Course Catalogue

This course is designed to engage graduate students in an in-depth study of the craft of creative writing through the reading of fiction and creative non-fiction. The students will be introduced to the elements of fiction including plot, character, viewpoint, and fictional genres and to some forms of nonfictional prose such as autobiography, biography, essay, letter, memoir, oration, and travelogue in British, American, and other English-language traditions.

The course on Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse will offer students the opportunity to study the history of European colonialism and how it impacted the society, politics, economy and culture of colonized nations. It will also focus on the resistance movements in these nations that took diverse forms –from armed and non-violent resistance, such as MK Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement, and literary and cultural productions challenging colonialism to mass migrations that signaled a dismissal of the entire structure of colonialism. Political and cultural discourses of the colonized countries also spurned the so called ‘civilizing mission’ of the Europeans which attempted to transform the colonized societies in the image of Europe. Although by the 1980s nearly all formerly colonized countries and territories became independent, they continued to be haunted by the specter of colonialism at multiple levels.

This course addresses various implications of culture and cultural presence, the complex relation between and within different cultures, society, politics and literature. In doing so, it addresses the discursive aspects of culture while investigating the production of ideology and power and how they are conditioned, distributed and consumed in contemporary media, and other forms of art and cultural productions (e.g: films, literary works, music, television shows and so on). It will hence highlight the key questions of the meaning making process in the era of capitalism and reflect onto the continuously evolving transnational situations through the lenses of cultural studies. The students will be acquainted with the core issues and different theoretical debates of cultural studies and are expected to grow with a critical awareness as well as ability to critically analyze cultural materials using updated frameworks of cultural studies.

The course will explore definitions of popular culture and survey a variety of critical approaches used in the study of popular culture from a scholarly perspective. The overall objective is to explore the social and cultural context of popular culture products and practices. The course will also examine a wide range of subjects (such as film, television, music, advertising, the internet) using a wide range of critical approaches (such as genre theory, gender studies).