Course Catalogue

This course will emphasize literary theory and criticism which emphasises on diverse analytical concepts and criticism by renowned theorists, authors, and critiques. The aim will be to understand primary theoretical concepts through the reading of literary works with attention to historical and social contexts. The course shall extensively study the twentieth-century development of literary criticism based on the concepts of formalism, feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, post-colonialism, and post-modernism. These concepts will help the students understand what “theory” is and how it can be related to “literature,” “literary criticism,” and “literary history”.

The course covers the literature and culture of the Victorian period, allowing students to explore the extraordinary cultural and social changes occurring in Nineteenth-century England. This is the brilliant age of Dickens, the Brontës, Tennyson and Browning, Oscar Wilde, and the Pre-Raphaelites among many others. This is also the transitional period between the Romantics and the Modernists and the literature of the time depicts the internal conflicts the nation sustained in its journey from rural simplicity to urbanization.

This course provides an introduction to literary Modernism as an artistic movement that transformed literary production in Europe and the United States from the end of the nineteenth century and across the first half of the twentieth century. In response to the unsettling social, political, and cultural changes brought about by an era of 'modernity', writers sought to create art that would engage with and reflect these changes. Through the study of key Modernist texts (prose, poetry, play), students will learn about the diverse innovations in form, style, and subject matter characteristic of the movement. Authors include, but are not limited to W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, T.S.Eliot, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, and Samuel Becket. Students will study how these prominent writers and their work interpret and express the experience of modernity, and the ways in which they reacted to, reflected on, or tried to give shape to the social and political tumult of their times.

This course, sociolinguistics, provides a general introduction to the study of the relationship between language and society. Importance is given to the study of language variation and change, sociology of language, correlational sociolinguistics (how social factors like age, sex and social class influence language) and social context of linguistic diversity including dialectology, language and gender, pidgins and creoles, language and ethnicity, new varieties of English, intercultural communication and applied sociolinguistics. It will focus on language variation according to users, including regional and social dialects as well as variation by gender. It will also discuss language variation according to use. It also includes issues related to disciplines such as education, gender & cultural studies, and politics.