literature.

SEMESTER VI

Core Course 13: Modern European Drama

Objectives: This course intends to read the plays by placing the epochal events representative of the political, social, individual, economic conditions the post-war Europe, with all its attendant ills and trauma as the backdrop.

Outcomes: After completing this course the students are expected to be able:-

1. To know Modern drama with its entire attendant problematic.
2. To know about the various emerging experimental dramatic genres like the Theatre of the Absurd, Epic theatre, etc.
3. To understand the relationship between politics and stage production.

Core Course 14: Post-Colonial Literatures

Objectives: The objectives of this course is to introduce learners to post-colonialism and its various themes of enquiry. It aims to guide the students in deploying postcolonial theory to engage critically with texts within a postcolonial framework. As such the course focuses on such issues as language, identity, point of view, displacement, physical and mental colonisation, Decolonisation, nationalism, fundamentalism, globalisation and diaspora, colonial legacy, gender and sexuality, regionalism, ethnicity, genocide, race, and so forth, and we will discuss how such issues are expressed in the literary texts.

Outcomes: After completing this course the students are expected to be able:-

1. To be acquainted with both the texts and the contexts of the given period.
2. To understand issues related to post-colonialism like language, identity, point of view, displacement, physical and mental colonisation, Decolonisation, nationalism, fundamentalism, globalisation and diaspora, colonial legacy, gender and sexuality, regionalism, ethnicity, genocide, race, etc.
3. To have an idea of the nations and writers from different nations that write on the aforementioned issues; the methods of decolonisation that they formulate and practise in their writings.