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Syllabus MAENG

The University of Burdwan offers a comprehensive M.A. in English syllabus that combines traditional English literature with interdisciplinary studies, focusing on language skills and cultural contexts. The program spans four semesters, requiring students to complete core, major, and minor elective courses, along with a project paper emphasizing research and social outreach. The course structure includes a variety of literary periods and critical approaches, ensuring a well-rounded education in English literature and its relevance in contemporary society.

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Syllabus MAENG

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1

THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH & CULTURE STUDIES
Syllabus for M.A. in English
(Effective from 2014-16 Session)

The new MA course in English offers training in canonical English literatures as well as
emergent interdisciplinary fields, to postgraduate students of literature. The course is designed
to lend competence in English language skills, through a close reading of literature. At the same
time, the course hones research skills, making students aware of the cultural contexts of literary
studies. The project writing component (that encourages field work) ensures the research-
intensive nature of the course.

The new MA course exposes students to the complex operations of English in India today;
sensitizes them in the process to social concerns, and to literature’s task of making our existence
meaningful in the contemporary world. The course is socially inclusive in intent and the outreach
component of project papers is testimony to the same.

Credits and Evaluation: The course has four semesters and is spread over a period of twoyears.
Students will be required to take fifteen compulsory or ‘core’ (of 75 credit points), four major
elective (of 20 credit points) and one minor elective (of a minimum of 2 credit points, offered
by other departments) courses. The minor elective courses offered in this syllabus are
meant for the students of other departments. Each paper of 5 credits shall have 5 hour session
of lectures per week over a period of one semester of 16 weeks for teaching-learning process.
Evaluation will be based on end semester examination and internal assessment. For end semester
examination, each paper will carry 40 marks and will be of two hours’ duration. Project paper will
carry 50 marks (of which 10 marks will be for social outreach and 10 for viva-voce).

Course Structure

Course Title Marks

Course Code Credits
First Semester
PG/ENG/101 Medieval and Renaissance English Literature I 5 50
(CORE)
PG/ENG/102 Medieval and Renaissance English Literature I 5 50
(CORE)
PG/ENG/103 Shakespeare I (Plays & Poems) 5 50
(CORE)
PG/ENG/104 Shakespeare II (Background, Reception and 5 50
(CORE) Translation)
PG/ENG/105 Classical Literature & Criticism 5 50
2

(CORE)
Second Semester
PG/ENG/201 Eighteenth Century English Literature I 5 50
(CORE)
PG/ENG/202 Eighteenth Century English Literature II 5 50
(CORE)
PG/ENG/203 Nineteenth Century English Literature I 5 50
(CORE)
PG/ENG/204 Nineteenth Century English Literature II 5 50
(CORE)
PG/ENG/205 Literary Criticism: Renaissance to Modern 5 50
(CORE)
Third Semester
PG/ENG/301 Modern English Literature till 1950 5 50
(CORE)
PG/ENG/302 Post 1950s English Literature 5 50
(CORE)
PG/ENG/303 Literary Theory and Contemporary Thoughts I 5 50
(CORE)
PG/ENG/304 Literary Theory and Contemporary Thoughts II 5 50
(CORE)

PG/ENG/305 Popular Culture /Indian Literatures in English 5 50

Translation*
(MINOR
ELECTIVE)
Fourth Semester
Indian English Literature /
American Literature/Australian
Literature /*
PG/ENG/401 5 50
(MAJOR
ELECTIVE)
Translation Studies / Literature & Films/
PG/ENG/402 African Literature* 5 50
(MAJOR
ELECTIVE)
Literature of South Asian Diaspora / Folklore
PG/ENG/403 Studies /Trauma & Literature* 5 50
(MAJOR
ELECTIVE)
PG/ENG/404 Gender and Literature / Race & Caste Studies / 5 50
(MAJOR Environment & Literature*

ELECTIVE)
3

PG/ENG/405 Project 5 50
(CORE)

* Students are to take 1 (one) out of three optional papers.

Semester I

Paper 101 & 102: Medieval and Renaissance English Literature (Excluding Shakespeare)
These courses propose to study Medieval, Renaissance and Reformation English literature in
the context of social, political and religious events that contributed to the formation of early
modern culture in England.

Paper 101: Medieval and Renaissance English Literature (Excluding Shakespeare) I

Unit I (Any two)

Geoffrey Chaucer: Prologue to the Canterbury Tales/ The Nun’S Priest’s Tale, Edmund
Spenser: The Faerie Queene BK I, Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight, Pearl, Everyman

Unit II (Milton and any two poets)

John Donne: ‘The Flea’, ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’; Andrew Marvell: ‘The Garden’,
‘An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’; Herbert: ‘The Collar’, ‘The Pearl’;
Mary Wroth: ‘Bee you all pleas'd, your pleasures grieve not me’, ‘No time, no roome, no
thought, or writing can give rest’; Chapman: ‘Bridal Song’, ‘The Shadow of Night’; Henry
Vaughan: ‘The Retreat’ , ‘The Storm’; John Milton: Paradise Lost BK IV

Candidates are required to answer two essay-type questions, choosing one from each Unit (out of three questions)
carrying 24 marks in all (12 for Unit I and 12 for Unit II) and one annotation passage out of four passages (two from
each unit) carrying 6 marks and two short-answer-type questions out of six (three to be set from each unit) carrying
5 marks each. Ten (10) marks are allotted to internal assessment test.

Paper 102: Medieval and Renaissance English Literature (Excluding Shakespeare) II

Unit I (Any three)
Thomas Kyd: The Spanish Tragedy, Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus /Tamburlaine,
John Webster: The Duchess of Malfi/The White Devil, Ben Jonson: Volpone/The Alchemist

Unit II (Any two)

Selections from Pico dellaMirandola’sOration on the Dignity of Man, John Lyly’s Eupheus,
Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Machiavelli’s The Prince, John Hobbes’s The Leviathan

Candidates are required to answer two essay-type questions, choosing one from each Unit (out of three
questions) carrying 24 marks in all (12 for Unit I and 12 for Unit II) and one annotation passage out of four
passages (two from each unit) carrying 6 marks and two short-answer-type questions out of six (three to be set
from each unit) carrying 5 marks each. Ten (10) marks are allotted to internal assessment test.
5

Paper 103: William Shakespeare I (Plays & Poems)

This paper proposes a study of select tragedies, comedies and sonnets of William Shakespeare
with the express intent of making students aware of the enduring importance of Shakespeare in
his times and ours.

Unit I (Any three)

King Lear, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra, Richard III

Unit II (Any two plays)

Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, Measure for
Measure

Ten sonnets: Sonnet No. 1, 19, 29, 32, 46, 55, 65, 71, 116, 147

Paper 104: William Shakespeare II (Background, Reception & Translation)

This paper will expose the students to Shakespeare’s time and stage and give them an overview of
different critical approaches to Shakespeare. It will also map the reception of Shakesepeare through
translations and adaptations with a particular focus on the Indian context.

Unit I
Shakespeare: Critical Approaches
Neo-classical: Dryden, Dr Johnson, Maurice Morgan
Romantic: Coleridge, Lamb, Thomas De Quincey
Victorian: Carlyle, A.C. Bradley
Modern: Wilson Knight, L.C. Knights, Caroline Spurgeon, E.M.W. Tillyard, S.C. Sengupta
Recent Trends: Gender-informed Approach, New Historicist Approach, Cultural Materialist
Approach, Postmodernist Approach

Unit II
Shakespeare’s Time and Stage
Shakespeare’s Reception in India (1850-till date): A Brief History
Shakespeare in Films: Romeo and Juliet (Dir. Franco Zeffirelli), Hamlet (Dir. Kenneth Branagh),
Maqbool,Omkara(any one)
Shakespeare in Translations and Adaptations: HurroChunderGhose: BhanumatiChittobilas,
GirishGhosh: Macbeth, UtpalDutt: Chaitali Rater Swapno (any one)

Candidates are required to answer two essay-type questions, choosing one from each Unit (out of three
questions) carrying 24 marks in all (12 for Unit I and 12 for Unit II) and four short notes out of eight (four to
be set from each unit) carrying 4 marks each. Ten (10) marks are allotted to internal assessment test.

John Drakakis, ed. Alternative Shakespeares, 1985.

Jean Wilson. The Archaeology of Shakespeare, 1995.

AniaLoomba. Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism, 2002.

Amitava Roy, Hemlat: The Prince of Garanhata, 2012.

Paper 105: Classical Literature and Criticism (European and Indian)

The classical European literature and critical thought course reminds students of the
ideological and aesthetic assumptions of British literature and situates such writing within and
between European linguistic/cultural traditions.
The course also exposes students to Indic aesthetic traditions, and enables them to appreciate
cross-cultural aesthetics. The inclusion of Indic aesthetic texts takes into account the
culturally hybrid space within which English operates in India.

Unit I (Any three European and any one Indian text)

Plato: The Republic (Books III & X), Aristotle: The Poetics, Horace: ArsPoetica, Longinus:
Onthe Sublime, Rasa-Siddhantawith special reference to Bharatmuni’s “On Natya and
Rasa:Aesthetic of Dramatic Experience”, Dhavni-siddhanta with special reference to
Anandavardhana’s , “Dhavni: Structure and Meaning”, Vakrokti-Siddhanta with special
reference to Kunatak’s “Language of Poetry and Metaphor”

Unit II (Any three)

Homer: The Iliad (Selections), Virgil: The Aenied (Selections), Aeschylus: Agamemnon,
Sophocles: King Oedipus, Euripides: Medea, Plautus: The Ghost, Aristophanes: The Frogs

Candidates are required to answer two essay-type questions, choosing one from each Unit (out of three questions)
carrying 24 marks in all (12 for Unit I and 12 for Unit II) and four short notes out of eight (four to be set from each
unit) carrying 4 marks each. Ten (10) marks are allotted to internal assessment test.

Recommended Reading:
Penelope Murray & T.S. Dorch (trans). Classical Literary Criticism. 2000.
ManomohanGhosh (trans). The Natyasastra: A Treatise on Hindu Dramaturgy and Histrionics.
1959.
8

Semseter II

Paper 201 & 202: Eighteenth Century English Literature I and II

The Eighteenth century course (I and II) exposes students to the coming of Enlightenment modernity,
print cultures, Romantic sensibilities, and the emergence of new genres (and modes) such as the
novel, the periodical essay, gothic narratives, children’s writing; sentimental literature, travel
narratives, life narratives and more. These emergent genres operating within the oral-literate
dynamic; engaging with technological innovations and cross-cultural concerns (as a result of imperial
expansions) now demand newer and more complex modes of reading-response. The course hopes to
sensitize students to the same.

Paper 201: Eighteenth Century English Literature I

Unit I (Any three)
AphraBehn: Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders/Robinson Crusoe (HL)/Roxana, The Fortunate
Mistress, Eliza Haywood: Fantomina, or Love in a Maze, Fanny Burney: Evelina: Or the History of
a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World, Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels, Lawrence Sterne:
TristramShandy, Henry Fielding: Tom Jones/Joseph Andrews

Unit II (One play and two prose work)

Dr. Samuel Johnson: Rambler: (No. 134. 1751), Joseph Addison: Spectator (Selections), James
Boswell: Life of Samuel Johnson(Selections), John Dryden: Translation of Plutarch’s Lives,
Alexander Pope: Translation of Homer’s Iliad, John Dryden: Aurangzebe, Richard Steele: The
Conscious Lovers, Richard Brinsley Sheridan: The School for Scandal, William Goldsmith: She
Stoops to Conquer , William Hogarth. The Rake’s Progress.

Candidates are required to answer two essay-type questions, choosing one from each Unit (out of three questions)
carrying 24 marks in all (12 for Unit I and 12 for Unit II) and four short-answer-type questions out of eight (four to
be set from each unit) carrying 4 marks each. Ten (10) marks are allotted to internal assessment test.

Paper 202: Eighteenth Century English Literature II

Unit I (Any three)

Mary Shelley: Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus, Horace Walpole. The Castle of Otranto:
A Gothic Story, M.G. Lewis: The Monk: A Romance, Samuel Richardson: Pamela or Virtue
Rewarded, Maria Edgeworth: Castle Rackrent, Walter Scott: Ivanhoe/Rob Roy/Waverly, Jane
Austen: Northanger Abbey /Mansfield Park/Sense and Sensibility

Unit II: (Any three)

John Dryden: Macflecknoe; Alexander Pope: Dunciad/An Essay on Man Epistle One; William
Cowper. The Task (Selections);The Diverting History of John Gilpin (Selections); William Thomson:
Seasons (Selections); William Collins: “Ode on the Death of Mr. Thomson”, “Ode Written in
the Beginning of the Year 1746”; Thomas Gray: “Elegy written in a Country Churchyard”,“Ode on
the Death of a Favourite Cat”; Felicia Hemans: Casabianca, The Better Land; William Blake: Songs
of Innocence/Songs of Experience (Selections)
9

Candidates are required to answer two essay-type questions, choosing one from each Unit (out of three questions)
carrying 24 marks in all (12 for Unit I and 12 for Unit II), one annotation passage out of three (to be set from Unit
II) carrying 6 marks and two short-answer-type questions out of six (three to be set from each unit) carrying 5 marks
each. Ten (10) marks are allotted to internal assessment test.

Paper 203 & 204: Nineteenth Century English Literature I & II

The nineteenth century literature course (I and II) focuses on the crystallization of British cultural
supremacy in the known world. It engages students with ‘Victoriana’ that is cultural assumptions of
the period of Queen Victoria’s rule. It includes literary texts that engage with concerns as varied as
industrial conflict, urbanization, crime, detection and horror, life-writing, scientific and technological
speculation, women’s issues, children’s issues, education experiments, spiritual and paranormal
research, fantasy and nonsense. The course gives the students a feel of the exciting experiments in
the field of literature.

Paper 203: Nineteenth Century English Literature I

Unit I (Two novels and two poets)

Charlotte Bronte: Villette/Jane Eyre, Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights, Charles Dickens: Bleak
House/Great Expectations, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell: North and South/Mary Barton, George
Eliot: Middlemarch/Mill on the Floss, William Makepeace Thackeray: Vanity Fair/The History of
Henry Esmond

William Wordsworth: The Prelude (Selections), Samuel T. Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, Lord Byron: Don Juan (Canto I-IV), Percy Bysshe Shelley: Prometheus Unbound, John
Keats: “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “Ode to Psyche”, “Ode on Melancholy”

Unit II (Any one novel and two prose writers)

Lewis Caroll: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass, Arthur Conan Doyle:
The Hound of Baskervilles/The Sign of Four, Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone, George du Maurier:
Trilby, W. Rider Haggard: Allan Quatermain/ King Solomon’s Mines

Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France, Thomas Paine: The Rights of
Man(selections), Mary Wollstonecraft: Vindication of the Rights of Woman, William Godwin: An
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Thomas Malthus: An Essay on the Principle of Population ,
Percy Bysshe Shelley: “England in 1819”, Benjamin Disraeli: Sybil, or The Two Nations
10

Candidates are required to answer two essay-type questions, choosing one from each Unit (out of four questions)
carrying 24 marks in all (12 for Unit I and 12 for Unit II) and one annotation passage out of three passages (from
Unit I) carrying 6 marks and two short-answer-type questions out of six (three to be set from each unit) carrying 5
marks each. Ten (10) marks are allotted to internal assessment test.

Paper 204: Nineteenth Century English Literature II

Unit I (Any one novel and two poets):

George Gissing: New Grub Street/The Unclassed, Anthony Trollope: Barchester Towers/The Way we
live now, Thomas Hardy: Jude the Obscure/ Tess of the d’Urbervilles ,Samuel Butler:
Erewhon/Ernest Pontifex or The Way of All Flesh

Lord Alfred Tennyson: In Memoriam/ The Lady of Shallot; Robert Browning: “Andrea Del Sarto”,
“Fra Lippo Lippi”; Christina Georgina Rossetti: Goblin Market and Other Poems (two from this
book); Thomas Hardy: “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’, “Between us Now”; John Henry
Newman: Apologia pro Vita Sua; Margaret Oliphant: The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant; John
Stuart Mill: Autobiography

Unit II (Any one novel and two prose writers):

John Ruskin. King of the Golden River, Charles Kingsley: The Water Babies: A Fairy Tale for a
Land Baby, H.G. Wells: The Invisible Man/ Time Machine, Jules Verne: Twenty Thousand Leagues
under the Sea/ Around the World in Eighty Days (translation from original French), Arthur Conan
Doyle: The Lost World, Edwin Arnold: The Light of Asia (Translation, life of Gautama Buddha) /The
Song Celestial (Translation of Bhagwat Gita)

Matthew Arnold: Culture and Anarchy (selections), Thomas Carlyle: Chartism, “The Sign of
Times”, Walter Pater: The Renaissance, John Ruskin: Unto this Last/ Stones of Venice, Charles
Darwin: On the Origin of Species(1859)/The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex,
Sigmund Freud: Unheimlich(Tr. Uncanny)

The Victorian Web

Martin Priestman. Cambridge Companion to Crime
Mathew Kaiser. Crime and Horror in Victorian Literature and Culture.Vols I and II
Jack Zipes. The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World
Jack Zipes. Why Fairy Tales Stick: The Evolution and Relevance of a Genre.
Phillipe Aries. Centuries of Childhood (in English Translation)
ShibajiBandopadhay. Gopal/RakhalDwandhosamas(Bengali)
Simon Denith. Epic and Empire

205: Literary Criticism: Renaissance to Modern

The course introduces students to critical theory, the ideological assumptions that underpin and shape
literature. Tracing aesthetic thought from Sidney to I.A. Richards the course prepares students to
think of literary texts in terms of structures.

Unit I (Any three)

Philip Sidney:An Apology for Poetry, John Dryden: Essay on Dramatic Poesie (Selections),
Alexander Pope: An Essay on Criticism, Joseph Addison: The Pleasures of Imagination Samuel
Johnson: From Preface to the Plays of Shakespeare

Unit II (Any three)

William Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads, S. T. Coleridge: BiographiaLiteraria(xiii, xiv,

xviii), Matthew Arnold: “Function of Criticism at the Present Time”, T.S. Eliot: “Tradition and
the Individual Talent”, F.R. Leavis: “Reality and Sincerity”, I. A. Richards: “Metaphor”

Candidates are required to answer two essay-type questions, choosing one from each Unit (out of three questions)
carrying 24 marks in all (12 for Unit I and 12 for Unit II) and four short-answer-type questions out of eight (four to
be set from each unit) carrying 4 marks each. Ten (10) marks are allotted to internal assessment test.

Recommended Reading:

J.H.W. Atkins. Literary Criticism in Antiquity (2 vols.)

Wimsatt and Brooks.Literary Criticism: A Short History
Rene Wellek. A History of Modern Criticism (Vols. 7 & 8)
George Saintsbury. A History of English Criticism
12

Semester III

Paper 301: Modern English Literature till 1950

The first few decades of the twentieth century witnessed two world wars that changed
geographical boundaries, cultural sensibility, aesthetic and literary values. Several literary and
aesthetic movements, such as Imagism, Dadaism, Futurism, Vorticism, articulated the
intellectual impulses and responses to the upheavals of the times. This course offers to inculcate
in the students an awareness and appreciation of the unique nature of literary and aesthetic
modernism.

Unit I (Any two playwrights and two poets)

G. B. Shaw: Man and Superman/Pygmalion, Sean O’Casey: Juno and the Paycock, W. B.
Yeats : Purgatory, T.S. Eliot: Murder in the Cathedral/Family Reunion, John Osborne: Look
Back inAnger, Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot
W. B. Yeats : ‘Easter 1916’, ‘Leda and the Swan, ‘Among the School Children’; T. S.
Eliot: ‘The Waste Land’/ ‘Four Quartets’; Ezra Pound: ‘In a Station of the Metro’; Wilfred
Owen: ‘Spring Offensive’, ‘Arms and the Boy’; Douglas: ‘Cairo Jig’, ‘How to Kill’; Dylan
Thomas: ‘And Death Shall Have No Dominion’; Stephen Spender: ‘A Childhood’, ‘I Think
Continually’

Unit II (Any three)

Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway/ To the Lighthouse, D. H. Lawrence: Rainbow/Women in
Love, E. M. Forster: A Passage to India/Howard’s End, Joseph Conrad: Heart of
Darkness/ Lord Jim, James Joyce: The Dubliners/Ulysses

Recommended Reading:
Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930. Malcolm Bradbury and
JamesMcFarlane, Penguin,1991.
Modernism 1910-1945: Images to Apocalypse. Jane Goldman.Palgrave,2004. Axel’s
Castle: A Study in the Imaginative literature of 1870-1930. Scribner,1931.
Modernism/Postmodernism. Peter Brooker. Longman, 1992.
Modernisms: A Literary Guide. Peter Nicholls, Palgrave,1995.
The Politics of Modernism. Raymond Williams, Verso,1989.
The Great War and the Modern Memory. Paul Fussell, OUP,1975.
A Genealogy of Modernism: A Survey of English Literary Doctrine 1908-1922.
M.Levenson,Cambridge UP,1984.
13

Paper 302: Post-1950s English Literature

This course proposes to study the Post 1950s English literature in the context of social,
political and historical events that contributed to the formation of new cultural trends in
England in the post second world war era.

Unit I (Any two plays & two poets)

Harold Pinter: The Birthday Party / The Homecoming; Arnold Wesker: The Merchant /
Roots; Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead / Travesties; Caryl Churchill:
Top Girls
/ Cloud Nine; Philip Larkin: ‘Ambulances’, ‘Church Going’; Ted Hughes: ‘Crow’s Fall’,
‘Pike’; Seamus Heaney: ‘Death of a Naturalist’, ‘Exposure’; Thom Gunn: ‘A Map of the City’,
‘Street Song’

Unit II (Any three)

Kingsley Amis: Lucky Jim / The Old Devils,JohnFowles: The French Lieutenant’s Woman /
AMaggot, Martin Amis: Money / London Fields, Doris Lessing: The Grass is Singing / The Golden
Notebook, Anthony Burgess: Time for a Tiger / One Hand Clapping; Margaret Drabble: The Gates
of Ivory / The Seven Sisters; Iris Murdoch: Jackson’s Dilemma /The Unicorn

Recommended Reading:
Simon Armitage& Robert Crawford, eds. The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and
Irelandsince 1945, 1998.
C.W.E. Bigsby. Contemporary English Drama, 1981.
B. Morrison. The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction in the 1950s, 1980.
Alan Sinfield. Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britian, 1989.
John Russell Taylor. Anger and After. 1962.
P. Waugh. Harvest of the Sixties: English Literature and its Background 1960-1990, 1995.
R. Welch. The Abbey Theatre 1899-1999, 1999.
Laura Marcus & Peter Nicholls, eds. The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century
EnglishLiterature. 2004.
James Acheson &RomanaHuk.Contemporary British Poetry: Essays in Theory and Criticism.
1996.
A. Gasiorek. Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After. 1995.
R. M. George. The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction.
Cambridge University Press,1996.
Halio, Jay, ed. British Novelists Since 1960. 1983.
14

Paper 303 & 304: Literary Theory

These courses aim at orienting the students in the history and evolution of literary theory in the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The students will be equipped with insights from different
theories which will enable them to read texts critically. Excerpts from a few seminal theoretical
texts are prescribed to encourage the students to read the complete texts in original and to make
them aware of contemporary critical discourses.

Paper 303: Literary Theory and Contemporary Thoughts I

Unit I
New Criticism, Russian Formalism, Dialogic Criticism, Psychoanalytic Criticism and Archetypal
Criticism

Unit II
Structuralism, Deconstruction, Reader-Response Criticism, Marxist Criticism, Feminisms and
Gender Studies

Essays/Chapters for Detailed Studies (Any four/three):

Althusser: “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, Frye: Anatomy of Criticism
(Selections), Derrida: “Structure, Sign and Play”, Bakhtin: Rabelais and His World
(Selections), Cixous: “Sortis”, Barthes: “Death of the Author”

Candidates are required to answer two essay- type questions, choosing one from each Unit (out of three questions)
carrying 24 marks in all (12 for Unit I and 12 for Unit II) and four short-answer-type questions (out of eight to be set
from the texts prescribed for detailed studies) carrying 4 marks each. Ten (10) marks are allotted to internal
assessment test.

Paper 304: Literary Theory and Contemporary Thoughts II

Unit I
New Historicism, Postmodernism, Postcolonialism, Culture Studies and Narratology
Unit II
Nationalism, Subaltern Studies, Race and Caste Studies, Ethnicity, Diaspora Theories,
Ecocriticism

Essays/Chapters for Detail Studies (Any four/three):

Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (Selections), Edward Said: Orientalism (Selections),
Greenblatt : “Invisible Bullets”, Lyotard : The Postmodern Condition (Selections), Ashis Nandy :
“Nationalism : Genuine and Spurious”, Partha Chatterjee: “More on Modes of Power
15

andPeasantry”, Stuart Hall: “New Ethnicities”, Tololyan: “Diaspora Studies: Past, Present and
Promise”, Cheryl Glotfelty: “Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis”,
Rabindranath Tagore: “Nationalism in India”, B. R. Ambedkar: “The Annihilation of Caste”
(edited, introduced Arundhati Roy) , Gandhi: Hind Swaraj(translated, edited by Tridip
Shurhud, Selections)

Candidates are required to answer two essay- type questions, choosing one from each Unit (out of three questions)
carrying 24 marks in all (12 for Unit I and 12 for Unit II) and four short-answer-type questions (out of eight to be set
from the texts prescribed for detailed studies) carrying 4 marks each. Ten (10) marks are allotted to internal
assessment test.

305.i: Popular Culture

The study of literature, in contemporary times, can only be meaningful, with reference to popular
cultural forms, such as films, advertisement, bestsellers, music. The course intends to inculcate
awareness among the students about the interrelation with and relevance of popular culture in
literary and aesthetic discursive practices.

Unit I
Popular Culture: Politics of Representation; Consumerism and Culture; Technology: The
Position of the Individual; Cultural Theories: Contemporary Thoughts; Subculture: Conformity
and Resistance

Unit II

Section A (Any two)

Amatory fictions - Eliza Haywood: Love in Excess, Aphra Behn: Unfortunate Bride
Crime fictions - Wilkie Collins: The Moonstone, Arthur Conan Doyle: A Study in Scarlet,
“A Scandal in Bohemia”, Edgar Allan Poe: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, “The
Purloined Letter”, Agatha Christie: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
16

Section B (Any two)

Chick Lit - Sophie Kinsella: Mini Shopaholic, Rajashree: Trust Me

Graphic / Comic novels - Joseph Heller: Catch 22, David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest, Chetan
Bhagat: Five Point Someone, Gene Luen Yang: American Born Chinese, Art Spiegelman: Maus
Popular songs - Bob Dylan songs: “Blowing in the Wind”, “Forever Young”, Beatles: “Love
Me Do”, “Come Together”, Mohiner Ghoraguli: “Ghare Pherar Gaan”, “Bheshe Ashe Kolkata”

Popular Hollywood films: Spider Man, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, The Lord of
the Rings

Candidates are required to answer two essay-type questions, choosing one from each Unit (out of four questions)
carrying 24 marks in all ( 12 for Unit I and 12 for Unit II) and four short -answer-type questions out of eight (four to
be set from each unit) carrying 4 marks each. Ten (10) marks are allotted to internal assessment test.

Recommended Reading:
Theodor Adorno. The Culture Industry. 1991.
A. A. Berger, Popular Culture Genres. 1976.
Ian Chambers.Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience.
1986. Martin Conboy. The Press and the Popular Culture. 2002.
J. Hartley Popular Reality. 1996.
Joke Hermes. Re-reading Popular Culture. 2005.
D. Kellner Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics between the Modern
andthe Postmodern. 1995.
L. Lewis. The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media. 1992.
T. Miller Technologies of Truth: Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media. 1998.
J. Radway. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature.
1984. J. Storey. An Introduction to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. 1997.
J. Street. Politics and Popular Culture. 1997.
Y. Tasker. Working Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Popular Cinema. 1998.
B. Waites, T. Bennett & G. Martin (eds.). Popular Culture: Past and Present. 1982.
L. Zoonen (ed.) Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge.
Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004.
17

305. ii: Indian Literatures in English Translation

The course is translinguistic in nature. It focuses on Indic bhasa texts that have been translated
and recast in English, and have thereby assumed a new avatar. The course is one more example
of this new syllabus’s attempts to widen its horizons; recognize cultural interanimations and
cross fertilization between English and the bhasas. It explores that third space where literary
creations between languages, and cultures are produced. Again, no recommended reading list is
provided as those suggested in the Indian English course and the Translation Studies course
should suffice.

Unit I (Any three)

Bankim Chandra Chattopadhaya: Anandamath; Rabindranath Tagore: Gora; Fakir Mohan
Senapati: Six Acres and a Third; Premchand: Godan; U.R. Anantha Murthy: Samskara;
Ashapurna Devi: Pratham Pratishruti; Mahashweta Devi: Mother of 1084; Sunil Gangopadhyay:
The First Light; Saadat Hasan Manto: “Toba Tek Singh”, “The Return”, “Colder than Ice”; Ismat
Chughtai: The Quilt and Other Stories (Selections)

Unit II: (Two plays and two poets)

Vijay Tendulkar: Kanyadaan, Girish Karnad: Hayavadhana (Self translation) ;
BadalSircar: Ebam Indrajit, Manoranjan Das: The Wild Harvest
Mirza Ghalib: Complete Mirza Ghalib Shairi Collection in English (Selections); K. Ayyappa
Paniker: ‘The Itch’, “Passage to America”; K. Satchidanandan: “The Mad”, “Stammer”;
KaaNaaSubramanyam: ‘Situation,’ ‘Temple Danceuse’ (From Signatures: One Hundred Indian
Poets, ed. K.Sachitanandan), Nirendranath Chakraborty: The Naked King and Other Poems (Tr.
Sujit Mukherjee, Selections), Shakti Chattopadhyay: Poems of a Rebel (Tr. Pinaki Poddar,
Selections) Sitakanta Mahapatra: “The Election” , “The Ruined Temple”; Jagannath Prasad
Das: ‘The Corpse’ and “My World

Semester IV

Paper 401: Major Elective (Any one of the following options)

401.i: Indian English Literature

The course introduces students to a body of literature that has now assumed canonicity, and
that perhaps most aptly exemplifies the hybrid nature of the operations of English in India
today. Coming into existence with the introduction of English as the medium of instruction in
India, pace the Anglicist victory in the great Indian education debate, Indian English is
nowacknowledged as a distinct language with a distinct tradition of literature. The course
charts the growth, development and new directions of this vibrant body of literature.

Unit I (Any two plays and three poets)

Nissim Ezekiel: “Hymns in Darkness”, “A Morning Walk”; A. K. Ramanujan: “One More After
Reading Homer”, “Elements of Composition”; JayantaMahapatra: “Bare Face”, “Dawn at Puri”;
Shiv K. Kumar: “Trapfalls in the Sky”, “Pilgrimage”; Eunice De Souza: “The Road,” “Outside
Jaisalmir”, Ranjit Hoskote: “Ghalib in the Winter of the Great Revolt,” “Colours for a
Landscape Held Captive”
Asif Currimbhoy: Inquilab, Mahesh Dattani: Dance Like a Man/ On a Muggy Night in Mumbai,
ManjulaPadmanabhan: Lights Out/ Harvest

Unit II (Any three)

Mulk Raj Anand: Coolie, R. K. Narayan: The Man-Eater of Malgudi, Raja Rao:
Kanthapura/Serpent and the Rope, Anita Desai: Cry, the Peacock/Clear Light of Day, Amitav
Ghosh: Calcutta Chromosomes/The Glass Palace; Shashi Deshpande: The Country of Deceit,
Vikram Seth: The Golden Gate

Recommended Reading:
C.D. Narasimhaiah. The Swan and the Eagle
19

William Walsh. Commonwealth Literature.

Sisir Kumar Das. A History of Indian Literature
M.K. Naik. A History of Indian English Literature
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, ed. An Illustrated History of Indian Literatures in English.
Harish Trivedi. Colonial Transactions
Meenkshi Mukherjee. Realism and Reality
---.Twice Born Fiction
Priya Joshi. In Another World
20

401.ii: American Literature

American literature offers a diversity that is reflective of its cultural ethos. The texts have
been selected with the objective to make the students aware of the nation’s history, politics,
and culture which shapes its literature. The course traces the historical and aesthetic evolution
of American Literature.

Unit I (Any two plays and three poets)

Arthur Miller: The Crucible, Tennesse Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire, Eugene O’ Neill:
Desire under the Elms
Robert Frost: Walt Whitman: ‘Song of Myself’, ‘I Sing of Body Electric’; Emily Dickinson:
‘Because I Could Not Stop for Death’, ‘I Heard A Fly Buzz’; Sylvia Plath: ‘Daddy’, ‘Lady
Lazarus’; Allen Ginsberg: ‘Howl’; Langston Hughes: ‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’, “As I
grew Older”

Unit II (Any three)

Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, Melville: Moby Dick, Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn,
Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath, Morrison: Beloved, Hemingway: The Old Man and the Sea,
Alice Walker: The Color Purple

Recommended Reading:
Cambridge History of American Literature.CUP.
From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature. Penguin,
1991. Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel. Philip Fisher.
OUP,1987.American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London. Donald Pizer.
CUP,1995.
The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro American Literary Criticism. Henry Louis Gates
Jr.OUP,1989.
The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Nina Baym. Norton,
2007.A History of American Literature. Richard Gray. Blackwell,2004.
Black Atlantic. Paul Giroy. Harvard UP,1992.
21

401.iii: Australian Literature

This course proposes to study Australian literature (both white and Aboriginal) by situating it in
a politico-historical context. It will also help the students understand how and why Australian
literature has emerged as a significant component of postcolonial literatures.

Unit I(Any two poets and two novelists)

Henry Lawson: ‘Middleton’s Rouseabout’, ‘The Song of Old Joe Swallow’; Kenneth Slessor:
‘Sensuality’, ‘Beach Burial’; A. D. Hope: ‘Australia’, ‘Faustus’; Judith Wright: ‘The Company
of Lovers’, ‘Our Love is so Natural’; Peter Porter: ‘River Run’, ‘River Quatrains’; Les Murray:
‘A New England Farm, August 1914’, ‘The Wilderness’
Patrick White: Voss, Peter Carey: True Adventures of the Kelly Gang, David Malouf:
AnImaginary Life, Peter Goldsworthy: Three Dog Night, David Williamson: Don’s
Party

Unit II(Any two poets and two authors)

Oodgeroo: ‘We Are Going’, ‘The Dawn is at Hand’; Jack Davis: ‘The First-born’, ‘A
Conversation Between Two Worms in a Cemetery’; Kevin Gilbert: ‘Shame’, “On Our Black
‘Radicals’ in Government & Semi-Government Jobs”, Kerry-Reed Gilbert: ‘My Life, Black
Life’, ‘My Totem’; Anita Heiss: ‘Apologies’, ‘My Other’

Robert J. Merritt: The Cake Man, Jack Davis: No Sugar

Oodgeroo: Selections from Stradbroke Dreamtime
Sally Morgan: My Place, Jackie Huggins: Auntie Rita, Anita Heiss: Am I Black Enough for
You?
Alexis Wright: Carpentaria
Candidates are required to answer two essay-type questions, choosing one from each Unit (out of four questions)
carrying 24 marks in all (12 for Unit I and 12 for Unit II) and one annotation passage out of three passages (from
Unit I & II) carrying 6 marks and two short-answer-type questions out of six (three to be set from each unit) carrying
5 marks each. Ten (10) marks are allotted to internal assessment test.

Recommended Reading:
Clark, Manning. A Short History of Australia, 1963.
Lock, Fred and Alan Lawson. Australian Literature: A Reference Guide,
1976. Goodwin, Ken. A History of Australian Literature, 1986.
Bennett, Bruce, and Jennifer Strauss, eds. The Oxford Literary History of Australia,
1998.Hergenhan, Laurie, gen. ed. The Penguin New Literary History of Australia, 1988.
Page, Geoff. A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Australian Poetry,
1995.
Clancy, Laurie. A Reader’s Guide to Australian Fiction, 1992.
Fitzpatrick, Peter. After the Doll: Australian Drama since 1955, 1979.
Reynolds, Henry. The Other Side of the Frontier: An Interpretation of the
Aboriginal Response to the Invasion and Settlement of Australia, 1981.
Broome, Richard. Aboriginal Australians: Black Response to White Dominance
22

1788-1980, 1982.
Carter, David. Dispossession, Dreams &Diversity: Issues in Australian Studies, 2006.
Davis and Bob Hodge, eds. Aboriginal Writing Today, 1985.
Hodge, Bob and Vijay Mishra.Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the
Postcolonial Mind, 1991.
Muecke, Stephen. Textual Spaces: Aboriginality and Cultural Studies, 1992.
Heiss, Anita & Peter Minter, eds. Anthology of Australian Aboriginal Literature, 2008.

402: Major Elective (Any one of the following options)

402.i: Translation Studies

This course introduces students to the emergent discipline of Translation Studies and charts the
development of perceptions regarding the translation act (and the translator) as slavish, passive,
mechanical and inferior to translation as active intervention and dynamic recasting. The course
is practical in nature in that it demands students translate a given text employing the theories
they have imbibed.

Unit I
Translation: Definitions, Historiography: i) Translation studies in the Anglo-American Context :
a) The Augustans:-Dryden, Pope; b) The Victorians-Edwin Arnold/Mathew Arnold; c) Modern,
Contemporary; ii)Translation in the colonial Indian context: a)Translating Epics b) Translating
novels

Unit II
Translation Theories: Linguistic School-Equivalence, machine Translation, Cultural translation-
Translation as afterlife of a text, The role of the Translator-invisibility to creative intervention,
Translation and Postcolonialism, Translation and Gender, The Polysystemic school, Translation
and Cannibalism, Translation and Comparative Literature, Translation as Nation Building

Candidates are required to answer two essay- type questions, choosing one from each Unit (out of three questions)
carrying 24 marks in all (12 for Unit I and 12 for Unit II) and four short-answer-type questions out of eight (four to
be set from each unit) carrying 4 marks each. Ten (10) marks are allotted to internal assessment test.

Recommended Reading:

Susan Bassnett. Translation Studies

Bassnett and Henri Lefevre, eds. Translation; History; Culture
Lawrence Venuti.Invisibility of the Translator.
23

Mary-Snell Hornby. Translation Studies: An integrated approach

Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak. “The Politics of Translation” in Lawrence Venuti eds. Translation
StudiesReader.
TejswiniNiranjana. Siting Translation
GideonToury.Descriptive Translation Studies
Barbara Godard. InBasnett and Lefevre eds. Constructing Cultures: Essays on
LiteraryTranslation
Sherry Simon. Gender in Translation.
Mona Baker. In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation
Mona Baker. eds.Routledge Enclyclopedia of Translation
Studies
Sukanta Chaudhuri.Translation and Understanding.
Translation Today (A journal of CIIL)

402.ii: Literature and Films

This course intends to explore the interface of the creative agencies of film and literature.
Literature opens up to diverse possibilities of adaptation and interpretation. The transformation
of literary texts into film texts promises challenging and interesting discursive paradigms. The
course includes canonical (literary and filmic) as well as popular texts.

Unit I
Film Theories: Word-Image liaison, Meaning of Signs, Theories of Adaptation and
Appropriation, Realist and Formalist Approaches: Politics of Representations, Critical
Inputs after 1968, Birth of the Postcolonial

Unit II (Any three)

Emma, Frankenstein(Kenneth Branagh); PatherPanchali (Ray); Charulata (Ray), Throne of
Blood (Kurosowa), Great Expectations(David Lean), Gone with the Wind; Meghe Dhaka
Tara,Gupi Gayen Bagha Bayen; Umrao Jaan; Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, The
Kite Runner, Brick Lane, Midnight’s Children, Devdas (Sanjay Leela Bhansali)
Candidates are required to answer two essay-type questions, choosing one from each Unit (out of three
questions) carrying 24 marks in all (12 for Unit I and 12 for Unit II) and four short notes (out of eight) carrying 4
marks each. Ten (10) marks are allotted to internal assessment test.

Recommended Reading:
A Companion to Literature and Film. Ed. Robert Stam &Alessandea Raengo.Blackwell
Pub,2004.
Films as Literature, Literature as Film: An Introduction to and Bibliography of
Film’s Relationship to Literature. Harris Ross, Greenwood, 1987.
24

Stories into Film. ed.William Kittredge and Steven Krauzer.Harper and Row, 1979.
Film and Literature: A Comparative Approach to Adaptation. Texas Tech University, 1988.
Film and Literature: An Introduction. Morris Beja. Longman,1979.
Film and Fiction: The Dynamics of Exchange. Yale University Press,1979.
Narrative in Fiction and Film: An Introduction. Jakob Lothe,OUP,2000.
Made into Movies: From Literature to Film. Stuart Y. McDougal. Holt, Rinehart
andWinston,1985.
25

402.iii: African Literature

This course will offer a broad view of the literary corpus produced by the different African
authors writing from the different geographical locations within the African continent. This
course proposes to study African literature by situating it in a socio-cultural context. It will also
help the students understand how and why African literature has emerged as a significant
component of postcolonial literatures.

Unit I: (Any three novelists)

Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart / No Longer at Ease; NgugiwaThiong’o: Petals of Blood /
Wizard of the Crow; J. M. Coetzee: Disgrace / Waiting for the Barbarians; Olive Schreiner:
Story of an African Farm, Nadine Gordimer The Conservationist /Burger’s Daughter , Buchi
Emecheta: Joys of Motherhood, Chimamanda NgoziAdichie: Purple Hibiscus / Half of a Yellow
Sun

Unit II: (Any two playwrights, one poet and one short story writer)
Wole Soyinka: Death and the King’s Horseman / The Lion and the Jewel, Reza de Wet:
Crossing / Concealment, Athol Fugard: “Master Harold”…and the Boys / The Road to Mecca
Selected poems of Ben Okri: “An African Elegy”, Gabriel Okara: “The Call of the River
Nun”, Wole Soyinka: “Dedication” &Ama Ata Aido: “For Bessie Head”
Selected short stories of Chinua Achebe: “The Madman”, Nadine Gordimer: “Amnesty”, Steve
Chimombo: “The Rubbish Dump”, Ben Okri: “Converging City”

Candidates are required to answer two essay-type questions, choosing one from each Unit (out of three questions)
carrying 24 marks in all (12 for Unit I and 12 for Unit II) and one annotation passage out of three passages (from
Unit II) carrying 6 marks and two short-answer-type questions out of six (three to be set from each unit) carrying 5
marks each. Ten (10) marks are allotted to internal assessment test.

Recommended Reading:
AbiolaIrele. The African Experience in Literature and Ideology. 1990.
Y. Valentin Mudimbe. The Invention of Africa. 1988.
Wole Soyinka. Myth, Literature and the AfricanWorld. 1978.
Ato Quayson. Strategic Transformations in Nigerian Writing. 1997.
Abiola Irele& Simon Gikandi, eds. The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean
Literature. 2004.
Tejumola Olaniyan &Ato Quayson.African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory.
2007.
John Edward Philips, ed. Writing African History. 2005. Christopher
Heywood. A History of South African Literature. 2004.
Mala Pandurang. Post-Colonial African Fiction: The Crisis of Consciousness. 1997.
Bonnie Barthold. Black Time: Fiction of Africa, the Caribbean and the United States. 1981
Neil Lazarus.Resistance in Post-Colonial African Fiction. 1990.
Robert Fraser. West African Poetry: A Critical History. 1986.
BiodunJeyifo. Modern African Drama: Backgrounds and Criticism. 2002.
John Coteh-Morgan. Theatre and Drama in Francophone Africa: A Critical Introduction. 2006.
26

Paper 403: Major Elective (Any one of the following options)

403.i: Literature of South Asian Diaspora
This course will offer a broad view of the literary corpus produced by the South Asian
writers from the diasporic locations. It will help the students explore the issues specific to the
phenomenon of migration that figure in the representation of diasporic experience.

Unit-I (History of South Asian Diaspora Movements, Theories of Diaspora and two novelists)

History of South Asian Diaspora Movements, Theories of Diaspora

V.S. Naipual: A House for MrBiswas/Half A Life, Salman Rushdie: Haroun and the Sea of
Stories/Shame, Bharati Mukherjee: Jasmine/Desirable Daughters, JhumpaLahiri: The
Lowland/Selections from Interpreter of Maladies, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: Sister of My
Heart / One Amazing Thing, Kunal Basu: Racists/Selections from The Japanese Wife,Kiran
Desai: The Inheritance of Loss

Unit-II (Any two novelists and two poets)

Bapsi Sidhwa: Ice Candy Man/ Water: A Novel, M.G. Vasanji: The Gunny Sack/Amriika,
HanifKureishi: My Beautiful Launderette/The Buddha of Suburbia, Monica Ali: Brick Lane/ In
theKitchen, Michael Ondaatje: The English Patient/The Cat’s Table, Romesh Gunesekera: Reef/
Heaven’s Edge, Kamila Shamsie :Kartography
Meena Alexander: “Art of Pariahs”, “Elegy for My Father”; Agha Shahid Ali: “The
Correspondent,” “After the August Wedding in Lahore, Pakistan,”; Uma Parameswaran: “This
Land Whereon I Stand”, from Kavya Bharati 17 (2005): 3-10); Imtiaz Dharkar: “Purdah 2,”
“These are the Times We Live in 1”

Candidates are required to answer two essay-type questions, choosing one from each Unit (out of four questions of
which at least one will be set from the history of South Asian diaspora movements/theories of diaspora) carrying 24
marks in all (12 for Unit I and 12 for Unit II) and four short-answer-type questions out of eight (four to be set from
each unit) carrying 4 marks each. Ten (10) marks are allotted to internal assessment test.

Recommended Reading:
Muhammad, Anwar. Between Cultures: Continuity and Change in the Lives of Young Asians,
1998.
Roger, Ballard, ed. DeshPardesh, 1994.
27

Avtar, Brah. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, 1996.

Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur, eds. Theorizing Diaspora, 2003.
Paul Gilroy. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, 1993.
Jasbir Jain, ed. Writers of the Indian Diaspora, 1998.
Jayaram, N., ed. The Indian Diaspora, 2004.
Waltraud Kokot, KhachigTölölyan and Carolin Alfonso, eds. Diaspora, Identity and
Religion:New Directions in Theory and Research, 2004.
Susan Koshy, and R. Radhakrishnan, eds. Transnational South Asians: The Making of a Neo-
Diaspora, 2008.
Sudesh Mishra. Diaspora Criticism, 2006.
Vijay Mishra. The Literature of the Indian Diaspora, 2007.
Makarand Paranjape, ed. In Diaspora; Theories, Histories, Texts, 2001.
Emmanuel S. Nelson, ed. Reworlding: The Literature of the Indian Diaspora,
1992. Uma, Parameswaran. Writing the Diaspora: Essays on Culture and Identity,
2007.
R. Radhakrishnan. Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location, 1996. Print.
Ajaya Kumar Sahoo and BrijMaharaj, eds. Sociology of Diaspora: A Reader, 2007.

403.ii: Folklore Studies

This course proposes to map the development of folkloristics as a subject and ground the
students into different theories of folklore. It also aims at studying folktales, fairytales, folk
music, folk dance, folk theatre, urban and cyber legends with a particular focus on Bengali lores,
songs and tales.

Unit I

Folkloristics: Evolution and Growth; History of Folklore Studies: Grimm Brothers, Kaarle
Krohne, Mary Alicia Owen, Stith Thompson, Vladimir Propp, Folklore scholars from the Prague
School

Psychoanalytic Approach to Folklore, Feminist Approach to Folklore, Monogenesis and

Polygenesis Theory, Finnish Method, Solar-Mythology Theory, Contextual Theory,
Functionalism Theory, Performance Theory

Field Methods and Studies:

Statement and Analysis of the Problem; Pre-field Preparation; Methods of Data Collection:
Interview method, Observation method, Questionnaires and Schedule, Indexing and
Classification, Audio-Visual methods; Processing and Digitization of material; Report Writing.
28

Unit II

Tales: folktale, fairytale, trickster tale, numbskull tale

Folk Poetry and Folk Songs: Composition, rhetoric, prosody, versification, tune, melody,
rhythm, harmony; Folk Epic
Proverb and Riddle; Folk and Colloquial Speech: slang, creolization, tongue-twister.
Urban Legends: Concept and meaning, revenant narratives, ghost-lore, coke-lore, KFC, chain
letters.
Computer, Cyber and Cellular Lore: Folklore of computers, blogs, face-books, riddle-joke
Folklore and its commodification, folklore and market forces, the mass consumption of folklore
Selected folktales, fairy tales and folk songs of Bengal: ThakumarJhuli, Rabindranath Tagore’s
Introduction to ThakumarJhuli, Kankabati(Tr. Nandini Bhattacharya), Selections from Dinesh
Chandra Sen’s The Folk Literature of Bengal, Banabibir Pala (eds Sujit Kr.Mondal), Baul songs,
Muslim marriage songs; Gajan songs, Bhadu and Tusu songs of Bankura and Purulia.

Recommended Reading:
Propp, V.J.Theory and History of Folklore,1984.
Propp, V.J.. Morphology of the Folktale, 1968.
B, Tolkein. The Dynamics of Folklore, 1996.
Claus, Peter J. and Frank J. Korom.Folkloristics and Indian Folklore,
1991.Dundes, Alan. Essays in Folkloristics, 1978.
- - . Interpreting Folklore, 1980.
Dorson, Richard M, ed. Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction, 1980. George,
Robert and Jones, Michel Owen. Folkloristics: An Introduction, 1994.
Handoo, J. 1989. Folklore: An Introduction. Mysore: CIIL.
- - -. Folklore in Modern India, 1998.
-- -. Theoretical Essay in Indian Folklore, 2000.
Dorson, R.M. ed. Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction, 1980.
Foley, John Miles. 1990. Traditional Oral Epic. California: University of California
Press. Hollis, Susan T. Feminist Theory and the study of Folklore, 1993.
Bartis, P. Folklife and Field Work: A layman’s Introduction to Field Techniques, 1980.
Jackson, B. Field Work, 1987.
Islam, Mazrul. Folklore, the Pulse of the People, 1985.
---. Theoretical Study of Folklore: Context, Discourse and History, 1998.
29

403.iii: Trauma and Literature

Human imagination seeks to represent the traumatic experiences individuals or members of a
community undergo in familial, societal or national spaces. A good corpus of literary works
which depict such traumatic experiences has already emerged. This course will try to understand
how creative works represent individual/community trauma and its effect on the human psyche.
It will also study the theoretical insights this interdisciplinary field has already developed.

Unit-I (Theories and any two texts)

Definitions; Psychology of trauma; Biopolitics; Partition narratives; Holocaust narratives
Sigmund Freud: “Mourning and Melancholia”, Kali Tal: Select Excerpts from Worlds of
Hurt:Reading the Literatures of Trauma ,Cathy Caruth : Select Excerpts from Unclaimed
Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History,GiorgioAgamben: Homo Sacer(Selections)/State of
Exception(Selections), Select Excerpts from Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive,
Lawrence Langer : Select Excerpts from The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination, Sontag,
Susan: Regarding the Pain of Others;UrvashiButalia: The Other Side of Silence: Voices fromthe
Partition of India; JasodharaBagchi: The Trauma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in India.
RituMenon: Borders and Boundaries (Selections); TapanBasu, ed. Translating Partition
(Selections)

Unit II (Any three)

Kenzaburo Oe: Hiroshima Notes, Philip Gourevitch: We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow
WeWill Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, Franz Kafka: “In the Penal
Colony”,JonathanSafranFoer: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Thomas Keneally:
Schindler’s Ark, Joy Kogawa: Obasan, TehminaAnam: The Golden Age, KhaledHossain: The
Kite Runner/ Thousand Splendid Sun, Shauna Singh Baldwin: What the Body Remembers ; Alok
Bhalla, ed. Selections from Stories about the Partition of India (3 vols, Selections); Joginder
Paul: Sleepwalkers, Jyotirmoyi Ganguli: Epar Ganga Opar Ganga

Candidates are required to answer two essay-type questions, choosing one from each Unit (out of four questions of
which at least one will be set from the theories of trauma) carrying 24 marks in all ( 12 for Unit I and 12 for Unit II)
and four short -answer-type questions out of eight (four to be set from each unit) carrying 4 marks each. Ten (10)
marks are allotted to internal assessment test.

Recommended Reading:

James E. Young. Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust : Narrative and the Consequences
of Interpretation. Bloomington : Indiana UP, 1988.
Marianne Hirsch and Irene Kacandes. Teaching the Representation of the Holocaust .
New York : MLA, 2004.
Anne Whitehead. Traumatic Fiction. Edinburgh : Edinburgh UP, 2004.
Jeffrey C. Alexander et al. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: U of California
P, 2004.
30

Judith Butler. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004.
Cathy Caruth, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.
Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln.9-11 in American Culture. Walnut Creek: AltaMira,
2003.
Ana Douglas and Thomas A. Vogler, eds.Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma. New
York: Routledge, 2003.
Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub.Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis,
and History. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Buelens Gert, Samuel Durrant and Robert Eaglestone, eds. The Future of Trauma Theory:
Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. London: Routledge, 2014.

Judith Greenberg, ed. Trauma at Home: After 9/11. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P. 2003.
Geoffrey Hartman. The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust. Bloomington:
Indiana UP, 1996.
Suzette Henke. Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women's Life Writing.
Gordonsville: Palgrave McMillan, 1998.
Carl Krokel. War Trauma and English Modernism: T.S: Eliot and D.H. Lawrence. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
EfraimSicher. The Holocaust Novel. New York and London: Routledge, 2005.

404: Major Elective (Any one of the following options)

404.i: Gender and Literature

This course sensitizes students to gender assumptions in literary texts and points to ways in
which such assumptions shape and produce literature. The course engages with ideologies such
as feminisms, masculinities, and transgenderism.

Unit I (Theories and any two texts)

Definitions, origins, transformation; Sexualities; Class, labour, family and gender; Religion
and Gender/Education and Gender; Femininities (Movements); Masculinity studies; Lesbian,
gay, transgender studies; Gender and language; Gender: Borders and boundaries (Gender in
nationalist, diasporic and other transnationalist discourses); Queer studies; Obscenity,
pornography, violence and gender
Simone De Beauvoir :The Second Sex (Selections), Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own
(Selections), Gayatri ChakravortySpivak: : “French Feminism in an International Frame”, Audre
Lorde : “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”, Michel Foucault: History
of Sexuality (Selections), Steven Marcus. The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality, Teresa de
Lauretis: “The Technology of Gender”, Eve Sedgewick: Between Men (Selections), Judith
Butler: Select Essays , Barbara Goddard: “Woman handling”, Lata Mani (select essays)
31

Unit II (Any three)

Therigatha (Selections), Songs of Mirabai (Selections), Rassaundari Devi: Amar Jiban; Rokeya
Sakhawat Hossain : Sultana’s Dream, Ashapurna Devi : First Promise, Tagore : GhareBaire/
Jogajog, Angela Carter : Bloody Chamber and other Stories, Margaret Atwood : The
Handmaid’s Tale, Saonli Mitra: Five Lords yet None thy Protector, Mallicka Sengupta:
Kathamanabi, Mahesh Dattani:Dance Like a Man, Shyam Selvadurai: Funny Boy, Alice
Walker: The Colour Purple, Iravati Karve:Yuganta; Urmila Pawar Aidan
Candidates are required to answer two essay-type questions, choosing one from each Unit (out of four questions of
which at least two will be set from theories) carrying 24 marks in all ( 12 for Unit I and 12 for Unit II) and four short
-answer-type questions out of eight (four to be set from each unit) carrying 4 marks each. Ten (10) marks are
allotted to internal assessment test.

Recommended Reading:
Teresa A. Meade and M. Hanks eds. A Companion to Gender History (Blackwell Companions to
History)
David Glover, Cora Kaplan eds. Gender. Routledge Critical Idioms.

Catherine Belsey, Jane Moor eds. The Feminist Reader: Essays in Gender and Politics
ofLiterary Criticism
Friedman, Marilyn. Autonomy, Gender, Politics. (Oxford University Press)

404.ii: Race and Caste Studies

The course introduces students to the categories of race and caste, to ways in which they are
produced through literature and how they in turn produce literature. The course is significant
in exposing students to concerns that shape contemporary realities.

Unit I (Theories and any three texts)

Origins and transformations; Empire and race: (South Asian and South African context); Race
and caste issues in India; Racism and anti-Semitism: (European context); Race and Americas
(Slavery); Gender, difference and identity, Ethnicity, immigration and Race: Changing
boundaries and spaces, Race/Caste/ethnicity stereotypes, Beauty: New Media representations

Arthur C. Gobineau: An Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (Tr. From French); Darwin:
The Origin of Species (Selections);The History of Phrenology (The Victorian Web); Claude
Levi Strauss: Race and History (Tr. From French); Ilbert Bill Papers; M.K. Gandhi:
32

Autobiography: My experiments with Truth (Tr.by Gandhi from original Gujarati) Romila
Thapar: The Aryans: Recasting Constructs; Peter Robb: Concept of Race in South Asia; B.R.
Ambedkar:“Annihilation of Caste”; Sarat Chandra Muktibodh: “What is Dalit Literature?”;
Sharan Kumar Limbale: “Towards Dalit Aesthetics”

Unit II (Any three)

Hanif Kureishi: The Buddha of Suburbia, Zadie Smith: White Teeth, Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso
Sea; Frederick Douglas/Harriet Jacobs
Rabindranath Tagore: Gora; Premchand: Thakur’s Well/Sadgati,
Namdeo Dhasal: Golpitha (Selections in translation)); Bama: Karukku, Sharan Kumar
Limbale: The Outcaste
Anne Frank’s Diary, Primo Levi: If This is a Man (tr. From Italian by Stuart Woolf),
Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man, Alice Walker: The Colour Purple, Maxine Hong Kingston:
Chinaman,
Nadine Gordimer: July’s People, J.M. Coetzee: Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace

Candidates are required to answer two essay-type questions, choosing one from each Unit (out of four questions of
which at least two will be set from theories) carrying 24 marks in all ( 12 for Unit I and 12 for Unit II) and four short
-answer-type questions out of eight (four to be set from each unit) carrying 4 marks each. Ten (10) marks are
allotted to internal assessment test.

Recommended Reading:

Reilly, Kaufmann and Bodino eds. Racism: A Global Reader.

Limbale. Sharan Kumar, Towards a Dalit Aesthetics.

404.iii: Environment & Literature

This course proposes to study the relationship between environment and literature from critical
and historical perspectives. It will orient the students in the theories of ecocriticism and
encourage them to close-read a few seminal texts of world literature with a particular focus on
Indian responses to environmental concerns.

Unit I (Theories and any two texts)

Ecocriticism and Ecopoetics, Pastoral Writing, Wilderness Writing, Environmentalism, Green

Studies, Deep Ecology, Eco-Marxism and Social Ecology, Ecofeminism, Deforestation and
Colonialism, Environment and Justice, Eco-tourism, Speciesism
Selections from Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring, Jonathan Bate’sThe Song of the Earth,
Lawrence Buell’s Writing for an Endangered World
33

Unit II (Any three texts)

William Shakespeare: As You Like It, William Wordsworth: The Prelude Book I/ Lucy poems,
Thomas Hardy :The Return of the Native, Peter Reading: Faunal
Nadine Gordimer: The Conservationist, Jamaica Kincaid: A Small Place, R.K. Narayan: A Tiger
for Malgudi, Amitav Ghosh: The Hungry Tide
Selections from Oodgeroo’s We Are Going, Mamang Dai’s River Poems and The Legends
of Pensam andTemsulaAo’s Songs that Tell and Songs that Try to Say

Recommended Reading:

Glotfelty, Cheryll, and Harold Fromm, eds. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in
Literary Ecology, 1996.
Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism, 2004.
Bate, Jonathan. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition, 1991.
Buell, Lawrence. Ecocriticism: Some Emerging Trends, 2011.
---. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American
Culture, 1995.
Gifford, Terry. Pastoral, 1999.
Grundmann, R. Marxism and Ecology, 1991.
Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution,
1980.
Midgley, Mary. Animals and Why They Matter: A Journey Around the Species Barrier, 1983.
Baker, Steve. Picturing the Beast: Animals, Identity and Representation, 1993.
Parsons, Howard L. Marx and Engels on Ecology, 1977.
Payne, Daniel. Voices in the Wilderness: American Nature Writing and Environmental
Politics, 1996.
Pepper, D. Eco-Socialism: From Deep Ecology to Social Justice, 1993.
Torrin, Ken, ed. The Ultimate Guide to Feminism Book 10: Ecofeminism, 2012.
Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 1993.
Roy, Arundhati. The Cost of Living, 1999.
Sessions, George, ed. Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century, 1995.
Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation: Towards an End to Man’s Inhumanity to Animals, 1975.
Soper, Kate. What Is Nature?, 1998.
Yearley, Stephen. Sociology, Environmentalism, Globalization: Reinventing the Globe, 1996.
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405: Project
Students must undertake one research project, the findings of which are to be submitted in
the form of a written term paper. The term paper shall be of 5000 words (approximately),
and should follow the MLA Style Sheet (as prescribed in MLA Handbook latest edition).
For social outreach component a report (in or about) 500 words) to be submitted separately
after conducting a field work/survey based on questionnaire
Marks Division: Term Paper: Written- 30marks (25 for content, 5 for format)
Social outreach: 10 marks
Viva-voce: 10 marks
Semester III 2016-2017 Session

(Sept. 2016 – Mid Feb. 2017)

Professor Bijay Kumar Das PhD,DLitt

Course offered The Theory of Deconstruction

Teaching Hours : 11

Lesson Plan

Reviewing the Critical Canon:

Sl.No.

1. Pioneers of Twentieth Century Literary

Criticism : T.S.Eliot, I.A.Richards,

F.R.Leavis 1 hour

2. New Criticism (American Formalism) 1 hour

3. Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude

Levi Straus : Pioneers of Linguistic

and Structural Criticism 1 hour

4. Introduction to Jacques Derrida 2 hours

5. Basic Tenets of Deconstruction : Attitude

to language and concept of writing 2 hours

6. Key Terms of Deconstruction :

Speech / Writing, Diffrance (Difference

and Deference) Erasure, Ecriture,

Aporia, Arche writing, Palimpsest,

Doctrine of Absence, Indeterminancy

of Meaning, Free Play of Signifiers, etc. 2 hours

7. Who Deconstructs the Text :

Writer or the Reader? Application of

Theory of Deconstruction to Literary Texts 2 hours

Reference Books :

Blamires, Harry. A History of Literary Criticism. Delhi : MacMillan, 1991 rpt 2001. Print.

Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction : Theory and Criticism after Structuralism. London : Routledge 1983.
Print.

Felperim, Howrad. Beyond Deconstruction : The Uses and Abuses of Literary Theory. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1990. Print.
Hawkes,Terence. Structuralism and Semiotics. New York: Routledge. 2003. Print.

Norris, Christopher. Derrida. London: Fantana, 1987. Print.

… Deconstruction : Theory and Practice. London: Methuen, 1982. Print.

Rayon, Michael. Literary Theory : A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 2002. Print.

Seldom, Raman, et al. A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory. Delhi: Peerson Education,
2006. Print.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Translator’s Preface to Derrida’s Of Gramatology. London: John Hopkins
University Press, 1974. Print.
Semester I 2016-2017 Session

(Sept. 2016 – Feb. 2017)

Professor Bijay Kumar Das PhD,DLitt

Course offered The Dhvani Theory.

Teaching Hours : 10

Lesson Plan

The Evolution of Indian Critical Canon.

Sl.No.

1. The Beginning of Indian Poetics 1 hour

2. Key Concepts of Indian Poetics :

Alamkara, Riti, Rasa, Dhvani and Vakroti 2 hours

3. Anandavardhana

Dhvani : Structure of Poetic Meaning 3 hours

4. Rasa-Dhvani theory and the Indian

Critical Practice 2 hours

5. Vakroti and Modes of Poetic Deviation 1 hour

6. What is a Dhvani Poem?

Application of Dhvani Theory to Poetry. 1 hour

Reference Books :
Anandavardhana. Dhvanyaloka. Trans. K.Krishnamoorthy, Delhi: Motilal Banarasidas, 1981. Print.

Chari, V.K., Sanskrit Criticism. Delhi : Motilal Banarasidas, 1993. Print.

Devy, G.N. Indian Literary Criticism. Hyderabad: Orient Longman Pvt. Ltd., 2002. Print.

Krishnamoorthy, K. Dhvanyalokaa and Its Critics. Mysore: Kavyala Publishers, 1968. Print.

Kushwaha, M.S. Indian Poetics and Western Thought. Lucknow: Argo Publishing House, 1988. Print.

Panda, Haladhar. University of Poetics. Bhubaneswar: Sayan Publication, 2014. Print.

Pathak, R.S. The Poetics of Encounter. Delhi: Ajanta Publication, 1998. Print.
The University of Burdwan
Department of English and Culture Studies

Course Description: Paper 301: Modern English Literature till 1950

Text: Heart of Darkness (1899), a novella written by Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)
Level: Postgraduate Course in English and Culture Studies (Third Semester)
Course Duration: September, 2016 to March, 2017
Text Facilitator: Professor Himadri Lahiri
Email: hlahiri@gmail.com

Course Description:

This course will be on an in-depth study of Joseph Conrad’s fiction Heart of Darkness. It will
initiate a discussion on the myriad aspects of the text and the historical background that
produced it. It will probe into the issue of how Conrad, a product of imperialism/colonialism,
represents European imperialism that penetrated into the ‘dark’ continent. The novel in fact
demonstrates the complex ideological ramifications of the European imperial project. Heart
of Darkness is also widely considered to be a precursor to British modernism. This course
will try to understand why it is considered to be so.

Thrust Area: With the above objectives in mind, the text will be examined from the
following perspectives:
1) History of the composition and publication of the text
2) Conrad’s life and time, and his memory of the involvement of his family in anti-
colonial activities
3) Conrad’s personal experience of travelling to Belgian Congo, the site of the novel’s
main action, and his brush with European colonialism
4) The corpus of Conrad’s other works (particularly, Lord Jim, Nostromo, Almayer’s
Folly and short stories like “The Lagoon”)
5) Cartography, travels and the colonial world which constitute the main thrust of many
of his novels and short stories
6) Effects of colonialism on human mind and spirit
7) Ideology of representation
8) Symbols and images in the prescribed text: their functional role
9) Modernist representational strategies employed in the novel
10) Conrad’s influence on later writers
During discussions other topics would surface. Students’ reflections on the text would be
discussed in the classroom.

Film adaptations of Conrad’s texts:

Apocalypse Now (1979) directed by Francis Ford Coppola (adapted from Heart of Darkness);
Lord Jim (1965) directed by Richard Brooks

Course Outcome:
1. Familiarity with Conrad’s creative oeuvre as a whole and Heart of Darkness in
particular
2. Exploration of the traveller’s perspectives that lend Conrad’s texts their dynamic
qualities
3. Familiarity with the expansionist ideology of imperialism and colonialism
4. Exploration of dualism that often accompanies expansionist ideology
5. Familiarity with Conrad’s thematic and stylistic aspects
6. Understanding of how women fared in men’s world
7. Understanding of how pseudo-scientific experiments and ideologies were employed
to legitimatise power games.
8. Exploration of modernist techniques in Heart of Darkness and how the text emerges
as an iconic one.

Modes of Evaluation:
1. End semester examination
2. Internal examination
3. Continuous evaluation in the form of question-answer sessions, debates, tests etc.

Further Reading:
Baines, Jocelyn. Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1960.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Modern Critical Interpretations. Ed. and Intro. By Harold
Bloom. Delhi: Worldview, 1987.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Ed. Sumanyu Satpathy. Delhi: Worldview, 2002.
Conrad, Joseph and Zdzislaw Najder, ed. The Congo Diary and Other Uncollected Pieces.
Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1978.
Chantler, Ashley. Heart of Darkness: Character Studies. New York: Continuum, 2008.
Collits, Terry. Postcolonial Conrad: Paradoxes of Empire. London: Routledge, 2005. Print.
Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphna. Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper. Oxford: OUP, 1991.
Fothergill, Anthony. Heart of Darkness: Open Guides to Literature. New Delhi: Viva,
2003.Lawtoo, Nidesh, ed. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Contemporary Thought:
Revisiting the Horror with Lacoue-Labarthe. London: Bloomsbury, 2012.
Moore, Gene M. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: A Casebook. Oxford: OUP, 2004.
Murfin, Ross C, ed. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Case Studies in Contemporary
Criticism Series. Houndsmill: Macmillan Education, 1996.
Watts, Cedric. Conrad: Preface Books. Delhi: Pearson, 2003.
Lee F, Robert. Conrad’s Colonialism. Paris: Mouton & Co, 1969.
Lothe, Jakob. Conrad’s Narrative Method. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.
Parry, Benita. Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers.
London: Macmillan, 1984.
Stapes J.H. The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Cambridge: CUP, 2004.
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES

COURSE DESCRIPTION: BRITISH MODERNISM

E.M. FORSTER’S A PASSAGE TO INDIA

LEVEL: MA IN ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES, THIRD SEMESTER

COURSE DURATION-7 TH SEPTEMBER 2016 TO MARCH 2017

COURSE FACILITATOR: DR. NANDINI BHATTACHARYA

Email. nandinibhattacharya60@gmail.com

COURSE DESCRIPTION. This course on literary modernism in Britain that focuses on Edward
Morgan Forster’s novel – A PASSAGE TO INDIA (1924)

COURSE RATIONALE. It proposes a reading of Forster’s novel in the light of the following issues:

 Publishing history, Brace Harcourt in 1924, refer to “Hill of Devi” 1912-1913, and visit to the
estate, Raja of Dewas
 What constitutes as “Modern” in Forster’s narrative, and why it is representative of British
literary modernity.
 What are the connections between Forster’s narrative and other modern British narratives?
 How does the genre of the novel mutate in the first decades of the 20th century; how do its
structuralist, quasi realist assumptions morph in an age where experiments in narrative form
and critique of Realism as credo are becoming the order of the day.
 Interesting narratological experiments that qualify “A Passage” as an experimental novel.
 A novel that engages with spatiality, that describes a “ a passage to India”, the “town of
Chandrapore”, the river Ganges”, “a cave”, “a mosque”, “a temple”. A novel of places.
 The title of the novel that points to its particular status as a narrative of cultural encounter, an
East versus West novel,

1
 The title suggests the novel’s particular engagement with questions of race, with colour lines
that, can and cannot be breached.
 A PASSAGE TO INDIA is distinctive as a Raj novel. India is examined as a mysterious,
exotic but the fearful Other, replete with anxieties of rape.
 Can it be compared to other Raj novels and especially Mutiny novels.
 A PASSAGE TO INDIA is distinctive in its engagement with gender questions, with
questions of interface between gender and race, the white woman’s honour, purity, friendship
between men that border on the erotic. The biographical details regarding Forster’s own
sexual predilections colour and inform the novel.
 Reception, rewriting of A Passage to India.

COURSE OUTCOME

1. Acquaintance with British modernism as a literary movement

2. Acquaintance with forms, experiments of modern British narratives.
3. Acquaintance with a seminal British novelist and theorist of the novel form
4. Acquaintance with narrativized spatiality
5. Acquaintance with colonial encounter and race relations in crises.
6. Acquaintance with gender issues and alternative sexualities in British narrative.
7. Acquaintance with India from the British colonialist point of view, questions of friendship vs
rule.
8. Sensitization regarding communal relations in colonial India

MODE OF EVALUATION. End semester examination, internal examination and continuous evaluation
in the form of class quiz, debates, test.

2
 LIFE AND TIMES

E. M. Forster was born on New Year's Day 1879, in London. He was intended to be called Henry
after his paternal great-grandfather (the father of Marianne Thornton, his mother's patron and his
father's aunt), and was, indeed, registered as 'Henry Morgan Forster'; through an odd mistake,
however, he was christened Edward after his father. It hardly mattered for throughout his life he was
known by his second name, Morgan. A previous child of the marriage had died at birth and the young
Forster was not yet two years old when, in October 1880, his father died of tuberculosis. Thus, the
novelist was left to be brought up as the only child of his widowed mother; he was surrounded from
an early age almost exclusively by female relatives - his great-aunt Marianne and her dependent niece
Henrietta; his mother and his maternal grandmother Louisa Whichelo; his mother's friend Maimie, the
widow of Henrietta's brother; and his mother's three younger sisters. In 1883 Forster and his mother
went to live at Rooks Nest, an attractive country house near Stevenage in Hertfordshire. He came to
love this house where they lived for ten years and it later served as the model for Howards End. Like
so many only children left fatherless, he was constantly mollycoddled, under the mistaken impression
that he might have inherited his father's weak chest. A photograph of him with his mother about this
time shows him with shoulder-length curls and dressed in a velvet 'Little Lord Fauntleroy' suit with
lace collar and cuffs. As time went on, the boy, with the impatience of youth, grew more and more
irritated with his very elderly great-aunt but when she died in 1887 at the age of ninety she left him a
legacy of £8000 which gave him a measure of independence he could not otherwise have experienced.
Until he was eleven, in 1890, Forster was tutored at home; after that he was sent as a boarder to a
small preparatory school in Eastbourne. Almost from the outset he found school uncongenial. Small,
slight and in no way athletic, he was unpopular and subjected to various kinds of bullying. He was so
unhappy there that it was decided when the time came, not to send him away to Public School but to
send him instead as a day-boy to Tonbridge School; consequently - and partly because their lease on
Rooksnest had run out - they moved to Tonbridge. The decision was little short of disastrous. Day-
boys were despised and looked upon as socially inferior; additionally, Forster once more came in for a
great deal of bullying and was very miserable. In The Longest Journey (1907) he castigates the Public
School ethos and denigrates Tonbridge in the guise of Sawston School. However, he gained a sound
classical education there; during his last year he won school prizes for both Latin and English and was

3
offered a place at King's College, Cambridge, where he went in 1897. If school had been a confining
and repressive influence, Cambridge enfranchised him. He read widely, attended lectures assiduously
and at the same time developed his interest in music and art. He now found himself in the company of
a number of like-minded young men with whom he could discuss literature, philosophy or any other
subject that took their fancy. In the intellectual ferment of this time he abjured Christianity, though he
never lost his interest in religion in its widest sense. After three years he gained an Upper Second in
his Classical Tripos and stayed on at King's for a further year to read History, again achieving no
more than a Second Class. During this year he was elected to the' Apostles', that celebrated
Cambridge Society to which have belonged so many of the famous and notorious. In his first long
vacation from Cambridge he and his mother had moved house from Tonbridge to nearby Tunbridge
Wells. Though Sawston School in The Longest Journey is essentially Tonbridge, Sawston itself is
undoubtedly Tunbridge Wells and through the character of Caroline Abbott in Where Angels Fear to
Tread Forster censures its 'idleness ... stupidity ... respectability [and 1 petty unselfishness'. After
Cambridge, Forster toyed for a while with the idea of becoming a schoolmaster but decided, with
some of the money he had inherited from Marianne Thornton, to travel on the Continent. He had
already tried his hand at writing and had published essays in various University magazines; he now
thought that travel would perhaps further his ambitions in this line. Thus, in October 1901, he started
with his mother for Italy. They were away for almost a year, spending most of the time in Italy but
visiting Sicily briefly and ending up in the Austrian Tyrol. Back at home, Forster considered finding
employment but did little beyond taking a weekly class in Latin at the Working Men's College in
Bloomsbury. The following spring he decided to go on his travels again and he set out with his mother
for Italy once more; this time he left her in Florence whilst he went on a Greek cruise. His post-
Cambridge travels seemed to give him the stimulus he needed for concentrated creativity. They
provided him with a background to contrast with his restricted and restricting life in suburban
England; they gave him insights into characters that he had not met with before and they realised for
him the link between the romance of the unknown and the widening of horizons that he had
experienced at Cambridge. He began to work on, but was unable at that time to finish, a 'Lucy' novel
which was the way Forster described the then untitled novel that became eventually A Room With a
View (1908). During his Greek trip he gestated a number of short stories which were later published
in The Celestial Omnibus (1911) and on his return from his second journey, in late summer 1904, he
began Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905). Simultaneously, he was extending his activities in other
fields: he was commissioned to edit Virgil's Aeneid for Dent's classics and he offered a series of
extra-mural lectures on various aspects of Italian history and culture. Yet his thirst for foreign travel
was not assuaged and he accepted an invitation to go for a few months as tutor to the daughters of
Countess Von Arnim, an ex-patriate Englishwoman living in a vast, old country house or Schloss in
Germany. (She was a minor novelist and well-known at the time as author of Elizabeth And Her
German Garden (1898)). Where Angels Fear To Tread was published in 1905 but already the next two

4
novels were being planned and written. Creatively, Forster was going through a period of intense
activity. In his personal life, however, he was far from happy. He had by now come to understand his
homosexual proclivities and though he had probably not experienced sexual consummation he had
fairly certainly felt erotic impulses in the company of various of his friends and, particularly with H.
O. Meredith, one of his Cambridge acquaintances, it seems likely that he had enjoyed physical
caresses. It was at this point of his life that he was introduced as Latin tutor to the young Moslem
Indian, Syed Ross Masood, who was preparing to go up to Oxford. A strikingly handsome young
man, Masood was also lively and intelligent; Forster found himself immediately dr~wn to him and,
before long, hopelessly in love - hopelessly, because Masood did not share his homosexual
tendencies. Nevertheless, their encounter was very rewarding for the novelist, opening out new vistas
for him and bringing him into close contact with an impulsive and demonstrative personality who
valued friendship highly and put personal relationships first. In April 1907 The Longest Journey was
published. Technically a less perfect novel than the previous one, it was reviewed more harshly, yet
Forster always had a special affection for this book. It is the most autobiographical of all his novels,
reflecting not so much actual incidents, but rather aspects of his imaginative and spiritual life. A
Room With A View came out in 1908 and was followed in 1910 by Howards End and in 1911 by the
collection of short stories The Celestial Omnibus. It was the end of a six-year period of intense
creative activity. The following year he started a new novel, Arctic Summer, which, despite the
considerable efforts he put into it for a while, was eventually abandoned. He tried his hand at writing
plays but, though he completed several, even he himself realised that they were unsatisfactory and
they did not get as far as publication. Then the opportunity arose for a journey to India and in October
1912, in the company of some friends, he set out for Bombay. There he parted from his friends and
went to stay with Masood for a while before travelling about the country. During this visit to India he
saw both Anglo-India and native states; he went to Bankipore and visited the Barabar Hills and Caves.
He also stayed briefly in two native states, Chhatarpur and Dewas Senior. Certainly he returned home
with many impressions and experiences which were later to find their way into A Passage to India but
he was not yet ready to write the novel. Instead, an almost chance encounter led him to write Maurice.
This book, unlike his other novels, over all of which he struggled and agonised, sprang into his mind
almost complete in its conception: 'The general plan,' he wrote in 1960, 'the three characters, the
happy ending for two of them, all rushed into my pen. And the whole thing went through without a
hitch' (published in a 'Terminal Note' to the first edition, 1971). The novel was written in record time
and, having written it, Forster realised that it could not be published, for the social climate of the time
was hostile to homosexuality. Since his return from India he had gradually become involved with the
Bloomsbury Group of writers and artists. He already liked and admired Leonard Woolf and soon
counted Virginia Woolf among his friends. When war was declared in August 1914, with so many
young men rushing to enlist, Forster decided to look for a job and he became a part-time cataloguer in
the National Gallery. He was a pacifist by inclination and most of his Bloomsbury acquaintances were

5
against the war. He was already thirty-five years old, rather above the age of general enlistment;
however, in 1915 he began to consider a more active role and in November he went to Egypt with the
International Red Cross. He remained in Alexandria until after the Armistice, returning home in
January 1919. He now turned to journalism and in 1920 he briefly held the post of literary editor of
the Daily Herald. The 'Indian novel' did not progress and it began to look as though his creative
energy had been dissipated. It was at this point, early in 1921, that he was invited to return to the state
of Dewas Senior to act as the Maharajah's secretary for a few months. After his official duties were
ended he remained in India for a further two months before taking his passage home in January 1922.
He still felt dispirited and unable to continue with his novel but, with encouragement from his friends,
it began slowly to take shape. A Passage To India was eventually published in June 1924.

Meanwhile, in May of that year his Aunt Laura died and left to Forster her house, West Hackhurst, in
Abinger, Surrey, which his father had designed for her. After a few months of indecision Forster and
his mother moved to the house, which he was to occupy for the next twenty-two years and in which
his mother was to die. It was soon obvious from the reviews and from the sales both in Britain and in
the United States that A Passage To India was a success, but Forster never seemed to find success
encouraging. He continued to do a little journalism, to write a few short stories and some criticism but
he did not settle down to any extensive creative work. He was invited by Trinity College, Cambridge
to give the annual Clark Lectures in 1927 and proved to be an exceedingly popular lecturer who
attracted large audiences. Following this, he was offered a three-year fellowship at King's College;
this he accepted, making the proviso that he would not be resident in the college for more than six
weeks a year. His eight lectures were published later in 1927 under the title Aspects O/The Novel.
Forster was now continually lionised; he became a regular broadcaster; a seasoned traveller, he
accompanied various friends to Africa, the Middle East and eastern Europe. He enlarged his circle of
literary acquaintances: he had already formed friendships with Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon, D.
H. Lawrence and T. E. Lawrence; now he got to know many other contemporary writers, among them
Somerset Maugham, Herbert Read, William Plomer and Christopher Isherwood. He also became
active in public life: he joined the International P.E.N. (Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors,
Essayists and Novelists) club and became the first president of the young P.E.N.; in 1934 he was
invited to become President of the newly founded N.C.C.L. (National Council for Civil Liberties) and
in the following year he headed the British delegation to the International Writers' Congress in Paris.
Back home in Abinger he was persuaded to write the spoken words and programme notes for a local
pageant in aid of the Church Preservation Fund (published as the last piece in Abinger Harvest, 1936);
Dr Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote the accompanying music; it is not many local efforts that can draw
on the contributions of two such distinguished men. During the period leading up to the Second World
War Forster was involved in politics, though only from the sidelines - essays to journals such as the
New Statesman and Nation, letters to national papers, some regular broadcasting; he produced little

6
original, imaginative work, however. Already sixty at the outbreak of the war he was no longer
expected to do any active war service, though he served on the local Refugee Committee. In March
1945 his mother died and Forster for the first time in his life was alone. Six months or so later the
local landowner, Lord Farrer, decided to reclaim West Hackhurst, the lease of which had run out some
years before. The loss of his house so soon after the death of his mother was a sore blow to Forster but
just at this moment he was offered an Honorary Fellowship at King's College and was invited to take
up residence there; he did so in November 1946. He now began writing again. He spent several years
on the libretto of Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd (first performed in December 1951); he collected
together a number of essays and reviews and published them in Two Cheers For Democracy (1951);
he wrote The Hill Of Devi (1953), a memoir of his visit to Dewas and Marianne Thornton, a
biography of his great-aunt. He was accorded civic honours, being made a Companion of Honour in
1952 and awarded the Order of Merit in 1969. In the 1960s, however, his health began to fail. He died
on 7 June 1970 at the age of ninety-one. During the nineteenth century, British influence in India had
been extended over the greater part of the subcontinent so that by the beginning of this century most
of the country was either directly under British control (British India) or under British protection; only
Nepal and the tiny state of Bhutan, both in the north-east, were independent. Forster's first journey to
India in 1912 was primarily to visit his friend and ex-pupil, Syed Ross Masood, then working as a
barrister in Patna, a town situated in the Bengal Plains to the north and west of Calcutta; adjoining
Patna was the Anglo-Indian town of Bankipore, geographically the original of the Chandrapore of his
novel. He moved on from British India to the native states of Chhatarpur and Dewas Senior which
served jointly as his models for Mau. Then, before returning home, he visited the Barabar Caves, the
Marabar of the novel's central section. He had thus on his first visit collected together the principal
physical features of the country which he was to use in A Passage To India. A novelist who constantly
made use of his own experiences in his work, he had also, consciously or subconsciously, absorbed
much of the other material he was to use later and had met many of the characters who, in one way or
another, were to contribute to his plot. Though he began the novel, however, it did not progress. The
war intervened before Forster's second journey to India in 1921. He had spent just a week in Dewas
on his previous visit, during which time he had developed a great liking for the young Rajah. Now he
was invited back, ostensibly to act as secretary to the ruler who had meanwhile been elevated to the
rank of Maharajah. Forster's duties were, in fact, very haphazard and uncertain and he found this
aspect of his stay rather disturbing, though he was happy at the friendship which grew between him
and the Maharajah. The highlight of his visit was the festival of Gokul Ashtami, the celebration which
culminates in the birth of Krishna. He gives a factual account of this festival in The Hill of Devi; it is
dramatically reproduced in the last section of A Passage to India and was, perhaps, for Forster the
final link in the chain of creation. When he returned to England he was at last able to write his 'Indian
novel' which had been so long delayed. Yet it was not the same novel which he had embarked on
almost ten years before; 'When I began the book I thought of it as a little bridge of sympathy between

7
the East and West, but this conception has had to go, my sense of truth forbids anything so
comfortable,' he wrote to Masood on 27 September 1922 (see Furbank,. page 106). So the novel
stands - truthful, but perhaps uncomfortable.

 POLITICAL ASPECTS

Though Forster himself maintained that his main purpose in A Passage to India 'was not political, was
not even sociological' (Prefatory Note to 1957 Everyman edition, republished in the Penguin Modern
Classics edition, 1979), most of the early reviewers and critics insisted on seeing it as such. Certainly
in the mid-I920s it touched a raw spot on the sensibilities of the British Empire builders. Now,
however, the India of the novel has gone forever; even the geographical entity that was then India is
no longer the same and the political situation has become an historical, though it is no longer a
political, fact. Yet the politics of suppression and subjugation are still with us today and they certainly
constitute one of Forster's themes. The Anglo-Indians as a group are little more than caricatures, as is
indicated by their introduction to us through the conversation of the Indians in Chapter 2: 'Red-nose
mumbles, Turton talks distinctly, Mrs Turton takes bribes, Mrs Red-nose does not and cannot,
because so far there is no Mrs Red-nose'. When we actually meet them our impression remains
unchanged; with their cosy comedies, their endless drinks and their exaggerated contempt for the
Indians they are, for the most part, mere parodies of colonial administrators; Hamidullah's remark that
every Englishman becomes the same 'be he Turton or Burton' (Chapter 2) is echoed by Fielding much
later in Chapter 30, with his 'Turtons and Burtons are all the same'; and when, after the trial, the
individual persons of the administration are replaced, he muses that 'the more the Club changed the
more it promised to be the same thing' (Chaper 31). We are left with the uneasy feeling that Forster
has successfully characterised the spirit, if not the fact, of colonial administration, that though
individuals may be understanding and compassionate, the generality is not. The worst aspects of
colonialism are shown in the unintelligent and biased comments of the Club women and in their lack
of courtesy and consideration, even for the superior and educated Indians. Yet the theory of
government is exemplary; the Lieutenant-Governor holds enlightened opinions and deplores racial
prejudice (Chapter 29); the practice is at fault. The Indians as a group are likewise typecast and
caricatured. Those we meet in the second chapter are from a privileged class; educated, comparatively
rich, they have accepted many of the benefits of western civilisation. They are, nevertheless,
dissatisfied with their lot; aware of etiquette and the rules of correct social behaviour, they are
vulnerable by the very fact of their having absorbed European sophistication; they are thus constantly

8
humiliated by the Anglo-Indians. But in them Forster appears to confirm feckless tendencies, which
were at the time frequently attributed to Indians: they take the word for the deed; their reason is
subjected to their emotions; they are incapable of punctuality; they cheat and lie charmingly and they
skilfully hide their resentments from their British rulers. Mahmoud Ali's extravagances at the trial
match those of Major Callendar, move for move, whilst the punkah-wallah's oblivion to all that goes
on around him adds an extra dimension of unreality to the proceedings. Left to their own devices, as
in Mau, the Indians neglect education and turn their High School into a grain store; even Aziz allows
his surgical instruments to rust and runs the hospital 'at half-steam' (Chapter 34). These two groups
have little in common, except that they share the same land and the same sky. We repeatedly see,
however, the high-handedness of the conquerors and the servility of the dominated: the arrogant
assumption that the Indians have no social life leads Major Callendar to show his power by calling
Aziz away from Hamidullah's dinner-party; the egocentricity of the women folk allows them to
appropriate Aziz's tonga;

the condescension of the Anglo-Indians at the Bridge Party precludes any possibility of breaking
down barriers. After the fiasco of the trial the defiance of the Indians is of the kind practised by
inferiors against their superiors. Yet Forster extracts no obvious political message from the general
circumstances of the two groups, teaches no lessons, reaches no conclusions. He presents the evidence
and leaves us to draw our own inferences. That something is wrong in the administration of Anglo-
India we are left in no doubt but of the steps needed to put it right we cannot be sure. The principal
characters - Mrs Moore, Adela, Fielding and Aziz - only partially underline the racial conflict, for
although Adela and Aziz are the main antagonists, the sympathies of Mrs Moore and Fielding lie
more with Aziz than with their own compatriots. Similarly, Aziz's determined assertion of affinity
with Mrs Moore again crosses racial barriers. Thus Forster retreats from the larger political issues to
consider individuals and their relationships

3. THE MYSTIC ELEMENT

Religion in its widest sense is both more and less than a theme in A Passage to India: it permeates the
whole fabric of the book, yet Forster has not written a religious novel. The title is taken from the
poem 'Passage to India' by the American poet, Walt Whitman (1819-92), a poem concerned, not with
physical journeyings, but with the voyage of the soul:

Passage to more than India!

Are thy winds plumed indeed for such far flights?

o soul, voyagest thou indeed on voyages like those? Disportest thou on waters such as those?

9
o my brave soul! o farther, farther sail!

o daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God?

o farther, farther, farther sail!

Although Mrs Moore and Adela Quested have taken their 'passage to India' their real experiences lie,
not in their actual physical explorations, but in the realms of the spirit. Yet their discoveries are not
informed by the beliefs of any particular religion; several, indeed, are examined and, in some respects
at least, found wanting. The first part 'Mosque' and the third part 'Temple' focus on the two principal
Indian religions, Mohammedanism and Hinduism, represented respectively by Aziz and Godbole; Mrs
Moore, on the other hand, becomes a spokeswoman for Western religion, loosely based on the main
precept of Christianity, 'God is love', the words of St John the Apostle (I John 4.16). Of these three,
however, only Hinduism, itself a mystic religion to Western understanding, is presented in its full
dress, with the ceremony of the Birth of Krishna dominating the action of Part III. Neither Aziz nor
Mrs Moore seek comfort in the formalities of their religion, nor do they appear to be especially
devout. Aziz sees Islam as 'an attitude towards life both exquisite and durable' (Chapter 2);
imaginatively and emotionally it fulfils a need in him which he tries to articulate through poetry. Mrs
Moore has accepted certain tenets of the Christian faith based on love and understanding but God
Himself continues to elude her; she knows no greater name to call on, yet the feeling that she lacks a
sure response troubles her (Chapter 5). Such problems do not trouble Godbole; as he explains, 'I say
to Him, Come, come, come, come, come, come. He neglects to come' (Chapter 7) but if he yearns to
reach beyond his grasp he nevertheless accepts his own shortcomings; what he achieves through love
may be inadequate, yet he knows it is more than he is himself (end of Chapter 34). The spiritual
quality of the novel, however, does not lie in its concern with specific religions; there is an indefinable
mystic aura which pervades the action. Understatements and negations which suggest the existence of
their opposites (compare the comment about 'yet' and 'there' in the previous section) are discernible
from the beginning; when, for instance, Forster describes the city of Chandrapore in the opening
chapter he comments that the Ganges 'happens not to be holy here', a clear acceptance that elsewhere
the Ganges is 'holy', that the concept of 'holiness' has reality. Likewise, later on when the Sunday
church bells ring out, those from the Civil Station ring out boldly, implying a partisanship with the
master-race of Anglo-Indians, whilst - we are told - the bells from the mission station ring out 'feebly
to mankind' (Chapter 8). Yet, however, feeble the summons, their call is universal and acknowledges
the possibility of spiritual unity. No recognisable and systematised pattern of belief can be constructed
from the many references in the novel to God, to good and evil, to heaven, to an afterlife but they all
contribute to the strong mystic element which is present; this element is mainly vested in Mrs Moore
who exerts an almost inexplicable spiritual influence upon those with whom she comes into contact.
Her. single-minded approach to the problems of race, colour and creed is prompted by humanitarian

10
beliefs, often couched in religious terms. When she tells Aziz in the mosque that 'God is here' it is
more a recognition of the susceptibilities of her fellow men than an acknowledgement of the presence
of God. Her words to Ronny in Chapter 5 are unequivocally based on a gospel of universal love: 'God
.. .is .. .1ove ... The desire to behave pleasantly satisfies God ... Though I speak with the tongues of. .. '
Although the quotation remains unfinished, we should recall its biblical context: 'Though I speak with
the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity [that is, love] .. .it profiteth me nothing' (I
Corinthians 13.1-3). Love governs her actions and enables her to reach out towards universal
brotherhood and the beliefs by which she lives transcend mortality so that, when she is dead, her spirit
remains, linking together Moslem, Hindu and Christian in a brotherhood oflove. The deification of
Mrs Moore's name, first at Chandrapore during the trial and later by the Hindus in the Gokul Ashtami
ceremony, not only suggests to us that a myth has been born but also shows us the spiritually
receptive state of the Moslem Aziz in Hindu Mau. 'Esmiss Esmoor' represents for him the 'syllables of
salvation'; though he accepts rationally that 'She had not borne witness in his favour, nor visited him
in the prison' (Chapter 36), he knows that witness was silently borne through Mrs Moore's influence
upon Adela and that, though she had not visited him, Mrs Moore had assuredly saved him from
prison. Throughout the novel Mrs Moore is more aware than the other characters of the spirit world.
She appears to be attuned to an extra-human wavelength which brings the supernatural within her
range of perception. Her introduction to us is highly emotive: as Aziz sits in the mosque, dreaming
sentimentally about death and poetry, he sees pillar after pillar seemingly quiver and sway so that his
thoughts turn to ghosts; his 'ghost', however, is Mrs Moore, quietly making her way out of the
mosque. Later, the less imaginative Adela is to feel that Mrs Moore, in her meeting with Aziz, has
glimpsed the real spirit of India (Chapter 5). The ghostly world becomes a minor theme, insubstantial
as is no doubt appropriate, but weaving an uncertain pattern through the web of the novel and
repeatedly linked with the idea of telepathy. It is Mrs Moore who hardly mentions, who no more than
breathes the thought that the Nawab Bahadur's car had been attacked by a ghost when he drove with
Adela and Ronny along the Marabar road; yet, at the very moment of her thought, the Nawab himself
is remembering how nine years previously he had run over a drunk man and killed him on that very
road. But, we are told, 'None of the English people knew of this, nor did the chauffeur; it was a racial
secret communicable more by blood than speech' (Chapter 8). Later, Mrs Moore is to convey to
Adela, without speech, her conviction that Aziz is innocent and later still Adela is to suggest to
Fielding that Mrs Moore knew, by telepathy, what had occurred in the cave, that there were, perhaps,
'worlds beyond' their consciousness (Chapter 29). The word 'telepathy' was coined by F. W. H. Myers
in 1882 at the founding meeting of the Society for Psychical Research and during the years that
followed there was considerable controversy about the truth of psychical phenomena. During the
years 1910-24 Professor Gilbert Murray and his family carried out an exhaustive series of
experiments on pure telepathy, the results of which were published in the Proceedings of the Society
for Psychical Research, Volume XXIX. Much of this research coincided with the long period of

11
gestation of A Passage to India which was probably begun in 1913; it seems unlikely that Forster was
not aware of the current interest and the arguments surrounding it, particularly as the Cambridge of
his own university days was a centre for such research. The problem of the survival of human
personality was, likewise, a subject which much exercised the minds of the psychical researchers at
this time and this too was a theme which Forster employed. His first sustained use of the idea is in
Howards End where Mrs Wilcox dies between the end of Chapter 8 and the beginning of Chapter 9,
yet remains to influence the action till the end. Here, in A Passage to India, Mrs Moore dies far away
from Chandrapore, a bodily death which releases her spirit to live again at the trial, to become a
Hindu goddess, to sway Adela's mind and to change the course of justice. Twice Aziz feels her
presence though he believes her to be far away and when, in fact, she is no longer alive; later, when
Fielding tries to convince him that she is indeed dead, Fielding finds himself, though a 'frank atheist'
teased by uncertainty: 'He had tried to kill Mrs Moore this evening on the roof of the Nawab
Bahadur's house; but she still eluded him' (end of Chapter 27). The reader too is left in doubt about the
significance of the supernatural in this novel: 'Perhaps life is', after all, 'a mystery, not a muddle'
(Chaper 29).

3. THE PROBLEM OF NATIONHOOD

'India a nation! What an apotheosis!' Fielding's mocking words to Aziz at the end of the novel voice
doubts which have been repeatedly hinted at earlier; the rifts apparent within native India are shown
to be as great as the barriers which divide English and Indian. A Passage to India is concerned mainly
with the Moslem population of Chandrapore, though Hindus live and work there freely: Professor
Godbole teaches in Government College; Dr Panna Lal works with Aziz at the hospital; Mr Das is a
magistrate; Mr Bhattacharya runs a monthly magazine. Even among the educated and profeSSional
people there is friction. Aziz frequently manifests anti-Hindu propensities: he deliberately picks a
quarrel with his colleague Dr Lal and later describes him to Mrs Moore as 'a slack unpunctual fellow';
he constantly connects Hindus with cow-dung; when he is ill and is visited by his Moslem friends
they learn that Godbole is also ill and, without justification, begin to slander Hindus in general,
speaking of them with disgust. In view of this it is not surprising that troubles arise over the
Mohurram procession, with both Moslems and Hindus provoking each other.

At Mau, however, Aziz settles happily to life in a Hindu state and for all practical purposes lives as a
Hindu and is 'chief medicine man to the court'. Though nominally subject to British rule Mau has no
resident British officials and scarcely any Moslem inhabitants; the difference between life in Anglo-
Indian Chandrapore and Hindu Mau is the significant lack of arrogance and oppression. Yet Forster
makes it clear that the obstacles to a united India are more subtle than merely the religious
differences. The life of Aziz and his friends is not dissimilar from the life of the Anglo-Indians,
though materially on a lower scale; they dress in western clothes, they are educated, they have a social

12
life and they can discuss poetry and philosophy. Other Indians, in the same land, wear only a
loincloth, or go naked and spend their lives in abject worship of a 'scarlet doll'. Language too divides,
even those of the same religion; so, as Mr Syed Mohammed gets excited while talking to his friends,
he lapses into his native Punjabi and becomes unintelligible. Their eating habits prevent Hindus,
Moslems and Christians from enjoying social meals together for there are taboos on beef, on ham, on
eggs, on alcohol, which greatly inhibit the choice of foods; thus on the Marabar expedition Aziz's
worries about food for his guests are blamed on him because he has not accepted the prevailing spirit
of India which tries to keep men separate. Furthermore, Moslem women are kept in purdah, apart
from all men except those of their own family. Wherever we look there are divisions and discord. In
the hot weather 'a barrier of fire' separates the mountainous north of the country from the great central
plain and the sea. During the rains the rivers overflow and cut off communication. The very land is
full of fissures and rocky outcrops which force men to pass along in single file. lt is a sign of the
balance and restraint of Forster's picture of India that he does not leave us with the feeling that, but for
English domination, India could establish itself as a nation. Writing the novel in the early 1920s he
was under no illusions about the possibilities of Indian unity. Aziz may dream of a motherland
(Chapter 30), of being 'an Indian at last' (Chapter 34), but in the end he is no more convinced than we
are that nationhood is possible. The civil war and the partition of 1947 which followed confirm this
view, though when he published The Hill of Devi in 1953 Forster was clearly not happy with the
solutions brought about at that time. He wanted , "India" ... to designate the whole sub-continent' and
he went on to say:

Much as I sympathise with the present government at New Delhi I wish it had not chosen 'India' to
describe its territory. Politicians are too prone to plunder the past.

'Nationhood' received its death-blow in 1947.

4 TECHNIQUES

4.1 NARRATION AND POINT OF VIEW

The narrative method of A Passage to India is neither innovative nor complicated. It employs a third
person omniscient narrator who is, for the most part, completely non-intrusive; at only one point in
the novel does Forster step into the story, acknowledge its novelistic character and, in Dickensian
style, address his 'dear reader' (Chapter 23). For the rest, a discreet anonymity is observed. The plot is
unfolded chronologically, though explanations are sometimes given after the event, rather than before;

13
so we learn that the Nawab Bahadur had once run over and killed a drunk man only after the motor
accident and his display of fear; again, Aziz is arrested before we learn what crime he is accused of.
Yet neither of these incidents may be seen as . a deliberate stylistic inversion of the order of events
for, in the first instance the Nawab Bahadur has deliberately suppressed his unpleasant memories,
whilst in the second the narrative has remained with Aziz and his party who are ignorant of Adela's
accusations. The action of the novel is introduced by and interspersed with sustained descriptive
passages and philosophic discussions. The plot progresses through a series of incidents centring on
groups or individuals as they react with each other. Our sympathies are engaged with some characters
and not with others by the simple device of allowing us to view some froin outside and others from
inside. The principal characters are seen in varying lights; what they do and what happens to them is
put into focus by an insight into their reasons for action and their reactions to events. Furthermore,
they appear to have a life apart from the plot of the novel, as they muse on poetry, religion,
philosophy and other subjects which affect and reflect their innermost thoughts; it is from their point
of view that we comprehend the tensions of the action. When, for instance, in Chapter 2, Aziz is
called to report to Major Callendar, we are immediately aware of the lack of civility in the Civil
Surgeon's note and we feel the young doctor's humiliation when Mrs Lesley and Mrs Callendar slight
him. This incident, though ostensibly told by an omniscient narrator, is seen through Aziz's eyes and
the reader becomes sympathetically involved with him. Conversely, there is no attempt to let us
understand the point of view of Callendar and the womenfolk and we thus remain opposed to them.
The narrator does not often describe characters, rarely refers to what they are wearing and never
directly tells us what to think about them or the action they are involved in. In so far as our
sympathies are manipulated, they are so through the characters themselves. This, however, is a fairly
traditional method of narration and has been used in the conventional novel, certainly from Jane
Austen onward.

 CHARACTERS AND CHARACTERISATION

Forster's named characters are given to us not merely against the setting of India but also against a
background of the vast unnamed population, the circles beyond circles of the inhabitants of India,
'humanity grading and drifting beyond the educated vision' (Chapter 4). The Westernised Indians who
live and work in the vicinity of the British Civil Station are but a small and atypical proportion of the
native people; they are those who aspire to a more advanced mode of life, who look for personal
fulfilment in the Western professions such as medicine, teaching and law, who believe that they may
achieve nationhood for India. Forster is not strong on characterisation. His main interest is in ideas
rather than people. He does not illustrate and develop the qualities of his characters but rather presents
them in relation to his theme and their emotional responses to it. This is not to say that they lack
realism, for his principal protagonists are real enough with regard to the situation of the novel; they
feel and think but we do not easily envisage them in other situations. For instance, Mrs Moore lives

14
for us only in India; we cannot imagine her life in England and, significantly, she dies as she leaves
Bombay.

 Aziz is the main protagonist of the novel and the only Indian treated in any depth. We know
little about his physical appearance, except that he is. about five foot nine inches tall, athletic
and slimly built; he generally dresses in Western clothes, mainly to avoid being picked on by
the police. He is a doctor at the hospital in Chandrapore, working under Major Callendar, the
Civil Surgeon; Aziz himself is a gifted and skilful surgeon, fascinated by modern medical
progress, and he practises his profession with enthusiasm. Yet, though his mind has embraced
the wonders of Western science, he is still emotionally attached to the culture and traditions
of his own country and of his Islamic religion. The plot of the novel begins with Aziz as he
arrives late for Hamidullah's dinner party and impulsively drops his bicycle down before a
servant can catch it. Unpunctuality is an Indian shortcoming of which he is well aware, yet it
is not within his nature to arrive on time: in order not to be late for the Marabar expedition he
goes to the other extreme, camping overnight with the servants at the station. Lateness
signifies little in Indian life and it is immediately apparent in the opening incident that no one
thinks less of Aziz because he is always late and his apology is passed off jokingly. His
impulsiveness and exuberance are, however, personal traits of considerable significance as the
plot progresses. We see him first among his own friends, happy, at ease, content to listen to an
argument between Hamidullah and Mahmoud Ali about the English; his lack of involvement
is shown by his only contribution to the discussion, which is to wonder whether it is necessary
to make the commitment of being friends or 'not friends' at all. When they join his host's wife
behind the purdah we learn a little of Aziz's domestic circumstances. His wife is dead and his
children - two boys and a girl - live with their maternal grandmother, whilst he lives poorly in
Chandrapore, sending away all his salary to support them. The stock Indian solution to this
problem would be to take another wife but Aziz is Westernised enough not to wish to marry a
woman chosen for him by others and Oriental enough to know that if he is to marry again
there is little alternative. By the third part of the novel he has pushed aside his aspirations
towards Western life and, living and working among the Hindus, he has remarried and
brought his children to live with him. Our first view of Aziz, the private man, is swiftly
overlaid by a view of him not only as professional man but also as a member of a subject
race. With his Indian friends he can laugh and joke as an equal but as Major Callendar's
subordinate he has to obey orders; furthermore, as an Indian he has to suffer humiliation
without redress at the hands of the Anglo-Indians. When he meets Mrs Moore in the mosque
he takes on yet another role; his attempt to bully her gives way to an open, natural, friendly
communion, untainted by thoughts of race, religion or sex. Though he is not at the time aware
of it, this is one of the most significant moments of his life for the meeting is one of hearts,

15
not of minds, and the emotional tie he establishes remains with him even after Mrs Moore's
death. Later, during the Krishna Festival he finds himself alone with Ralph Moore and against
his will he is overcome by feelings of love and friendship, his heart 'too full to draw back'
(Chapter 36).

The impulsiveness which attaches him to Mrs Moore is accompanied by a deep, perhaps almost
subconscious, desire to establish connections with the English, to get beneath superficialities which
separate to find the spirit which unites. His route to such unity is not through the intellect but through
the heart, as he searches for 'some truth of religion or love'. Though his mind is engaged with his
profession, he is at heart a dreamer, a poet; cultured, he is well-versed in the history of his country, he
has a knowledge of art and reads Persian. At Mau he returns to writing poetry which he had felt
unable to do in Chandrapore. Despite his learning, Aziz lacks the ability to bring logic to bear upon
his problems; his response is always instinctive rather than rational. Thus, he rips out his collar-stud to
give to Fielding, regardless of the fact that his own collar will rise up; or again, at a moment's whim,
having let down his colleague Dr Panna Lal at the Bridge Party, he reinforces enmity between them
by deliberately frightening Dr Lal's horse. More seriously, however, when Adela disappears on the
Marabar expedition, Aziz invents a story which allows him to save face and the telling of it makes
him believe it is true. Practically everything he does at this time incriminates him in Western eyes; it
is only through Fielding's intervention that he does not run away when McBryde arrests him at the
station; such an act would have immediately confirmed his guilt to the Anglo-Indians, his emotional
reaction appearing to them incomprehensible. After the trial the harsher side of Aziz's nature comes to
the fore; his attitude towards Anglo-India hardens; he refuses to recognise Adela's courage and shows
a lack of generosity towards her; he convinces himself of Fielding's perfidy and deliberately breaks
his ties with the Englishman. Finally, in Mau, free of the pressures of Anglo-India, he is able to
reassemble his life; he is less subservient, more realistic. His sentimental affection for Mrs Moore,
however, remains and is transferred to her son Ralph. Yet Aziz knows that the time is not ripe for
friendship between the two races and the novel ends with his acceptance of the inevitability of
separation between him and Fielding. The character of Aziz was partly based on that of Forster's
Moslem friend Syed Ross Masood (see page 3) to whom A Passage to India is dedicated. He has, too,
affinities with characters in earlier novels, such as Gino in Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) or
Stephen Wonham in The Longest Journey (1907); in this final novel, however, Aziz is depicted as
more thoughtful, more artistic, more philosophic than his predecessors.

Mrs Moore is the most enigmatic of all the characters in A Passage to India. An elderly
Englishwoman, she, like Aziz, has her precursors in Forster's work, most particularly in Mrs Wilcox
of Howards End (1910).

16
We see Mrs Moore at her best in the scene in the mosque with Aziz. There she is considerate and
sympathetic, light-hearted and completely frank. Despite his initial roughness, she treats Aziz with
easy friendship and as an equal. Her understanding and tolerance are apparent in her acceptance of
God's presence in the mosque. The words 'God is here' are a significant indication of her spirituality;
when, later, she argues with Ronny about the duties of the English in India she returns to the subject
of God's omnipresence, emphasising her belief that God's will is that man shall love his neighbour.
Her visit to India brings about a crisis in Mrs Moore's spiritual life. Ronny believes that her religious
bouts are always a sign of ill-health; certainly she is tired and dispirited for most of the time and we
do not often see the side of her character which so endears her to Aziz. Her second meeting with Aziz
at Fielding's tea party is the last time we see her in a carefree mood. Her problems begin at that party:
first, Adela indiscreetly tells Aziz that she does not intend to settle in India; this remark indicates to
Mrs Moore that her mission has resulted in failure and Fielding observes that she 'looked flustered and
put out'; secondly, Ronny rudely breaks up the party and she realises that the English have no
intention of being pleasant to the Indians, whether God is watching them or not; and thirdly, Professor
Godbole's song suggests the possibility of the absence of God, that He is perhaps not, after all,
omnipresent: 'I say to Him, Come, come, come, come, come, come. He neglects to come'. The song
with its negative conclusion is followed by an almost mystic moment of silence: Ronny's steps had
died away, and there was a moment of absolute silence. No ripple disturbed the water, no leaf stirred.
The absence of God is suggested by the reference to the water, for it recalls the biblical story of the
troubling of the waters of Bethesda in which the movement of the water indicated the presence of an
angel (St John 5.1-9). From this time Mrs Moore is a changed person; on the way back from
Fielding's she is querulous and refuses to go to watch the polo; she appears to be both physically and
spiritually sick, out of tune with the life around her. Though the day ends with Adela and Ronny's
engagement, she does not recover her enthusiasm for life. During the fortnight between the tea party
and the Marabar expedition little happens to revive her spirits and on the journey to the caves there is
again a palpable silence which seems to deny all purpose in life. It is inside the first cave, however,
that Mrs Moore's breakdown occurs, when the silence becomes filled with meaningless echoes; she
gives way to despair, rejecting 'poor, little talkative Christianity', finding her life empty of
understanding, of affection, of all interest. An elderly woman, she is fatigued with the journey, has
probably had too much sun and is suffering from the strains and stresses of her Indian visit; she is, of
course, physically ill and this manifests itself in mental and spiritual sickness. Before the trial she tries
to free herself of the burdens of duty and responsibility but she is too distraught to do more than assert
Aziz's innocence and thus sow the seeds of doubt in Adela's mind. Though she becomes a
cantankerous old woman, Mrs Moore never entirely loses the reader's sympathy. That she does not
bear witness in the court for Aziz can hardly be held against her, for by that point she is a dying
woman. It may also be said that she does, in fact, bear more powerful witness than her bodily
presence could have done; she had no evidence on his behalf, only her knowledge of human

17
character, but in spirit she is with Adela, maintaining his innocence; she is constantly alluded to
during the trial scene and it is just after the invocation of 'Esmiss Esmoor' that Adela speaks 'more
naturally and healthily than usual'. After her death, Mrs Moore gains new significance. Does Forster
intend us to believe that in the mystery of India part of her personality survives to influence Adela, to
fill Aziz with happiness, to be worshipped by the Hindus? There is no suggestion that she lives again
in a Christian sense but that she has an extra-human awareness is evidenced again and again (see
pp.50-2).

Adela Quested is a very ordinary upper-middle-class English girl. .Not especially attractive, she is
sensible and thoughful; her reactions to life in India are probably those of any reasonable, well-
disposed visitor from the West. She is, however, a rather special visitor, for she has come to explore
the possibilities of marrying and settling down as the wife of a British official in the country. Her
expectations are, perhaps not surprisingly, confused; though the members of the Civil Club have
reproduced a version of suburban England in Chandra pore , Adela has difficulty in understanding
that the native population is excluded from this life, that English and Indians do not meet socially, that
she is superior, the natives inferior. Like Mrs Moore she rejects the arrogance of the rulers but she
recognises the fear that she may herself become like them if she stays in India. Her instinct to return
home (expressed at Fielding's tea party) is sound, for Ronny has already absorbed the prevailing
Anglo-Indian attitudes and he annoys and irritates her. The reader never quite believes in the
possibility of the marriage. Perhaps Adela's feeling all along has been for Mrs Moore rather than for
her son; she has a very real affection for Mrs Moore which is shown through her kindness and
consideration for the older woman. Adela's wish to see the 'real India' is accompanied by a genuine
desire to make connections with the Indians but she does not know how to start. She seems to have no
small talk and little lightness of heart; whilst Aziz and Mrs Moore can laugh together, Adela is always
serious; Fielding describes her as 'a prig ... trying ever so hard to understand India and life' (Chapter
11); her efforts to understand lead to the catastrophe in the cave. Just before they go into the first cave
Adela expresses her concern to Aziz that in marrying Ronny she will become an Anglo-Indian and, in
pursuing this conversation she touches him on a raw spot. On their way to the next cave she is
suddenly overcome by the realisation that she does not love Ronny, that she is about to enter into a
marriage without love; it is this reflection which prompts her to question Aziz about his marriage and
to commit an even greater social blunder by asking him if he has more than one wife. She is unaware
of her gaffe but, with her thoughts revolving round ideas of love and marriage, she enters the cave and
appears to have an hallucination which is followed by some sort of emotional breakdown. Mrs Moore
had suffered similarly and Aziz too panics in the vicinity of the caves, becoming disorientated and
striking the guide. At the trial, Adela's sense of honesty, fair play and decency finally triumphs and
she comes out of it well, certainly better than Ronny, who deserts her in her hour of need. Her parting
from Fielding in Chapter 29 shows her once more to have regained her balance; she is again logical

18
and sensible but more subdued than on her arrival in India. She returns to England alone, having
failed to make any real connections in India and having lost through Mrs Moore's death a relationship
she treasured.

Fielding, though not Forster himself, is generally assumed to represent Forster's point of view in this
novel. Forty-five years old, he is exactly the age Forster was in 1924 when A Passage to India was
first published. An easy-going, kindly man, he has stepped aside from the politics of conquest and
rejected the role of 'sahib' with all its connotations of superiority. As Principal of Government College
he necessarily mixes with Indians and, like the missionaries, is despised for encouraging them to
advance themselves. On his first appearance in the novel he advises Adela and Mrs Moore to 'try
seeing Indians' if they want to get to know India; by this he means meeting with them, rather than
viewing them from a distance. To this end he arranges his tea party to entertain the visiting
Englishwomen and to bring them into contact with two of the educated Indians, Aziz and Godbole.
Imbued with Forster's own liberal humanism he, like Mrs Moore, is not concerned with colour, race
or creed. When he says to Aziz, 'Please make yourself at home' (Chapter 7), it is the kind of remark he
would have made to any visitor; Aziz thinks it unconventional, which in an Anglo-Indian context it is,
but he is nevertheless delighted. Fielding is more at home with Indians than with Englishmen of the
ruling class. He rarely goes to the Club except to play tennis or billiards and when he resigns he
expects to miss no one except McBryde. Among the Indians, however, he is able to be himself. The
parents of his pupils like him and he finds the company of the educated Indians congenial. His needs
are simple; he wants friendship but he has little sexual desire. A quality in Fielding which Aziz sees as
both endearing and worrying is his outspokenness; at the Club he had offended his compatriots by a
joke describing the 'so-called white races' as 'really pinko-gray' (Chapter 7); on his visit to Aziz's sick-
bed he scandalises the Indians by renouncing belief in God; just before the trial he insists that Aziz is
innocent, first at the meeting of the Civil Club and afterwards in a letter to Adela. He worries little as
long as he speaks the truth as he sees it and he does not speak in rancour. Whilst Mrs Moore's
kindness stems from her religious belief, however, Fielding's is an entirely human attribute; he is 'a
holy man minus the holiness' (Chapter 11), travelling light because personal possessions have no
appeal for him. Yet he too becomes involved in the catastrophe of the caves; against his will he is
forced to take sides and he plumps for what he believes is the side of the wronged and oppressed,
throwing in his lot with Aziz and his Indian friends. It is typical of him that after the fiasco of the trial
he is the only Englishman to show any magnanimity towards Adela, even though it proves to be
detrimental to the budding friendship between him and Aziz. His natural sympathy for the underdog is
combined with a grudging admiration for the honesty which made her speak out in court. At the same
time he is aware of the very Englishness of his gallantry and of the fact that if his Indian friends
attacked Adela 'he would be obliged to die in her defence'. At the end of Part II Fielding returns home
and feels enlivened and revivified by the beauty of form of Italian buildings. A hint of his

19
forthcoming marriage is contained in the last sentence of Chapter 32 when, arriving in England,
'tender romantic fancies' are reborn in him at the sight of the wild flowers of the countryside. Two
years later he returns to India; now married, he is harder, sterner, travelling less lightly than before.
Love, which he had earlier felt no need of is passionate within him and Stella has the first place in his
affection. He takes life more seriously, has more responsibilities and his profession has become more
important to him financially. He is, too, less easy with Aziz and more ready to criticise him. The rift
between them which came about after the trial is finally healed but the desire for friendship is out of
tune with the time and place and he accepts the limitations imposed.

Professor Godbole Godbole is a Hindu teacher at Government College where Fielding is Principal. He
is one of the few characters described in detail to us; physically he looks rather like a European with
his fair complexion, grey-blue

eyes and grey moustache; he dresses in European clothes except for his turban and, remarks Forster,
'his whole appearance suggest [s] harmony' (Chapter 7). Apart from this, we know so little about him
that we do not even know what he teaches and when he becomes Minister of Education at Mau he
shows no real concern for education, allowing the King-Emperor George Fifth High School to be
turned into a granary. A Brahman, a member of a superior social caste, he remains outside and above
all the turmoil which surrounds the inhabitants of Chandrapore, English and Indian. He lives in the
College where he teaches and does not appear to have, or to need, any social life outside his job and
his religion. He is not a very strict Hindu; nevertheless, he is always placed in a Hindu context: Aziz
worries about the picnic at the Marabar because Godbole will not eat meat or anything that has eggs
in'it and will not allow anyone else to eat beef in his presence; at Fielding's tea party he sings a
religious song which carries its echoes of desire and yearning through the rest of the novel- the god
will never come, however often men beg him to do so. In the third part of the novel Godbole takes on
a more active religious role, leading one of the choirs that sings in honour of the Birth of Krishna,
dancing to the glory of the god and helping in the naming ceremony. Though he is the chief
representative of Hinduism in the novel, Professor Godbole has little to do with the main plot. He
constantly cuts himself off from the action and his responses bewilder those who come into contact
with him. When the caves are discussed in Chapter 7 it is Godbole who proves to be 'extraordinary'.
The simple, straightforward mind of Aziz can make no headway with him; questions are stonewalled,
information withheld. What he knows he keeps to himself so that genuine communication with him is
impossible. His secrecy is seemingly purposeless, his mind impenetrable. After the incident at the
caves he shocks Fielding by asking if the expedition was successful, even though he knows of the
catastrophe. Fielding values his opinion and wants his advice but realises how impossible it is to pin
him down. When he asks if Aziz is innocent or guilty, Godbole engages him in a philosophic

20
discussion about the nature of good and evil but draws no satisfactory conclusions. Later, at Mau, it
appears that Godbole knows that Fielding has married Stella Moore, yet though he is aware of Aziz's
misconception he has made no attempt to clarify the matter. Finally he slips out of the novel as
silently as he slipped away from Chandrapore.

The Anglo-Indians Though they are essentially caricatures rather than living people, the Anglo-
Indians can be distinguished from each other. Ronny is the least exaggerated and may be thought of,
perhaps, as a functional character,

rather than as a caricature; it is necessary to the plot that Mrs Moore and Adela go to India with a
purpose, not just as holidaymakers; they must become involved with the Anglo-Indians so that they
are able to view the Civil Club from inside; conversely, the Anglo-Indians must have reasons for
involving the two ladies in their expatriate life. Ronny is the reason. We see him as a rather feeble
young man who has allowed his career to destroy his humanity. He is so impressed by the opinions of
his superiors that he fails to have any real opinions of his own; he finally abandons Adela because
marriage to her would end his career in India. After the trial he is transferred from Chandrapore, only
to make way for 'young Milner', who is the new City Magistrate, but likely to be little different from
Ronny himself. Of the longer established Anglo-Indians Turton and McBryde are the most
reasonable, CaUendar the worst. Early in the novel the latter is seen arrogantly asserting his authority
over Aziz whom he dislikes, partly because he suspects that the young Indian doctor's surgical skills
are greater than his own. On the other hand, Adela sees Turton and McBryde as being, with Fielding,
the only Englishmen who had shown any common politeness at the Bridge Party. As for the
Englishwomen, they are wholly objectionable and thus a powerful contrast to Adela and Mrs Moore.
The very exaggeration of the presentation of the Anglo-Indians makes them more acceptable to the
reader. Their faults are so gross that they become comic and their lack of realism allows Forster to
treat them harshly without appearing to be unfair.

4. STYLE AND LANGUAGE

A Passage to India is a skilfully crafted novel both in its overall pattern and in the details of its
language. Its tripartite form - Mosque, Caves, Temple is reflected by trinities of groupings within the
body of the novel: three settings, three seasons, three religions, three attempts to form bridges, three
children for both Aziz and Mrs Moore, three Moslem friends (Aziz, Hamidullah and Mahmoud Ali),
three English who cannot be considered as Anglo-Indian (Mrs Moore, Fielding and Adela). The subtle
insistence on the idea of 'threesomeness' emphasises separation and connection; the three parts of the
novel are separated from each other not only geographically but also emotionally, yet each part is
repeatedly brought to life in each of the other parts. So Part I begins with the caves and ends by
recalling Aziz's mosque; Part II begins with the caves, recalls the mosque and looks forward to Mau;

21
Part III, though taking place in Mau, simultaneously looks back to the events, characters and ideas of
the earlier parts.

The method of reference and cross-reference, of simultaneity within variety, results in a novel that is
highly structured yet not confined, a novel that opens out, rather than closes in. Not only the ending
but the novel itself may be seen as illustrating one of Forster's own precepts in Chapter 8 of Aspects
of the Novel: 'Expansion. That is the idea the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off
but opening out.' The most striking feature of the language of A Passage to India is its use of what
Forster himself, again in Chapter 8 of Aspects of the Novel, has described as 'rhythm'. He rejects the
word 'symbol' because he feels that symbols are inclined to take over a novel and deflect the reader
from the novelist's main purpose; for him, any motif a novelist uses should sometimes mean
everything and sometimes be forgotten and mean nothing. With these caveats about Forster's own
ideas, let us look in more detail at his use of symbol, image, rhythm, call it what you will. The caves
are central both to the whole pattern of the novel and to the imagery. Round, hollow, empty, they are
without adornment, without beauty, without religious significance. The sky dominates but the caves
set the tone of the novel. In their nihilism they hint at a nihilism at the heart of the universe; even
physically they resemble the empty dome of the sky reaching out to infinity; the flame of a match
reflected within their shining polished walls, like the stars in the vault of the sky, illuminates nothing
but itself; a sound made within one of the caves is infinitely echoed until it loses its own identity. In
The Cave and the Mountain Professor Wilfred Stone has shown how significant the circular pattern is
in Forster's work. Here, in A Passage to India, the concept of circularity is present in the form of the
novel, which constantly returns to previous starting points, in the caves themselves, in the snakes with
their tails in their mouths, in the repeated references to circles within circles which touch every aspect
of Indian life - nature itself, the social framework and the political set-up within the country. The
vocabulary reinforces the idea with the repeated use of words such as 'dome ... vault. .. circle ...
circumference ... arch ... globe ... bubble ... ball ... cycle'. Basic to the circular image and to the caves
is the echo - not merely auditory but visual and conceptual as well. It appears in the first chapter when
the distance between earth and stars is echoed by the ever-widening circles of distance behind them
and by the faint memory of the blue-tinted daytime sky. The more usual echo of sound does not occur
until the novel has progressed into the second part. By that time, however, the echo image is well
established and confirmed by the methods of its musical equivalents (again, see Chapter 8 of Aspects
of the Novel). A word or phrase apparently randomly used and abandoned is picked up later, dropped
again and again occurs: Mrs Moore's wasp which is first seen at the end of Chapter 3 is reintroduced
at the end of Chapter 4 in the passage about the missionaries; it is then left behind, forgotten, until it is
recalled together with Mrs Moore by Professor Godbole in Chapter 33. The subsequent references to
bees leave us slightly uneasy; this variation on the theme opens the novel out at the end, connecting
Mrs Moore with her son Ralph and again with Aziz in a mystic communion. Similarly, the phrase first

22
used by Aziz to Mrs Moore in the mosque, 'Then you are an Oriental' is echoed later in Chapter 27,
again by Aziz referring to Mrs Moore; it is recalled in Chapter 34 when Aziz uses it to Ralph Moore
and it is finally used by Fielding to Aziz in the last chapter of the book; Aziz does not reply to
Fielding's remark but the significance of this echo is not lost on him and it is underlined for us by the
narrator's words, 'Something - not a sight but a sound flitted past him'; what flits past is, of course, the
memory of his first use of these words to Mrs Moore and it leads him to add an affectionate comment
about her in his letter to Adela. There is a multiplicity of such echoing phrases: Godbole's song with
its yearning plea to the god who never comes; Mrs Moore's assertion that 'God is love'; the idea of
'Kindness, kindness and more kindness'; the smell of cow-dung connected with Hindus; jackals;
friezes; ghosts; 'the real India'; 'Esmiss Esmoor'; the colour red; nothingness. Each can be traced as it
wanders through the novel, accumulating references and building up a wealth of contextual
significance. Delicately handled leitmotifs, they never stand firmly as symbols but they serve to
enrich the whole fabric of the novel for the percipient reader, calling to mind the context of the earlier
references to add subtle layers of meaning as the novel progresses. Try to investigate some of these
yourself. More firmly set up as images are the snakes, the owls and the kites. It should be remembered
that, while for us in the West the snake is a symbol of evil, it is often in the east an object of
veneration, to be feared, perhaps (are not Christians bidden to fear God?), but also to be worshipped.
Hindus associate the snake or serpent with the god Siva and it is often prominent in their festivals;
here, in the naming ceremony of the god Shri Krishna, a 'cobra of papier-mache' appears suddenly on
the red carpet, simultaneously with the appearance of the cradle of the infant god. In reading A
Passage to India, then, we must rid ourselves of any prejudices connoting the snake with evil. Mrs
Moore is warned by Aziz about the danger from snakes but snakes do not constitute the threat to her
in India. Likewise, the deadly poisonous Russell's viper found crawling round a classroom in
Government College is of less concern to Fielding than the monstrous accusation made against Aziz.
Forster does not use the serpent as a religious symbol; it is neither evil nor good. Tail in mouth it
reflects the circular pattern and the empty 0 it forms echoes the nothingness, the nihilism of the caves.
Through it can be seen the contradictions of India, 'the serpent of eternity made of maggots' (Chapter
23). Kites too, preying upon human disaster, are woven into the pattern of

the book. Hovering over the Bridge Party, they are in their turn hovered over by a vulture, above
which, like the reverberations of an echo, is the sky. At the caves a Brahminy kite is introduced in a
similar context of echoes, reminding us that previous attempts to connect have failed. Yet, earlier,
before the party leaves Chandrapore, kites are mentioned in the same sentence as the stationmaster
and owls, so that our mind drifts back to the evening that Aziz first met Mrs Moore, when he heard
owls and smelt the fragrance of flowers from the stationmaster's garden. The actual echo which
dominates Part II of the novel is another thread of the intricately woven pattern of the book, just as
every repeated image or phrase becomes in turn part of the echo. It manifests itself first through its

23
absence on the plains before the Marabar Hills, emptying life of its meaning because nothing has any
consequence. In the cave a reversal occurs; there, the presence of an echo intimidates and takes away
hope: life has consequence (in that sounds no longer lie dead) but it is still without meaning as the
echo reduces everything to 'the same monotonous noise'. Long after the sound has died away the echo
remains; it destroys Mrs Moore who feels that the props supporting her spiritual life have been
withdrawn. It stays with Adela, haunting her with an indefinable malice; in the presence of Mrs
Moore it becomes less threatening but returns with all its force just before the trial, perhaps at the
moment of Mrs Moore's death. Not until she affirms Aziz's innocence does Adela's echo disappear;
certainly in this context the echo has been entirely associated with evil. Later Fielding is to reflect that
though the 'original sound may be harmless ... the echo is always evil' (Chapter 31) but his thought
progresses no further. The echo of the caves remains a strange phenomenon, adding to the mystic
dimension of the novel. Just as phrases and images flit through the pages, so matters of import in the
plot are often referred to briefly, recalled and apparently forgotten until the event they have prepared
us for occurs. For instance, the attentive reader should not be taken by surprise by Mrs Moore's death.
At the very outset Aziz observes that she is old 'with a red face and white hair' (Chapter 2); a little
later (Chapter 5) Ronny recognises the religious strain in his mother as a 'symptom of bad health'; she
tires easily and needs to rest after visits such as that to Government College; in the train on the way to
the caves she falls asleep and we are told that she is 'in rather low health' and after her experience in
the cave she thinks, 'I am going to be ill'; later she mentions that she gets headaches and puffs when
she walks. When we gather all these references together we realise that we have been given the
picture of a rather sick elderly woman who is constantly trying to do more than her state of health
makes possible. The 'brief episode of pain' she experiences as she approaches Bombay is the final
warning; Mrs Moore's death follows soon after, though the trial intervenes before we learn of it.

In a similar way we are prepared to meet at Mau the characters who had been involved in the action at
Chandrapore. Another aspect of Forster's language that is of special interest is his use of quotation and
allusion. Some quotations, such as the quatrain of Persian poetry quoted by Aziz in Chapter 3, are
used principally to enrich the texture of the novel. The series of biblical quotations, however, serve to
underline the spiritual content and, particularly in Part III, to universalise the religious mythology.
Prominence is given to the mystic side of Mrs Moore by subtly equating her with a god or Christ-
figure. When in Chapter 22 she complains about being held up from her business, the strange use of
the word 'business' at this point recalls Christ's words to his mother in St Luke 2.49 that he must be
about His Father's business; Chapter 23 parallels her with the sorrowing God of Lamentations 1.12 as
she thinks 'there is no sorrow like my sorrow'; during the trial, Adela remembers her sitting 'in the
shadow of a great rock' (see Isaiah 32.2) and when Mahmoud Ali calls upon the Anglo-Indians to
bring Mrs Moore into the court in order to 'save' Aziz it is ultimately her name that saves him.
Certainly in Part III Aziz is to hear her name chanted by the Hindu worshippers and to interpret it as

24
'the syllables of salvation'. Yet this identification is not insisted upon. References to it again wander
through the novel, are lost, picked up and dropped again. The very last mention of her in the book,
however, is Aziz's ' ... the name that is very sacred in my mind, namely Mrs Moore'. The Gokul
Ashtami festival in Part III is given wider significance by being repeatedly referred to in biblical
terms so that, whilst it retains its Hindu origin, it is also placed in a Christian context. The birth of
Krishna is at one and the same time the birth of Christ; Gokul is Bethlehem, King Kansa is Herod and
Krishna's salvation that of Christ. Echoes of biblical stories tantalise the reader with doubts and
memories: 'God so loved the world that he .. .' gave His only begotten Son (St John 3.16)?-No-' ... that
he took monkey'S flesh upon him'. There are references to the 'Ark of the Lord' (see, for example, I
Kings 2.26), to the 'Despised and Rejected' (see Isaiah 53.3); sorrow is annihilated (see Isaiah 35.10);
the freeing of prisoners takes place. The hope brought to men by the Birth ceremony is thus for all
men and, together with the abundant rains, it contains a promise for the future, again opening the
novel out, expanding it rather than seeking completion. Forster uses quite a number of specialised
Anglo-Indian, Hindi or Arabic words in the novel. In many cases their meaning is self-evident or
apparent from the context. The Penguin Modern Classics edition, however, contains a useful glossary
of such words and should solve any difficulties. In general, Forster's Indian characters speak excellent
standard English. Aziz's grasp of idiom impresses Fielding in Chapter 7, though in Chapter 2 he twice
uses the un-idiomatic 'in the same box' to Mrs Moore. When they talk among themselves Aziz and his
friends would probably, in fact, speak Arabic but Forster has not fallen into the trap of translating this
into a kind of 'pidgin English' to indicate that it is not their native language. Only Mohammed Latif
speaks the English of the stage-Indian, such as 'You spick a lie' (Chapter 13) when Aziz teases him
and this is at least partly because he is considered to be the comic turn of the Marabar expedition.
Aziz himself speaks of his 'imperfect English' but his imperfections are hardly noticeable to the
reader.

For details of contemporary criticism in this section see E. M. Forster, The Critical Heritage, edited by
Philip Gardner.

6.1 CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM

When A Passage to India was first published in June 1924 it was widely reviewed and generally well
received. Most of the reviewers recognised that the story itself is not (and was not intended to be) the
most significant aspect of the novel; they praised particularly the characterisation, the presentation of
the Anglo-Indian scene, and Forster's style. One of the first reviews was written by Rose Macaulay
and published in the Daily News for 4 June 1924, the very day of A Passage to India's publication.
She grasped immediately Forster's strengths:

His delicate character presentation ... his gentle and pervading humour, his sense and conveyed of the
beauty, the ridiculousness, and the nightmare strangeness, of all life, his accurate recording of social,

25
intellectual and spiritual shades and reactions, his fine-spun honesty of thought, his poetry and ironic
wit and concluded that it was 'the best and most interesting book' Forster had written. A little over a
week later, on 14June in the Nation and Athenaeum, Leonard Woolf outlined almost similar qualities
and urged his readers to 'rush out to the nearest bookseller, [and] buy a copy of the book'. Woolf's
comments tempted H. W. Massingham to review the reviewers; he asserted in the New Leader that
contemporary critics were too apt to write on literature 'as if its form-pattern, or its spiritual rhythm,
and not its meaning and content, were the most important thing about it'; yet, faced with the task of
isolating the 'subject' of the novel, Massingham was himself not fully confident, remarking tentatively
that Forster ... seems - perhaps he only seems - to suggest that if such Englishmen as Mr Fielding and
such Englishwomen as Mrs Moore could have their say, the irreconcilable might be reconciled, the
all-but-impossible accomplished. One of the most sensitive and perceptive of the early reviewers was
the novelist L. P. Hartley and it is worth quoting at length his comments on the incident in the cave
and his final conclusions:

... It is the central fact of the book, this gloomy expedition arranged with so much solicitude and
affection by Dr. Aziz to give his guests pleasure. A lesser novelist than Mr. Forster could have shown
everything going wrong, could have emphasized the tragic waste of Aziz's hospitality and kind
intentions, could have blamed Fate. But no one else could have given the affair its peculiar horror,
could have so dissociated it from the common course of experience and imagination, could have left it
at once so vague and so clear. Unlike many catastrophes in fiction, it seems unavoidable whichever
way we look at it; we cannot belittle it by saying that the characters should have behaved more
sensibly, the sun need not have been so hot or the scales weighted against happiness. And not only by
the accident of the caves does Mr. Forster illustrate the incalculable disastrous fluctuations of human
personality, but he subtly works in the black magic of India, crudely presented to us in a hundred
penny-dreadfuls about the stolen eyes of idols and death-bearing charms. A Passage to India is a
disturbing, uncomfortable book. Its surface is so delicately and finely wrought that it pricks us at a
thousand points. There is no emotional repose or security about it; it is for ever puncturing our
complacence, it is a bed of thorns. The humour, irony and satire that awake the attention and delight
the mind on every page all leave their sting. We cannot escape to the past or the future, because Mr.
Forster's method does not encourage the growth of those accretions in the mind; he pins us down to
the present moment, the discontent and pain of which cannot be allayed by reference to what has been
or to what will be. The action of the book is not fused by a continuous impulse; it is a series of intense
isolated moments. To overstate the case very much, the characters seem with each fresh sensation to
begin their lives again. And that perhaps is why no general aspect or outline of Mr. Forster's book is
so satisfactory as its details.

Though the majority of the reviews which appeared immediately after the novel's publication were
favourable, that of Gerald Gould in the Saturday Review struck a slightly sourer note. He was critical

26
of the very qualities that most other reviewers had praised. Reading his words today we must suspect
that he did not understand the novel and that he was irritated at not understanding it; this view is
reinforced by his final sentence, ' ... all Mr Forster's dazzling and baffling wisdom leaves us only
dazzled and baffled'. There were two groups of people who might be said to have a special interest in
A Passage to India - the Anglo-Indians and the Indians themselves. Predictably, perhaps, the Anglo-
Indians felt that Forster had caricatured them. Typical of their reaction was a letter from E. A. Horne,
published in the New Statesman for 16 August 1924. Mr Horne was generous in his appreciation of
Forster's presentation of his Indian characters: 'Mr Forster has created some wonderful characters. The
dear old Nawab Bahadur. .. the polished and charming Hamidullah; Mohammed Latif. .. Hassan ...
Aziz himself'. Even the 'English' people are real enough. Fielding, the author's mouthpiece; Adela,
with her frank, questioning, but ever baffled nature; old Mrs Moore, with her rather shiftless, rather
tiresome, mysticism, but her authentic beauty of soul.

However, he condemns utterly Forster's attempt to characterise the Anglo-Indians: Where have they
come from? What planet do they inhabit? One rubs one's eyes. They are not even good caricatures, for
an artist must see his original clearly before he can successfully caricature it. They are puppets,
simulacra. The only two of them that come alive at all are Ronny, the young and rapidly becoming
starched civilian, and the light-hearted Miss Derek .... And if these people are preposterous, equally
preposterous are the scenes which they enact. The Indians, on the other hand, saw the book as a
truthful reflection of the English in India. St Nihal Singh in the Calcutta Modem Review for
September 1924 commented ... The plot, though quite thin, has enabled the author to accomplish two
purposes. It has first of all given him the opportunity to show how the British in India despise and
ostracise Indians, while on their part the Indians mistrust and misjudge the British and how the gulf
between the two is widening and becoming unbridgeable. It has further given him a chance to
demonstrate the utter hopelessness of expecting any improvement from the efforts of Englishmen of

superior education who arrive in India at a mature age, because they can resist the bacillus of Anglo-
Indians only for a time ... The author's pictures are faithful and vivid. That is particularly the case in
regard to the Anglo-Indian characters he has created. Unlike that of later Indian critics, however,
Nihal Singh's stance is a slightly bitter one for he feels that, though the Anglo-Indians are accurately
portrayed, the Indians themselves have been misrepresented. A more balanced view may be found in
A Survey of Anglo-Indian Fiction by Bhupal Singh, published ten years after A Passage to India: Mr.
Forster's A Passage to India is an oasis in the desert of AngloIndian fiction. It is a refreshing book,
refreshing in its candour, sincerity, fairness, and art, and is worth more than the whole of the trash that
passes by the name of Anglo-Indian fiction, a few writers excepted. It is a clever picture of
Englishmen in India, a subtle portraiture of the Indian, especially the Moslem mind, and a fascinating
study of the problems arising out of the contact of India with the West. It aims at no solution, and
offers no explanation; it merely records with sincerity and insight the impressions of an English man

27
of letters of his passage through post-War India, an Englishman who is a master of his craft, and who
combines an original vision with a finished artistry. Like all original books it is intensely provoking. It
does not flatter the Englishman and it does not aim at pleasing the Indian; it is likely to irritate both. It
is not an imaginary picture, though it is imaginatively conceived. Most Anglo-Indian writers, as we
have seen, write of India and of Indians with contempt; a very few (mostly histOrians) go to the other
extreme. Mr. Forster's object is merely to discover how people behave in relation to one another under
the conditions obtaining in India at present. That he does not win applause either from India or Anglo-
India is a tribute to his impartiality.

Biography: The definitive biography is that by

 P. N. Furbank, E. M.Forster: A Life, 2 vols (Secker & Warburg, 1977-8).

Criticism

 Colmer, John, E. M. Forster: The Personal Voice (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975).
 Gardner, Philip (ed.), E. M Forster: The Critical Heritage (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973).
 Said. Edward. Orientalism
 Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism
 Stone, Wilfred, The Cave and the Mountain (Stanford University Press, 1966).
 Trilling, Lionel, E. M. Forster (Hogarth Press, 1944)
 Martin and Piggford eds. QUEER FORSTER. Chicago, University of Chicago Press

Reading list:

28
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES

COURSE DESCRIPTION: 101. RENAISSANCE, EARLY MODERNISM IN BRITAIN

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE: KING LEAR
LEVEL: MA in English and Culture Studies, First Semester
COURSE DURATION: 7TH SEPTEMBER 2016 TO MARCH 2017
COURSE FACILITATOR: DR. NANDINI BHATTACHARYA
Email. nandinibhattacharya60@gmail.com

 COURSE DESCRIPTION. This course on Renaissance and Early Modernism in Britain,

focuses on the plays of Shakespeare and especially King Lear

 COURSE RATIONALE/THRUST. It proposes a reading of Shakespeare’s play King

Lear in the light of the following issues:
 Publishing history, The Quarto edition that calls it the History of King Lear and the
Folio edition that describes it as the Tragedy of King
 The differences between creation of a single author text meant for reading or even for
dramatic performance and the creation of an early modern dramatic text. The nature of
collaboration and transaction that makes it distinctive.
 The history of editing, emendation, the Tate version that improves on it, resembling the
production of our epics. Collaborative, accretional, and layered.
 The importance of an Ur-text the myth of Lear, that creates greater complexities in
considering King Lear as a single author text meant for individual and individuated
reading.
 Mythic traces in Shakespeare’s work. Something fairy tale like, primeval about the
division of empire on the basis of love protestations, the ogre like nature of the
daughters, the raving king uttering curses, the unimaginable cruelty and bodily torture
exacted, the chaos in nature.
 The question of generic overlap. A history that is a tragedy that is coded as a comedy
but ends in disaster. A difficult play.

1
 The condition of post-Brexit England that makes the play relevant. Written in the
context of King James’ desire to unite Scotland and Wales. Lear’s division of kingdoms
serves as a kind of bad example.
 It is symptomatic of his last plays in the sense that he is concerned about relationship
between fathers and daughters, fathers and sons, and warring families. Compare with
Tempest, Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline. And Twelfth Night (surprisingly, the Fools in both
the plays, one a comedy and the other high tragedy, use the same song)
 The question of overlapping of private and public spheres as in today’s world of power
politics.
 Old age, and questions of generational divide.
 The Elizabethan stage, and the its conditions: - its rhetoricity due to constraints of an
open stage, signification only through words; conventions of disguise; of song making;
of soliloquies and asides; of boy actors, of fools and their centricity in marginality, the
defiance of generic purities, rules of unities and characterization.
 The question of tragedy. What makes Lear unbearable? What makes the Tate version
so acceptable.
 Key scenes:
1. the love contest,
2. Cordelia’s refusal to speak, “nothing”,
3. the division of kingdom,
4. Lear’s humiliation,
5. Lear in the storm,
6. Edmund’s legitimacy
7. Gloster’s blinding,
8. the Fool and Lear
9. Cordelia and Lear (and my poor Fool dead)
 Key issues
1. The question of need “O reason not the need!”, nothing is all, inversion of language,
menschenwurde.
2. The question of kingship, of power, an abiding theme in Shakespeare, a mirror for
magistrates
3. The question of foolery
4. The question of parenting, and filial gratitude

2
5. The question of body, open, bare, with borders between animal and human rendered
fuzzy and interchangeable
6. Reception in contemporary times.

 Please note that these are suggested areas of study and in no way
claim to read/ teach/evaluate King Lear in every possible way.
 We encourage students to add to our courses by coming prepared in
classes; suggesting extra reading or visual materials; citing scholars
who are currently working in this area in India; and creating a credible
research data bank

 COURSE OUTCOME
1. Acquaintance with Tragedy as a mode, as genre, as a way of being.
2. Acquaintance with the complex generic problems of the Lear text
3. Acquaintance with issues of textual production in Early modern England
4. Acquaintance with the Elizabethan stage, conventions and times.
5. Acquaintance with the complexity of its editorial history
6. Acquaintance with King Lear as a story of an old man, a king a father, and his daughters
and his subjects.
7. Acquaintance with Shakespeare’s life, times and politics, and Lear being produced by
the same.
8. Acquaintance with Shakespeare’s reception, and his growth from a popular playwright
to a cultural icon, an objective correlative of Englishness at an imperializing moment,
in a post-globalized world
9. Acquaintance with reception of Shakespeare in India
10. Acquaintance with fundamental questions regarding bio-politics in our times, and
Shakespeare’s relevance.

 MODE OF EVALUATION. End semester examination, internal examination and

continuous evaluation in the form of class quiz, debates, test.

3
 FURTHER READING
o Text: The Arden Edition of King Lear
o The Arden edition of Tempest
o Sophocles: Oedipus the King
o Oedipus at Colonus (406 BC according to Wiki, cant authenticate!)
o Antigone (441 BC)
o Aristotle: Poetics
o Everyman (a Morality play)
o Gorbuduc (probably by Norton and Sackville)
TEXTS MARKED IN YELLOW WILL BE PROVIDED IN E VERSIONS
o Charles Lamb: Tales of Shakespeare
o Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own (Essay on Shakespeare’s imaginary sister)
o T.S. Eliot. “Hamlet and His Problems” in SACRED WOOD
o A.C. Bradley: Shakespearean Tragedy
o Stephen Greenblatt: Renaissance Self-Fashioning
o Michael Shapiro: Cross Dressing in Shakespeare: A context for Elizabethan Gender
Studies
o Marjorie Garber: Shakespeare After All
o Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedies
o Michel Foucault Abnormal
o Giorgio Agamben: Homo Sacer
o The Open

 CINEMA:
o Grigori M. Kosinstev: King Lear 1971, (Film Show at the end of the course).
o Aparna Sen: 36 Chowringhee Lane

4
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES

COURSE DESCRIPTION: Paper 103: William Shakespeare I (Plays & Poems)

Text: William Shakespeare’s The Tempest

LEVEL: MA IN ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES, FIRST SEMESTER

COURSE DURATION: 7TH SEPTEMBER 2016 TO MARCH 2017

TEXT FACILITATOR: DR. ANGSHUMAN KAR

Email. angshus@gmail.com

COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course proposes a study of select tragedies, comedies and
sonnets of William Shakespeare with the express intent of making students aware of the
enduring importance of Shakespeare in his times and ours.

THRUST AREAS: In view of the objectives of the course mentioned above, The Tempest will be read
highlighting the following issues/areas:

1) Date (s) and Stage History of the play

2) Sources and Contexts of the play with particular focus on the New World Travel accounts
3) Genre of the play
4) As one of the last plays of Shakespeare with particular focus on the ending of the play and on the
issues of regeneration and reconciliation
5) As a pastoral play with special reference to Renaissance Pastoral and its English Developments
6) As a Renaissance response to the debate on nature vs nurture
7) As a masque with special reference to the masque of the Fourth Act
8) As a debate on the notions of freedom and service
9) The role and character of Prospero with particular focus on his use of magic and on the debates
regarding the presence of autobiographical elements in his making
10) Use of language and music in the play
11) The validity of the feminist readings of the play
12) (Imp?)possibility of the postcolonial readings of the play
13) After-life of the play on stage and screen as well as in literature in India and abroad

PLEASE NOTE THAT THESE ARE SUGGESTED AREAS OF STUDY AND IN NO

WAY CLAIM TO READ/TEACH/EVALUATE THE TEMPEST IN EVERY
POSSIBLE WAY.

We encourage students to add to our courses by coming prepared in classes; suggesting

extra reading or visual materials; citing scholars who are currently working in this area
in India; and creating a credible research data bank

COURSE OUTCOME:

1. Acquaintance with Shakespeare’s time with special reference to the New World developments
2. Acquaintance with the structural and thematic concerns of the last plays of Shakespeare.
3. Acquaintance with the genre of the pastoral and its English representations.
4. Acquaintance with sixteenth and seventeenth century debates on nature and nurture
5. Acquaintance with the genre of masque and its importance as performance in the Jacobean Court
6. Acquaintance with the notions of Renaissance magic and the role of the magician in the
Renaissance imaginary
7. Acquaintance with the politics of language and its role in subject formation
8. Acquaintance with feminist theories and their merits and limitations in reading Shakespearean
plays
9. Acquaintance with postcolonial theories and their merits and limitations in reading a New World
play like The Tempest
10. Acquaintance with the politics of adaptation/appropriation
MODES OF EVALUATION:

1) End semester examination

2) Internal examination
3) Continuous evaluation in the form of quiz and interactions with/among the students

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ADDITIONS TO THIS LIST ARE MOST WELCOME

IMPORTANT LINKS FOR E-MATERIALS:

1. The Tempest: A Critical Reader. Ed. Vaughan and Vaughan.

https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1472518411
2. Postcolonial Theory in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Gerlinde Didea.
https://books.google.com/books?isbn=3640246780
3. “Montaigne's ‘Cannibals’ and ‘The Tempest’ Revisited.” Kenji Go. Studies in Philology.
Vol. 109, No. 4 (Summer, 2012), pp. 455-473.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/24392013?Search=yes&resultItemClick=true&searchText=T
he&searchText=Tempest&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3DThe
%2BTempest%26amp%3Bacc%3Doff%26amp%3Bwc%3Don%26amp%3Bfc%3Doff%
26amp%3Bgroup%3Dnone&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

4. Shakespeare as a Way of Life: Skeptical Practice and the Politics of Weakness. JAMES
KUZNER.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt19x3jfn?Search=yes&resultItemClick=true&searchText=
The&searchText=Tempest&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3DTh
e%2BTempest%26amp%3Bacc%3Doff%26amp%3Bwc%3Don%26amp%3Bfc%3Doff
%26amp%3Bgroup%3Dnone

5. “Revisiting ‘The Tempest,’” Arthur F. Kinney. Modern Philology. Vol. 93, No. 2 (Nov.,
1995), pp. 161-177.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/438504?Search=yes&resultItemClick=true&searchText=The
&searchText=Tempest&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3DThe%2
BTempest%26amp%3Bacc%3Doff%26amp%3Bwc%3Don%26amp%3Bfc%3Doff%26a
mp%3Bgroup%3Dnone&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
The University of Burdwan

Department of English and Culture Studies

Course Description: Paper 103 William Shakespeare I (Plays and Poems): Twelfth Night

Course Level: M.A. First Semester

Course Duration: October, 2016- March 2017

Course Instructor : Dr Arpita Chattaraj (Mukhopadhyay)

lailychatt@gmail.com

Course Description: This course focuses on Shakespeare’s plays and poems with reference to
Twelfth Night. The course intends to inculcate in the students an understanding of Shakespearean
canon along with reference to the historical, cultural and political impetus to his artistic creations.

Suggested Text: Twelfth Night, The Arden Shakespeare, Ed. J.M.Lothian and T.W. Craik. 2006.

Course rationale: The course offers to evaluate and interpret Twelfth Night from the perspective of
the following issues:

 The textual, performance history and critical history of Twelfth Night in order to trace the
evolution of the reception and interpretation of the play across space and time.

 Despite being one of Shakespeare’s more popular plays Twelfth Night is riddled with
uncertainties and ambiguities which are seldom associated with his ‘romantic comedies’.
An engagement with this curious mix of mirth and melancholy, “hilarity and discomfort’,
‘music and dissonance’ in the play will serve in raising pertinent questions, the scope of
which may well go beyond the text.

 The carnivalesque element of the play which is an important signifier to explore the
ambivalences of the festive mood of the play
 Romantic love and its paradoxes
 Disguise /mistaken identities with its implications of gender fluidities vis-à-vis cross-
dressing with specific reference to Renaissance England

 The ethical questions of Malvolio’s gulling , Feste’s songs and the ambiguous ending
Mode of Evaluation: End semester examination, Internal examination

The students will also be encouraged to make class presentations on the play to foster
interactive and dynamic pedagogic practices.

Bruce Smith's Twelfth Night: Texts and Contexts, 2001

Shakespeare: A Bibliographical Guide (1990), edited by
Stanley Wells
Larry Champion's 1986 TheEssential Shakespeare
Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the
Renaissance Stage
S Baker, Herschel. "The Source of Twelfth Night." Twelfth Night, or What You Wi
By William Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Ed. Herschel Baker. New York: Signet,
1998. 108-109.
, ed. Twelfth Night, or What You Will. By William Shakespeare. 2nd ed.
New York: Signet, 1998.
Bamber, Linda. Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in
Shakespeare. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982.
Barber, C.L. Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its
Relation to Social Custom. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959.
Billington, Michael, ed. Approaches to Twelfth Night. By Bill Alexander, John
Barton, John Caird, Terry Hands. Directors' Shakespeare. London: Nick
Hern, 1990.
Bristol, Michael D. Carnival and Theater: Plebian Culture and the Structure of
Authority in Renaissance England. New York: Methuen, 1985.

Film : Trevor Nunn. Dir. Twelfth Night, 1996.

THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES

COURSE: JOHN MILTON’S PARADISE LOST BOOK IV

PAPER: 101 UNIT II; MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE ENGLISH
LITERATURE (EXCLUDING SHAKESPEARE) I
LEVEL: M.A., FIRST SEMESTER
COURSE DURATION: SEPTEMBER 2016 TO MARCH 2017
COURSE FACILITATOR: DR. SUBHAJIT SEN GUPTA
Email. subhajits2000@gmail.com

 COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course proposes to introduce students to the chief

ideas that characterized the Renaissance and the Reformation in England, and to study
Book IV of Milton’s Paradise Lost in the context of social, political and religious
events that contributed to the formation of early modern culture in England.

 COURSE RATIONALE/THRUST: It proposes a reading of Paradise Lost Book IV

in the light of the following issues:

 Life of Milton (students will be given an outline of Milton’s life)

 The Biblical story that Milton used for Paradise Lost; the Christian subject of the
poem — Milton probably believed in the story; his doctrine of accommodation would
not have denied its contents — Milton’s view (shared, in some ways, by C. S. Lewis)
bases moral and religious attitudes on the ‘events’ of a divine drama
 The bold scepticism of many twentieth-century orthodox theologians towards Genesis
— the Biblical story of man’s creation and fall, they implied, is mythical just Greek
and Roman stories about gods and goddesses were mythical and factually untrue —
this scepticism marks the transition from an older intellectual climate to a modern one
 Does the impressive ‘rationality’ of the poem persuade us to take the myth seriously?
 Milton’s grand style; his rhetorical virtues; the persuasive quality of Milton’s rhetoric;
Milton keeps the simple mythical framework central and uses his enormous
intellectual energy to make it acceptable — Milton’s grand style and Longinus’s On
the Sublime
 Dominant religious ideas during the Renaissance and the Reformation — Milton lived
at a time when it was not merely possible, but necessary, to see human history as
played out against a background of divine will / divine providence (‘the ways of God
to men’ – Book I, 26)
 Publishing history; Milton’s original wish to write a tragedy on the subject; Paradise
Lost was published in 1667 but Milton had probably finished writing the poem by
1663
 Milton’s frequent allusions to myths, classical and other — does the poem’s
extraordinary power derive partly from its capacity, as myth, to stimulate deep and
very primitive layers of human feeling?
 The structure of Milton’s cosmos — Paradise Lost was published in 1667, well over a
century after the appearance of Copernicus’s revolutionary theory concerning the
structure of the universe (1543), and around five decades after Galileo’s conclusive
support (1610) for the Copernican thesis — why does Milton’s universe conform to a
scientifically obsolete scheme?
 Milton’s ideas about the cosmos and the beginnings of the universe (see, for example,
Book VII, 243-60) and their relation to those of Hesiod and Sir James Jeans
 The description of Paradise in Book IV — Paul Elmer More’s equating of Milton’s
Paradise with the Hesperian Gardens of Homer, Hesiod’s Golden Age, the Celtic Tir-
nan-og, the Arcadia of the pastoral poets and of Sidney, the Forest of Arden,
Tennyson’s island valley of Avilion, and all the other Utopias to be found in myth and
literature
 The epic as a literary genre — classical epics — primary and secondary epics —
features of epic poetry in Paradise Lost — Milton uses a classical genre to tell a
Christian story
 Milton’s epic similes and the role they play
 Milton’s descriptive powers — Paradise Lost is more elaborately descriptive than
other epics because the beauty of the world and its inhabitants is a significant theme
in the poem
 Milton’s representation of Satan — the gradual scaling down of Satan — the
magnificent ‘hero’ (the Romantic critics mistook him to be the hero of the poem) who
strode over the burning floor of Hell in Book I is shown in Book IV laboriously
making his way up a hillside, only to find his way blocked by tangled undergrowth
 The doctrine of free will — this doctrine is fundamental to Paradise Lost — as free
agents, angels and humans were expected to love God and to serve him voluntarily —
however, as free agents, they could choose not to obey God — obedience turns out to
be a state of precarious equilibrium, disturbed first by Lucifer (later renamed Satan)
and then by Adam and Eve — yet, while the punishment of Satan is absolute, the
punishment of Adam and Eve is tentative

 ADVICE TO STUDENTS:
 Please note that the issues suggested above do not claim to examine Paradise Lost
Book IV in every possible way.
 Students are advised and encouraged to enrich the course by reading the text
thoroughly, and by suggesting resources (reading and visual material, for example)
and scholarship, past and present. This will help create a credible research data bank.

 COURSE OUTCOME
1. Acquaintance with epic as a genre
2. Acquaintance with the history of ideas of the European Renaissance and Reformation
3. Acquaintance with the Early Modern English culture
4. Acquaintance with Milton’s works and the publication history of Paradise Lost
5. Acquaintance with the dominant religious beliefs of Milton’s time
6. Acquaintance with Milton’s religious beliefs
7. Acquaintance with Milton’s conception of the universe
8. Acquaintance with the epic conventions in Paradise Lost
9. Acquaintance with the episodes in Paradise Lost Book IV, and with the story of the
whole poem in general
10. Acquaintance with paintings related to the subject of Milton’s Paradise Lost
11. Acquaintance with Milton’s style, including his unusual syntax, grand rhetoric and his
powers of description
 MODE OF EVALUATION.
 End-of-semester examination, internal examination and continuous evaluation in the
form of class quiz, debates, seminar presentations by students, tests.

 RECOMMENDED READING

Editions of Milton’s works

 Patterson, F. A. (gen. ed.) The Works of John Milton, 20 vols. (1931-40)
 Wolfe, D. M. (gen. ed.) The Complete Prose Works of John Milton (1953)
 Fully annotated one-volume editions of Milton’s poetry by M. Y. Hughes (1957)
Douglas Bush (1966), and John Carey and A. D. S. Fowler (1968)
 Gang, T. M. (introduction and notes) Paradise Lost Book IV (1974)

Biographies
The best biographies are by E. M. W. Tilyard (1930), J. H. Hanford (1949), David
Daiches (1957), Emile Saillens (1959, trans. 1964), and Douglas Bush (1964). Students
may also see W. R. Parker’s Milton: A Biography (1968).

On Milton and his age

Bush, D. The Renaissance and English Humanism (1939)
Willey, B. The Seventeenth-Century Background (1934)
Wolfe, D. M. Milton in the Puritan Revolution (1934)
Hughes, M. Y. Ten Perspectives on Milton (1965)
Patrides, C. A. Milton and the Christian Tradition ((1966)
Steadman, J. M. Milton and the Renaissance Hero (1967)
Svendsen, K. Milton and Science (1956)
Tillyard, E. M. The English Epic and its Background (1954)
Langdon, I. Milton’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art (1924)
Prince, F. T. The Italian Element in Milton’s Verse (1954)
Rajan, B. The Lofty Rhyme (1970)
Ricks, C. Milton’s Grand Style (1963)
Kermode, F. (ed.) The Living Milton (1960)
Criticism on Paradise Lost
Frye, N. Five Essays on Milton’s Epics (1966)
Lewis, C. S. A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’ (1942)
Broadbent, J. B. Some Graver Subject (1960)
Empson, W. Milton’s God (rev. Ed., 1965)
Gardner, H. A Reading of ‘Paradise Lost’ (1965)
Patrides, C. A. (ed.) Approaches to ‘Paradise Lost’ (1968)
Patrides, C. A. (ed.) Milton’s Epic Poetry: Essays on ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Paradise
Regained’ (1967)

Recent criticism (1980 and after) on Milton, his age, and Paradise Lost

Martz, L. Poet of Exile (1980) [Ovid and Milton]

Lewalski, B. Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (1985) [genre]
Martindale, C. The Transformation of Classical Epic (1986) [genre]
Quint, D. Epic and Empire: Politics and Form from Virgil to Milton (1993) [genre: epic]
Corns, T. Regaining Paradise Lost (1994)
Danielson, D. (ed.) Cambridge Companion to Milton (1999) [essays; general introduction]
Edwards, K. L. Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry in Paradise Lost (1999)
Jordan, M. Milton and Modernity (2000) [masculinity; political philosophy]
Corns, T. A Companion to Milton (2001) [general introduction]
Lewalski, B. The Life of John Milton (2002) [biography]
Kean, M. (ed.) John Milton’s Paradise Lost: A Sourcebook (2005) [introduction, sources]
Beer, A. Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot (2008) [biography]
___________________
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES

COURSE DESCRIPTION: 102. Medieval and Renaissance English Literature (Excluding

Shakespeare) II
BEN JONSON: Volpone
Level: MA in English and Culture Studies, First Semester
Course Duration: 7TH SEPTEMBER 2016 TO MARCH 2017
Course Facilitator: Dr. Arnab Kumar Sinha
Email: arnab.ks@gmail.com
 Course Description: This course on Medieval and Renaissance English Literature focuses on
Ben Jonson’s play Volpone.

 Thrust areas: It proposes a reading of Ben Jonson’s play Volpone in the light of the following
issues:
 Greed as the central idea. Jonson’s critique of the contemporary materialistic society. The
play is considered to be a satire on human greed.
 Animal imagery in the play. Significantly, all the major characters in the play are named
after the animals. Feeding image is a major symbol in the play.
 Disguise as one of the core issues. Volpone cheats the three legacy hunters: Voltore,
Corvino and Corbaccio, by playing the role of an old and diseased person. Role playing is
also an important aspect in the play.
 Market economy and problematics of identity. The characters in the play are constantly
changing their identities to accommodate themselves in a society that is driven by the
forces of market capitalism. Money making, self transformation and playing a role were
important traits of the urban Jacobean consciousness (McEvoy 55).
 Source of Jonson’s Volpone. The story and the characters of Volpone are drawn from
different classical sources. The medieval beast epic of Reynard the Fox, Aesop’s fable of
the fox who pretends to be dead to catch birds of prey and Horace’s Satires are the primary
sources from which Jonson derived the story of Volpone. Critics consider Petronius’ novel
The Satyricon as one of the important sources from which Jonson drew the idea of
characterization in Volpone. The writings of the Greek writer Lucian also influenced
Jonson.
 Double plot in the play. How is the sub plot connected to the main plot? The characters of
the sub plot seem to mock the seriousness of the characters of main plot. Relationship
between Volpone and Sir Politic Would Be. Also, the relationship between the three legacy
hunters and Mrs. Politic Would Be.
 Celia’s role. She resists the commodification of her character. What differentiates her from
the other characters of the play? Why did Jonson choose the name Celia?
 Mosca’s role in the play.
 What kind of comedy is Volpone? Is it a comedy of humours or a satirical comedy?

 Key scenes:
1. The opening soliloquy of Volpone
2. Mountebank scene
3. Mosca’s soliloquy in Act III, Scene i
4. The first meeting of Volpone and Celia with a special focus on the songs
5. Court room scenes in Act IV & V
6. Tortoise scene

 Please note that these are suggested areas of study and in no way claim to read/ teach/evaluate
Volpone in every possible way.
 We encourage students to add to our courses by coming prepared in classes; suggesting extra
reading or visual materials; citing scholars who are currently working in this area in India; and
creating a credible research data bank

 Course Outcome
1. Acquaintance with the features of Jonsonian comedy.
2. Acquaintance with the conventional criticisms related to the play.
3. Acquaintance with the contemporary trends of criticisms related to Volpone.
4. Acquaintance with Jonson’s life, times and politics.
5. Acquaintance with the significance of a play like Volpone in a post-globalized world.

 Mode of Evaluation
End semester examination, internal examination and continuous evaluation in the form of class
quiz, debates, test.

 Further Reading
Barton, A. Ben Jonson: Dramatist, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Craig, D. Ben Jonson: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1990.
Creaser, J. ed. Volpone, or The Fox, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1978.
Dutton, R. ed. Ben Jonson, Longman Critical Reader, London: Longman, 2000.
Loxley, James. The Complete Critical Guide to Ben Jonson. London: Routledge, 2002.
McEvoy, Sean. Ben Jonson: Renaissance Dramatist. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2008.
Steggle, Matthew. Volpone: Critical Guide. London: Continuum Books, 2011.
Barish, Jonas A. Jonson: Volpone (Casebook Series). London: Macmillan, 1972.
Cousins, A.D. and Alison V. Scott. Ben Jonson and the Politics of Genre. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009.

 Film version of the text

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film, The Honey Pot (1967)
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES

COURSE DESCRIPTION: 105 : CLASSICAL LITERATURE AND CRITICISM (

EUROPEAN AND INDIAN) : ARISTOTLE’S POETICS

LEVEL: MA IN ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES, FIRST SEMESTER

COURSE DURATION: 7TH SEPTEMBER 2016 TO MARCH 2017

COURSE FACILITATOR: SANJOY MALIK

Email. sanjoymalikbu@gmail.com

 COURSE DESCRIPTION. This course on Classical Literature and Criticism (

European and Indian ) particularly focuses on Aristotle’s Poetics.
 COURSE RATIONALE/THRUST. It proposes a reading of Aristotle’s Poetics
addressing the following issues:
1. Aristotle’s doctrine of Imitation.
2. Aristotle’s doctrine of Catharsis
3. Aristotle’s views on Plot.
4. Aristotle’s views on Hamartia
5. Aristotle’s views on ideal tragic hero.
6. Comparison between tragedy and epic poetry.
7. Comparison between tragedy and history.
8. Relevance of Aristotle in contemporary time.
9. Key terms: a) Anagnorisis b) Peripety c) Beauty d) Tragic deed d) Ideal form of
Discovery e) Tragic flaw
10. Acquaintance with the ways Aristotle is similar to Plato in approaches to literary
criticism.

1
11. Acquaintance with the ways Aristotle is different from Plato in approaches to
literary criticism.

 We encourage students to add to our courses by coming prepared in classes;

suggesting extra reading or visual materials; citing scholars who are currently
working in this area in India; and creating a credible research data bank

COURSE OUTCOME

1. Acquaintance with Aristotle and his work.

2. Acquaintance with Aristotle’s treatment of poetry and fine arts.

3. Acquaintance with Aristotle’s idea of tragedy in a comprehensive manner.

4. Acquaintance with the reception of Aristotle in different ages.

5. Acquaintance with the relevance of Aristotle in contemporary time.

 MODES OF EVALUATION.
1) End semester examination,
2) Internal Assessment
3) Continuous evaluation in the form of class quiz, debates, test etc.

1. Text: Aristotle on the Art of Poetry. Translated by Ingram Bywater. Preface by

2
5. Butcher, S.H. Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art. New Delhi: Kalyani
Publishers, 1996
6. Hudson, William Henry. An Introduction to the Study of Literature. Kolkata:
Radha Publishing House, 2008.
7. Rudra, Arup. Trends of European and English Criticism. Kolkata: G.J. Book
Society, 2004.
8. Scott-James, R.A. The Making of English Literature. Delhi: Surjeet Publicatons,
2008.
9. Watson, George. The literary Critics.: A Study of English Descriptive
Criticism.Delhi: Doaba Publishing, 1962.
10. Wimsatt, William K., Cleanth Brooks. Literary Criticism: A Short History. New
Delhi: Oxford and IB publishing, 1957.

3
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN DEPARTMENT OF
ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES COURSE
DESCRIPTIONS

COURSE DESCRIPTION:
Paper 103: William Shakespeare I (Plays & Poems)
Text: William Shakespeare’s The Tempest

LEVEL: MA in English and Culture Studies, First Semester

DURATION SEPTEMBER 2017 TO MARCH 2018

COURSE FACILITATOR:
DR. ANGSHUMAN KAR [Email. angshus@gmail.com]

COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course proposes a study of select tragedies, comedies and sonnets of William
Shakespeare with the express intent of making students aware of the enduring importance
of Shakespeare in his times and ours.

THRUST AREAS
In view of the objectives of the course mentioned above, The Tempest will be read
highlighting the following issues/areas:

1) Date (s) and Stage History of the play

2) Sources and Contexts of the play with particular focus on the New World Travel
accounts
3) Genre of the play
4) As one of the last plays of Shakespeare with particular focus on the ending of the
play and on the issues of regeneration and reconciliation
5) As a pastoral play with special reference to Renaissance Pastoral and its
English Developments
6) As a Renaissance response to the debate on nature vs nurture
7) As a masque with special reference to the masque of the Fourth Act
8) As a debate on the notions of freedom and service
9) The role and character of Prospero with particular focus on his use of magic and
on the debates regarding the presence of autobiographical elements in his making
10) Use of language and music in the play
11) The validity of the feminist readings of the play
12) (Imp?)possibility of the postcolonial readings of the play
13) After-life of the play on stage and screen as well as in literature in India and abroad
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN DEPARTMENT OF
ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES COURSE
DESCRIPTIONS

PLEASE NOTE THAT THESE ARE SUGGESTED AREAS OF STUDY AND IN

NO WAY CLAIM TO READ/TEACH/EVALUATE THE TEMPEST IN EVERY
POSSIBLE WAY.

We encourage students to add to our courses by coming prepared in classes;

suggesting extra reading or visual materials; citing scholars who are currently
working in this area in India; and creating a credible research data bank

COURSE OUTCOME
1) Acquaintance with Shakespeare’s time with special reference to the New
World developments
2) Acquaintance with the structural and thematic concerns of the last plays
of Shakespeare.
3) Acquaintance with the genre of the pastoral and its English representations.
4) Acquaintance with sixteenth and seventeenth century debates on nature and nurture
5) Acquaintance with the genre of masque and its importance as performance in
the Jacobean Court
6) Acquaintance with the notions of Renaissance magic and the role of the magician in
the Renaissance imaginary
7) Acquaintance with the politics of language and its role in subject formation
8) Acquaintance with feminist theories and their merits and limitations in
reading Shakespearean plays
9) Acquaintance with postcolonial theories and their merits and limitations in reading
a New World play like The Tempest
10) Acquaintance with the politics of adaptation/appropriation

MODES OF EVALUATION
11) End semester examination
12) Internal examination
13) Continuous evaluation in the form of quiz and interactions with/among the students

FURTHER READING
TEXT
1) V. M. Vaughan and A. T. Vaughan, eds. The Tempest. The Arden Shakespeare.
Surrey: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd, 1999. (Indian Distributor EWP)
2) Kermode, Frank, ed. The Tempest. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Methuen, 1964.
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN DEPARTMENT OF
ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES COURSE
DESCRIPTIONS

3) Orgel, Stephen, ed. The Tempest. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: OUP, 1987.
4) Verity, A. W. The Tempest. Cambridge: CUP, 1962.

REFERENCE BOOKS
Bloom, Harold, ed. William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. New York: Chelsea House,
1988.
Chaudhuri, Sukanta. Renaissance Pastoral and Its English Developments.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.
Dowden, Edward. Shakespeare: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art. New
York: Harper, 1875.
Drakakis, John, ed. Alternative Shakespeares. London: Methuen, 1985.
Eagleton, Terry. Shakespeare and Society: Critical Studies in Shakespearean Drama.
New York: Schocken, 1967.
Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to
Shakespeare. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1980.
Hirst, David L. Tragicomedy. Critical Idiom Series. London: Methuen, 1984.
Hulme, Peter and William H. Sherman, eds. The Tempest. Norton Critical
South Asian Edition. New York: Norton, 2005.
---. The Tempest and Its Travels. London: Reaktion Books, 2000.
Kastan, David Scott. Shakespeare After Theory. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Kennedy Dennis. Looking at Shakespeare: A Visual History of Twentieth Century
Performance. Cambridge: CUP, 2001.
Kermode, Frank. William Shakespeare: The Final Plays. London: Longmans Group
for British Council, 1973.
Knight, G. Wilson. The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s
Final Plays. 1947. London: Methuen, 1965.
Kott, Jan. Shakespeare: Our Contemporary. New York: Doubleday, 1964.
Lal Ananda and Sukanta Chowdhury, eds. Shakespeare on the Calcutta Stage: A
Checklist. Kolkata: Papyrus, 2001.
Loomba, Ania. Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama. Manchester: Manchester UP,
1989.
Murry, John Middleton. Shakespeare. London: Jonathan Cape, 1936.
Orgel, Stephen. The Illusion of Power: Political Theatre in the English Renaissance.
Berkley: University of California Press, 1975.
Palmer, D.J. Shakespeare’s Later Comedies. Baltimore: Penguin, 1971.
---. The Tempest: A Casebook. Rev. Ed. Hampshire: Macmillan, 1991.
Ryan, Kierman, ed. Shakespeare: The Last Plays. London: Longman, 1999.
Sengupta, S.C. Shakespearean Comedy. London: OUP, 1950.
Tillyard, E.M.W. Shakespeare’s Last Plays. London: Chatto and Windus, 1958.
Welsford, Enid. The Court Masque: A Study of the Relationship between Poetry
and the Revels. Cambridge: CUP, 1927.
Young, David. The Heart’s Forest: A Study of Shakespeare’s Pastoral Plays.
New Haven: Yale Up, 1972.
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN DEPARTMENT OF
ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES COURSE
DESCRIPTIONS

Essays

Barker Francis and Peter Hulme. “‘Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish’: The
Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest.” Alternative Shakespeares. Ed. John
Drakakis. London: Methuen, 1985. 191-205.
Brotton, Jerry. “‘This Tunis, Sir, was Carthage’: Contesting Colonialism in The
Tempest.” Post-colonialShakespeares. Ed. Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin.
London: Routledge, 1998. 23-42.
Brown, Paul. “‘This thing of Darkness I acknowledge mine’: The Tempest and the
Discourse of Colonialism.” Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural
Materialism. Ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Manchester: Manchester UP,
1985. 48-71.
Mowatt, Barbara A. “Prospero’s Books.” Shakespeare Quarterly 52 (2001): 1-33.
Orgel, Stephen. “Prospero’s Wife.” Representations 8 (1984): 1-13.
Wickham Glynne. “Masque and Anti-Masque in The Tempest.” Essays and Studies 28
(1975): 1-14.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ADDITIONS TO THIS LIST ARE MOST WELCOME

IMPORTANT LINKS FOR E-MATERIALS

1. The Tempest: A Critical Reader. Ed. Vaughan and Vaughan.

https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1472518411

2. Postcolonial Theory in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Gerlinde

Didea. https://books.google.com/books?isbn=3640246780

3. “Montaigne's ‘Cannibals’ and ‘The Tempest’ Revisited.” Kenji Go. Studies in Philology.
Vol. 109, No. 4 (Summer, 2012), pp. 455-473.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/24392013?Search=yes&resultItemClick=true&searchText
=The&searchText=Tempest&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3
DThe%2BTempest%26amp%3Bacc%3Doff%26amp%3Bwc%3Don%26amp%3Bfc
%3Doff%26amp%3Bgroup%3Dnone&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

4. Shakespeare as a Way of Life: Skeptical Practice and the Politics of Weakness.

JAMES KUZNER.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt19x3jfn?Search=yes&resultItemClick=true&searchTe
xt=The&searchText=Tempest&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery
%3DThe%2BTempest%26amp%3Bacc%3Doff%26amp%3Bwc%3Don%26amp%3B
fc%3Doff%26amp%3Bgroup%3Dnone

5. “Revisiting ‘The Tempest,’” Arthur F. Kinney. Modern Philology. Vol. 93, No. 2
(Nov., 1995), pp. 161-177.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/438504?Search=yes&resultItemClick=true&searchText=T
he&searchText=Tempest&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3DT
he%2BTempest%26amp%3Bacc%3Doff%26amp%3Bwc%3Don%26amp%3Bfc%3
Doff%26amp%3Bgroup%3Dnone&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN DEPARTMENT OF
ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES COURSE
DESCRIPTIONS

COURSE DESCRIPTION:
Paper 103: William Shakespeare I (Plays & Poems)
Text: William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night

LEVEL: MA in English and Culture Studies, First Semester

DURATION SEPTEMBER 2017 TO MARCH 2018

COURSE FACILITATOR:
DR ARPITA CHATTARAJ (MUKHOPADHYAY)[Email. lailychatt@gmail.com]

COURSE DESCRIPTION
Course Description: This course focuses on Shakespeare’s plays and poems with reference to
Twelfth Night. The course intends to inculcate in the students an understanding of
Shakespearean canon along with reference to the historical, cultural and political impetus to
his artistic creations.
Suggested Text: Twelfth Night, The Arden Shakespeare, Ed. J.M.Lothian and T.W.
Craik. 2006.

COURSE RATIONALE
The course offers to evaluate and interpret Twelfth Night from the perspective of the
following issues:
1. The textual, performance history and critical history of Twelfth Night in order to trace
the evolution of the reception and interpretation of the play across space and time.
2. Despite being one of Shakespeare’s more popular plays Twelfth Night is riddled with
uncertainties and ambiguities which are seldom associated with his ‘romantic
comedies’. An engagement with this curious mix of mirth and melancholy, “hilarity
and discomfort’, ‘music and dissonance’ in the play will serve in raising pertinent
questions, the scope of which may well go beyond the text.
3. The carnivalesque element of the play which is an important signifier to explore the
ambivalences of the festive mood of the play
4. Romantic love and its paradoxes
5. Disguise /mistaken identities with its implications of gender fluidities vis-à-vis cross-
dressing with specific reference to Renaissance England
6. The ethical questions of Malvolio’s gulling , Feste’s songs and the ambiguous ending

MODES OF EVALUATION
1) End semester examination
2) Internal examination
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN DEPARTMENT OF
ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES COURSE
DESCRIPTIONS

The students will also be encouraged to make class presentations on the play to foster
interactive and dynamic pedagogic practices.

SUGGESTED READING
Bruce Smith's Twelfth Night: Texts and Contexts, 2001
Shakespeare: A Bibliographical Guide (1990), edited by Stanley Wells
Larry Champion's 1986 TheEssential Shakespeare Shakespeare Without
Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage
S Baker, Herschel. "The Source of Twelfth Night." Twelfth Night, or What You Wi By
William Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Ed. Herschel Baker. New York: Signet, 1998. 108-109.
, ed. Twelfth Night, or What You Will. By William Shakespeare. 2nd ed. New York:
Signet, 1998.
Bamber, Linda. Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre
in Shakespeare. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982.
Barber, C.L. Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its
Relation to Social Custom. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959.
Billington, Michael, ed. Approaches to Twelfth Night. By Bill Alexander, John Barton,
John Caird, Terry Hands. Directors' Shakespeare. London: Nick Hern, 1990.
Bristol, Michael D. Carnival and Theater: Plebian Culture and the Structure
of Authority in Renaissance England. New York: Methuen, 1985.

Film: Trevor Nunn. Dir Twelfth Night, 1996.

THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN DEPARTMENT OF
ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES COURSE
DESCRIPTIONS

COURSE DESCRIPTION:
101 Unit II Medieval And Renaissance English Literature
(Excluding Shakespeare) I
Text: John Milton’s Paradise Lost Book Iv

LEVEL: MA in English and Culture Studies, First Semester

DURATION SEPTEMBER 2017 TO MARCH 2018

COURSE FACILITATOR:
DR. SUBHAJIT SEN GUPTA [Email. subhajits2000@gmail.com]

COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course proposes to introduce students to the chief ideas that characterized the
Renaissance and the Reformation in England, and to study Book IV of Milton’s Paradise
Lost in the context of social, political and religious events that contributed to the formation of
early modern culture in England.

COURSE RATIONALE/THRUST
It proposes a reading of Paradise Lost Book IV in the light of the following issues:

1. Life of Milton (students will be given an outline of Milton’s life)

2. The Biblical story that Milton used for Paradise Lost; the Christian subject of the
poem — Milton probably believed in the story; his doctrine of accommodation
would not have denied its contents — Milton’s view (shared, in some ways, by C. S.
Lewis) bases moral and religious attitudes on the ‘events’ of a divine drama
3. The bold scepticism of many twentieth-century orthodox theologians towards Genesis
— the Biblical story of man’s creation and fall, they implied, is mythical just Greek
and Roman stories about gods and goddesses were mythical and factually untrue — this
scepticism marks the transition from an older intellectual climate to a modern one
4. Does the impressive ‘rationality’ of the poem persuade us to take the myth seriously?
5. Milton’s grand style; his rhetorical virtues; the persuasive quality of Milton’s rhetoric;
Milton keeps the simple mythical framework central and uses his enormous
intellectual energy to make it acceptable — Milton’s grand style and Longinus’s On
the Sublime
6. Dominant religious ideas during the Renaissance and the Reformation — Milton
lived at a time when it was not merely possible, but necessary, to see human history
as played out against a background of divine will / divine providence (‘the ways of
God to men’ – Book I, 26)
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN DEPARTMENT OF
ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES COURSE
DESCRIPTIONS

7. Publishing history; Milton’s original wish to write a tragedy on the subject;

Paradise Lost was published in 1667 but Milton had probably finished writing the
poem by 1663
8. Milton’s frequent allusions to myths, classical and other — does the poem’s
extraordinary power derive partly from its capacity, as myth, to stimulate deep
and very primitive layers of human feeling?
9. The structure of Milton’s cosmos — Paradise Lost was published in 1667, well over a
century after the appearance of Copernicus’s revolutionary theory concerning the
structure of the universe (1543), and around five decades after Galileo’s conclusive
support (1610) for the Copernican thesis — why does Milton’s universe conform to a
scientifically obsolete scheme?
10. Milton’s ideas about the cosmos and the beginnings of the universe (see, for
example, Book VII, 243-60) and their relation to those of Hesiod and Sir James Jeans
11. The description of Paradise in Book IV — Paul Elmer More’s equating of Milton’s
Paradise with the Hesperian Gardens of Homer, Hesiod’s Golden Age, the Celtic Tir-
nan-og, the Arcadia of the pastoral poets and of Sidney, the Forest of Arden,
Tennyson’s island valley of Avilion, and all the other Utopias to be found in myth
and literature
12. The epic as a literary genre — classical epics — primary and secondary epics
— features of epic poetry in Paradise Lost — Milton uses a classical genre to
tell a Christian story
13. Milton’s epic similes and the role they play
14. Milton’s descriptive powers — Paradise Lost is more elaborately descriptive than
other epics because the beauty of the world and its inhabitants is a significant
theme in the poem
15. Milton’s representation of Satan — the gradual scaling down of Satan — the
magnificent ‘hero’ (the Romantic critics mistook him to be the hero of the poem)
who strode over the burning floor of Hell in Book I is shown in Book IV laboriously
making his way up a hillside, only to find his way blocked by tangled undergrowth
16. The doctrine of free will — this doctrine is fundamental to Paradise Lost — as free
agents, angels and humans were expected to love God and to serve him voluntarily —
however, as free agents, they could choose not to obey God — obedience turns out to
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN DEPARTMENT OF
ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES COURSE
DESCRIPTIONS

be a state of precarious equilibrium, disturbed first by Lucifer (later renamed

Satan) and then by Adam and Eve — yet, while the punishment of Satan is
absolute, the punishment of Adam and Eve is tentative

ADVICE TO STUDENTS:
Please note that the issues suggested above do not claim to examine Paradise Lost
Book IV in every possible way.
Students are advised and encouraged to enrich the course by reading the text
thoroughly, and by suggesting resources (reading and visual material, for
example) and scholarship, past and present. This will help create a credible
research data bank.

COURSE OUTCOME
1. Acquaintance with epic as a genre
2. Acquaintance with the history of ideas of the European Renaissance and Reformation
3. Acquaintance with the Early Modern English culture
4. Acquaintance with Milton’s works and the publication history of Paradise Lost
5. Acquaintance with the dominant religious beliefs of Milton’s time
6. Acquaintance with Milton’s religious beliefs
7. Acquaintance with Milton’s conception of the universe
8. Acquaintance with the epic conventions in Paradise Lost
9. Acquaintance with the episodes in Paradise Lost Book IV, and with the story of
the whole poem in general
10. Acquaintance with paintings related to the subject of Milton’s Paradise Lost
11. Acquaintance with Milton’s style, including his unusual syntax, grand rhetoric and
his powers of description

MODE OF EVALUATION
End-of-semester examination, internal examination and continuous evaluation in the
form of class quiz, debates, seminar presentations by students, tests.

RECOMMENDED READING
Editions of Milton’s works
Patterson, F. A. (gen. ed.) The Works of John Milton, 20 vols. (1931-40)
Wolfe, D. M. (gen. ed.) The Complete Prose Works of John Milton (1953)
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN DEPARTMENT OF
ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES COURSE
DESCRIPTIONS

Fully annotated one-volume editions of Milton’s poetry by M. Y. Hughes (1957)

Douglas Bush (1966), and John Carey and A. D. S. Fowler (1968)
Gang, T. M. (introduction and notes) Paradise Lost Book IV (1974)

On Milton and his age

Criticism on Paradise Lost

Frye, N. Five Essays on Milton’s Epics (1966)
Lewis, C. S. A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’ (1942)
Broadbent, J. B. Some Graver Subject (1960)
Empson, W. Milton’s God (rev. Ed., 1965)
Gardner, H. A Reading of ‘Paradise Lost’ (1965)
Patrides, C. A. (ed.) Approaches to ‘Paradise Lost’ (1968)
Patrides, C. A. (ed.) Milton’s Epic Poetry: Essays on ‘Paradise Lost’ and ‘Paradise
Regained’ (1967)
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN DEPARTMENT OF
ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES COURSE
DESCRIPTIONS

Recent criticism (1980 and after) on Milton, his age, and Paradise Lost

Martz, L. Poet of Exile (1980) [Ovid and Milton]

Lewalski, B. Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (1985) [genre]
Martindale, C. The Transformation of Classical Epic (1986) [genre]
Quint, D. Epic and Empire: Politics and Form from Virgil to Milton (1993) [genre:
epic] Corns, T. Regaining Paradise Lost (1994)
Danielson, D. (ed.) Cambridge Companion to Milton (1999) [essays; general introduction]
Edwards, K. L. Milton and the Natural World: Science and Poetry in Paradise Lost (1999)
Jordan, M. Milton and Modernity (2000) [masculinity; political philosophy]
Corns, T. A Companion to Milton (2001) [general introduction]
Lewalski, B. The Life of John Milton (2002) [biography]
Kean, M. (ed.) John Milton’s Paradise Lost: A Sourcebook (2005) [introduction, sources]
Beer, A. Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot (2008) [biography]
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN DEPARTMENT OF
ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES COURSE
DESCRIPTIONS

COURSE DESCRIPTION:
101 Renaissance, Early Modernism in Britain
Text: William Shakespeare: King Lear

LEVEL: MA in English and Culture Studies, First Semester

DURATION SEPTEMBER 2017 TO MARCH 2018

COURSE FACILITATOR:
DR. NANDINI BHATTACHARYA [Email. nandinibhattacharya60@gmail.com]

COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course on Renaissance and Early Modernism in Britain, focuses on the plays of
Shakespeare and especially King Lear

COURSE RATIONALE/THRUST
It proposes a reading of Shakespeare’s play King Lear in the light of the following issues:

1. Publishing history, The Quarto edition that calls it the History of King Lear and
the Folio edition that describes it as the Tragedy of King
2. The differences between creation of a single author text meant for reading or even
for dramatic performance and the creation of an early modern dramatic text. The
nature of collaboration and transaction that makes it distinctive.
3. The history of editing, emendation, the Tate version that improves on it,
resembling the production of our epics. Collaborative, accretional, and layered.
4. The importance of an Ur-text the myth of Lear, that creates greater complexities in
considering King Lear as a single author text meant for individual and individuated
reading.
5. Mythic traces in Shakespeare’s work. Something fairy tale like, primeval about the
division of empire on the basis of love protestations, the ogre like nature of the
daughters, the raving king uttering curses, the unimaginable cruelty and bodily torture
exacted, the chaos in nature.
6. The question of generic overlap. A history that is a tragedy that is coded as a
comedy but ends in disaster. A difficult play.
7. The condition of post-Brexit England that makes the play relevant. Written in
the context of King James’ desire to unite Scotland and Wales. Lear’s division of
kingdoms serves as a kind of bad example.
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN DEPARTMENT OF
ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES COURSE
DESCRIPTIONS

8. It is symptomatic of his last plays in the sense that he is concerned about relationship
between fathers and daughters, fathers and sons, and warring families. Compare with
Tempest, Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline. And Twelfth Night (surprisingly, the Fools
in both the plays, one a comedy and the other high tragedy, use the same song)
9. The question of overlapping of private and public spheres as in today’s world of
power politics.
10. Old age and questions of generational divide.
11. The Elizabethan stage, and the its conditions: - its rhetoricity due to constraints of an
open stage, signification only through words; conventions of disguise; of song
making; of soliloquies and asides; of boy actors, of fools and their centricity in
marginality, the defiance of generic purities, rules of unities and characterization.
12. The question of tragedy. What makes Lear unbearable? What makes the Tate
version so acceptable?
13. Key scenes:
1. the love contest,
2. Cordelia’s refusal to speak, “nothing”,
3. the division of kingdom,
4. Lear’s humiliation,
5. Lear in the storm,
6. Edmund’s legitimacy
7. Gloucester’s blinding,
8. the Fool and Lear
9. Cordelia and Lear (and my poor Fool dead)

14. Key issues

1. The question of need “O reason not the need!”, nothing is all, inversion of
language, menschenwurde.
2. The question of kingship, of power, an abiding theme in Shakespeare, a mirror for
magistrates
3. The question of foolery
4. The question of parenting, and filial gratitude
5. The question of body, open, bare, with borders between animal and human
rendered fuzzy and interchangeable
6. Reception in contemporary times.

Please note that these are suggested areas of study and in no way claim to
read/ teach/evaluate King Lear in every possible way.

We encourage students to add to our courses by coming prepared in

classes; suggesting extra reading or visual materials; citing scholars who
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN DEPARTMENT OF
ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES COURSE
DESCRIPTIONS

are currently working in this area in India; and creating a credible

research data bank
COURSE OUTCOME

1. Acquaintance with Tragedy as a mode, as genre, as a way of being.

2. Acquaintance with the complex generic problems of the Lear text
3. Acquaintance with issues of textual production in Early modern England
4. Acquaintance with the Elizabethan stage, conventions and times.
5. Acquaintance with the complexity of its editorial history
6. Acquaintance with King Lear as a story of an old man, a king a father, and
his daughters and his subjects.
7. Acquaintance with Shakespeare’s life, times olitics, and Lear being produced by
the same.
8. Acquaintance with Shakespeare’s reception, and his growth from a
popular playwright to a cultural icon, an objective correlative of
Englishness at an imperializing moment, in a post-globalized world
9. Acquaintance with reception of Shakespeare in India
10. Acquaintance with fundamental questions regarding bio-politics in our times, and
Shakespeare’s relevance.

MODE OF EVALUATION
End semester examination, internal examination and continuous evaluation in the form of
class quiz, debates, test.

FURTHER READING
o Text: The Arden Edition of King
Lear o The Arden edition of Tempest
o Sophocles: Oedipus the King
o Oedipus at Colonus (406 BC according to Wiki, can’t
authenticate!) o Antigone (441 BC)
o Aristotle: Poetics
o Everyman (a Morality play)
o Gorbuduc (probably by Norton and Sackville)

TEXTS MARKED IN YELLOW WILL BE PROVIDED IN E VERSIONS

o Charles Lamb: Tales of Shakespeare

o Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own (Essay on Shakespeare’s imaginary sister)
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN DEPARTMENT OF
ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES COURSE
DESCRIPTIONS

o T.S. Eliot. “Hamlet and His Problems” in SACRED WOOD

o A.C. Bradley: Shakespearean Tragedy
o Stephen Greenblatt: Renaissance Self-Fashioning
o Michael Shapiro: Cross Dressing in Shakespeare: A context for Elizabethan Gender
Studies
o Marjorie Garber: Shakespeare After All
o Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare: Tragedies
o Michel Foucault Abnormal
o Giorgio Agamben: Homo Sacer
o Giorgi Agamben: Open

CINEMA:
o Grigori M. Kosinstev: King Lear 1971, (Film Show at the end of the course).
o Aparna Sen: 36 Chowringhee Lane
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN DEPARTMENT OF
ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES COURSE
DESCRIPTIONS

COURSE DESCRIPTION:
102. Medieval and Renaissance English Literature
(Excluding Shakespeare) II
Text: BEN JONSON: Volpone

LEVEL: MA in English and Culture Studies, First Semester

DURATION SEPTEMBER 2017 TO MARCH 2018

COURSE FACILITATOR:
DR. ARNAB KUMAR SINHA [Email. arnab.ks@gmail.com]

COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course on Medieval and Renaissance English Literature focuses on Ben Jonson’s play
Volpone.

THRUST AREAS
It proposes a reading of Ben Jonson’s play Volpone in the light of the following issues:

Greed as the central idea. Jonson’s critique of the contemporary materialistic society.
The play is considered to be a satire on human greed.
Animal imagery in the play. Significantly, all the major characters in the play are
named after the animals. Feeding image is a major symbol in the play.
Disguise as one of the core issues. Volpone cheats the three legacy hunters: Voltore,
Corvino and Corbaccio, by playing the role of an old and diseased person. Role
playing is also an important aspect in the play.
Market economy and problematics of identity. The characters in the play are
constantly changing their identities to accommodate themselves in a society that is
driven by the forces of market capitalism. Money making, self transformation and
playing a role were important traits of the urban Jacobean consciousness (McEvoy
55).
Source of Jonson’s Volpone. The story and the characters of Volpone are drawn from
different classical sources. The medieval beast epic of Reynard the Fox, Aesop’s fable
of the fox who pretends to be dead to catch birds of prey and Horace’s Satires are the
primary sources from which Jonson derived the story of Volpone. Critics consider
Petronius’ novel The Satyricon as one of the important sources from which Jonson
drew the idea of characterization in Volpone. The writings of the Greek writer Lucian
also influenced Jonson.
Double plot in the play. How is the sub plot connected to the main plot? The
characters of the sub plot seem to mock the seriousness of the characters of main plot.
Relationship between Volpone and Sir Politic Would Be. Also, the relationship
between the three legacy hunters and Mrs. Politic Would Be.
Celia’s role. She resists the commodification of her character. What differentiates her
from the other characters of the play? Why did Jonson choose the name Celia?
Mosca’s role in the play.
What kind of comedy is Volpone? Is it a comedy of humours or a satirical
comedy? Key scenes:
1. The opening soliloquy of Volpone
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN DEPARTMENT OF
ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES COURSE
DESCRIPTIONS

2. Mountebank scene
3. Mosca’s soliloquy in Act III, Scene i
4. The first meeting of Volpone and Celia with a special focus on the songs
5. Court room scenes in Act IV & V
6. Tortoise scene

Please note that these are suggested areas of study and in no way claim to read/
teach/evaluate Volpone in every possible way.

We encourage students to add to our courses by coming prepared in classes; suggesting

extra reading or visual materials; citing scholars who are currently working on this
area in India; and creating a credible research data bank

COURSE OUTCOME
1. Acquaintance with the features of Jonsonian comedy.
2. Acquaintance with the conventional criticisms related to the play.
3. Acquaintance with the contemporary trends of criticisms related to Volpone.
4. Acquaintance with Jonson’s life, times and politics.
5. Acquaintance with the significance of a play like Volpone in a post-globalized world.

Mode of Evaluation
End semester examination, internal examination and continuous evaluation in the form of
class quiz, debates, test.

Further Reading
Barton, A. Ben Jonson: Dramatist, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Craig, D. Ben Jonson: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1990.
Creaser, J. ed. Volpone, or The Fox, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1978.
Dutton, R. ed. Ben Jonson, Longman Critical Reader, London: Longman, 2000.
Loxley, James. The Complete Critical Guide to Ben Jonson. London: Routledge,
2002.
McEvoy, Sean. Ben Jonson: Renaissance Dramatist. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2008.
Steggle, Matthew. Volpone: Critical Guide. London: Continuum Books, 2011.
Barish, Jonas A. Jonson: Volpone (Casebook Series). London: Macmillan, 1972.
Cousins, A.D. and Alison V. Scott. Ben Jonson and the Politics of Genre. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Film version of the text

Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film, The Honey Pot (1967)
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND
CULTURE STUDIES COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
________________________________________________________________________

Course description:
Paper 101: Medieval and Renaissance English Literature
(Excluding Shakespeare) I
Texts: poems of Donne and Marvell
Paper 102: Medieval and Renaissance English Literature
(Excluding Shakespeare) II
Text: Machiavelli, The Prince
Paper 104: William Shakespeare II (Background, Reception &
Translation) Text: Bhanumati Chittabilas , Bengali adaptation
of The Merchant of Venice
Paper 105: Classical Literature and Criticism (European and
Indian)
Texts: Plato, The Republic, Homer, TheIliad (selections)

Course instructor: Dr Anway Mukhopadhyay

Email id: anwaymukhopadhyay@gmail.com

Paper 101: Medieval and Renaissance English Literature (Excluding Shakespeare) I

Courseoutline and objective:
This course introduces the students to the literary and cultural dynamics of Medieval and
Renaissance England. The focus is on the literary culture of early modern Britain outside the
domain of the Shakespearean canon. As part of this course, the metaphysical poets are dealt
with in detail.

Poems by John Donne

Thrust areas
The Aesthetics of metaphysical poetry
The rupture in the Petrarchan poetics of love
Love poetry before the “dissociation of sensibility”
Cavarero’s view of love: spirituality of the flesh and fleshiness of the spirit
The re-invocation of Aphrodite Pandemos
Realistic versions of love: re-sexualization and re-corporealization of the Neo-Platonic Eros

Reference work:
LouisMartz, The Poetry of Meditation
Helen Gardner, Introduction to The Metaphysical Poets, ed. by Gardner

Poems of Andrew Marvell

Thrust areas
The political background to Marvell’s literary works
Society in 18th century Britain
Ecology and Eros/From anthropocentric Eros to an eco-agape
The desire for an Oikos within and outside Eros
Irigaray’s view of Eros: Eros as indwelling
References to classical mythology
Nature unadorned
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND
CULTURE STUDIES COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
________________________________________________________________________

The pagan and Christian attitudes to Nature: the issues of spirituality and sensuousness
Violence and revolution
Horrorism (a la Cavarero)
Regicide as a metaphor of power
Agamben on the state of exception/Ausnahme
Reference work:
Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England

Paper 102: Medieval and Renaissance English Literature (Excluding Shakespeare) II

Course outline and objective:

Through this course, the students will be acquainted with the multiple political and socio-
cultural discourses which shaped the dominant ideologies, cultural codes and political
movements of the Renaissance.

Machiavelli, The Prince

Thrust areas
Politics in Renaissance Italy
Machiavelli as a secular thinker
Categorization of polities
Paradoxes of democracy
Psychology and politics
Management of the “mob”
Andreia/virtu/manliness
The absent Princess: would she be an “honorary” (a la Derrida) man?
A comparative reading of Machiavelli and Chanakya
The literary figurations of Machiavelli in Renaissance England
Reference work:
Dante Germino, Machiavelli to Marx: Modern Western Political Thought

Paper 104: William Shakespeare II (Background, Reception & Translation)

Course outline and objective
This course seeks to familiarize the students with the cultural phenomenon called
Shakespeare. They will get to know about the cultural background of the Shakespearean
canon, and his reception in India. Thus, this course deals with Shakespeare at “home” and
Shakespeare in the “world”.
Thrustareas
Basic trends of Shakespeare criticism in the early and late twentieth century
Canonization of Shakespeare: “Mask” of conquest? – views of Gauri Viswanathan and
Sukanta Chaudhuri
The Politics of Shakespeare Criticism
Shakespeare criticism and multiple scientific, philosophical and social discourses
Shakespeare and the Ideological State Apparatuses during and after the Empire
Reception of Shakespeare in India
Shakespeare pedagogy in India
Performance of Shakespearean plays in India
Translation/transcreation of Shakespearean works in India
Bhanumati Chittabilas as an adaptation/transcreation of The Merchant of Venice
Sanskritic poetics/aesthetics and Indian Shakespeare adaptations
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND
CULTURE STUDIES COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
________________________________________________________________________

Vernacularization of Shakespeare: accommodating Shakespeare in Indian dramatic traditions

Shakespearean rasa – hybridization or cannibalization?

Reference work
Lisa Hopkins, Beginning Shakespeare
Shormishtha Panja and Babli Moitra Saraf, eds, Performing Shakespeare in India
Germaine Greer, Shakespeare: A Very Short Introduction
Poonam Trivedi and Dennis Bartholomeusz, eds, India’s Shakespeare

Paper 105: Classical Literature and Criticism (European and Indian)

Course outline and objective:
Through this course the students will be sensitized to the socio-cultural dynamics and
political ideologies, as well as the value systems of ancient Europe. The classical European
literature and critical thought which constitute the bedrock of the Western philosophy and
literary culture are something the students must be acquainted with. This course is designed
to perform this task.

Plato, The Republic

Thrust areas
Contextualizing Plato in the Pre-Socratic and Socratic Traditions of Philosophizing
Socrates and Plato: Views of Heda Segvic on the Socraticoi logoi
Platonic Ontology
Plato on Poetry: Ion, Republic, Phaedrus
Plato/Socrates on Politics
Uses of poetry, uses of philosophy
Truth and lies
Abhorrence of fiction
Socrates and the Sophists
Ignorance and knowledge
Individual and the collectivity
Nussbaum on Plato and Socrates – the fragility of goodness and three-dimensional lives
Iris Murdoch on Plato: The Fire and the Sun
Metaphysics and art: uses and misuses of “figures”

Reference work:
W K C Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers: From Thales to Aristotle
TerenceIrwin, Plato’s Ethics

Homer, Iliad

Thrust areas
Primary and secondary epics
The Homerides
The masculinist ethos of heroism
Simone Weil on the theme of “force”
Ethics of vulnerability: “wounded heroes”
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND
CULTURE STUDIES COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
________________________________________________________________________

Reference work:
Marina McCoy, Wounded Heroes
Donna Wilson, Ransom, revenge, and Heroic Identity in the Iliad

Message from the course instructor:

The students should manage to get access to the reference works mentioned above. The
publication details of these works are widely available on the Internet. They can be bought,
borrowed from libraries, or collected in any other way. The students should assist the teacher
in turning the classroom into a dialogic forum for academic discussion. They will be
encouraged to ask questions and engage in academic discussions with the teacher.

Please note that the thrust areas mentioned above, by no means,

exhaust the interpretative possibilities of these texts. There are many
other ways to read these texts and the students are encouraged to
suggest alternative readings during the class lectures.
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN DEPARTMENT OF
ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES COURSE
DESCRIPTIONS

COURSE DESCRIPTION:
105: Classical Literature and Criticism (European
and Indian): Aristotle’s Poetics

LEVEL: MA in English and Culture Studies, First Semester

DURATION SEPTEMBER 2017 TO MARCH 2018

COURSE FACILITATOR:
SANJOY MALIK [Email. sanjoymalikbu@gmail.com]

COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course on Classical Literature and Criticism (European and Indian) particularly
focuses on Aristotle’s Poetics.

COURSE RATIONALE/THRUST
It proposes a reading of Aristotle’s Poetics addressing the following issues:

1. Aristotle’s doctrine of Imitation.

2. Aristotle’s doctrine of Catharsis
3. Aristotle’s views on Plot.
4. Aristotle’s views on Hamartia
5. Aristotle’s views on ideal tragic hero.
6. Comparison between tragedy and epic poetry.
7. Comparison between tragedy and history.
8. Relevance of Aristotle in contemporary time.
9. Key terms: a) Anagnorisis b) Peripety c) Beauty d) Tragic deed d) Ideal form of
Discovery e) Tragic flaw
10. Acquaintance with the ways Aristotle is similar to Plato in approaches to
literary criticism.
11. Acquaintance with the ways Aristotle is different from Plato in approaches to
literary criticism.

We encourage students to add to our courses by coming prepared in

classes; suggesting extra reading or visual materials; citing scholars who
are currently working in this area in India; and creating a credible
research data bank
THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN DEPARTMENT OF
ENGLISH AND CULTURE STUDIES COURSE
DESCRIPTIONS

COURSE OUTCOME
1. Acquaintance with Aristotle and his work.
2. Acquaintance with Aristotle’s treatment of poetry and fine arts.
3. Acquaintance with Aristotle’s idea of tragedy in a comprehensive manner.
4. Acquaintance with the reception of Aristotle in different ages.
5. Acquaintance with the relevance of Aristotle in contemporary time.

MODES OF EVALUATION
1. End semester examination,
2. Internal Assessment
3. Continuous evaluation in the form of class quiz, debates, tests etc.

1. Text: Aristotle on the Art of Poetry. Translated by Ingram Bywater. Preface by

Gilbert Murray. Oxford: OUP, 1977.
2. Penelope Murray & T.S. Dorsch (trans). Classical Literary Criticism. 2000.
3. Sophocles: King Oedipus
4. Blamires, Harry. A History of Literary Criticism. Delhi: Macmillan, 1991.
5. Butcher, S.H. Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art. New Delhi: Kalyani
Publishers, 1996
6. Hudson, William Henry. An Introduction to the Study of Literature. Kolkata:
Radha Publishing House, 2008.
7. Rudra, Arup. Trends of European and English Criticism. Kolkata: G.J. Book
Society, 2004.
8. Scott-James, R.A. The Making of English Literature. Delhi: Surjeet Publicatons,
2008.
9. Watson, George. The literary Critics.: A Study of English Descriptive
Criticism.Delhi: Doaba Publishing, 1962.
10. Wimsatt, William K., Cleanth Brooks. Literary Criticism: A Short History. New
Delhi: Oxford and IB publishing, 1957.

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Syllabus MAENG

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Syllabus MAENG

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1

THE UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN

Course Title Marks

PG/ENG/305 Popular Culture /Indian Literatures in English 5 50

* Students are to take 1 (one) out of three optional papers.

Paper 101: Medieval and Renaissance English Literature (Excluding Shakespeare) I

Unit II (Milton and any two poets)

Paper 102: Medieval and Renaissance English Literature (Excluding Shakespeare) II

Unit II (Any two)

Recommended Reading for 101 and 102:

Paper 103: William Shakespeare I (Plays & Poems)

Unit I (Any three)

Unit II (Any two plays)

Paper 104: William Shakespeare II (Background, Reception & Translation)

Recommended Reading for 102 and 103:

John Drakakis, ed. Alternative Shakespeares, 1985.

AniaLoomba. Shakespeare, Race and Colonialism, 2002.

Paper 105: Classical Literature and Criticism (European and Indian)

Unit I (Any three European and any one Indian text)

Unit II (Any three)

Paper 201 & 202: Eighteenth Century English Literature I and II

Paper 201: Eighteenth Century English Literature I

Unit II (One play and two prose work)

Paper 202: Eighteenth Century English Literature II

Unit I (Any three)

Unit II: (Any three)

Recommended Reading for 201 & 202:

Paper 203 & 204: Nineteenth Century English Literature I & II

Paper 203: Nineteenth Century English Literature I

Unit I (Two novels and two poets)

Unit II (Any one novel and two prose writers)

Paper 204: Nineteenth Century English Literature II

Unit I (Any one novel and two poets):

Unit II (Any one novel and two prose writers):

Recommended Reading for 203 & 204:

The Victorian Web

205: Literary Criticism: Renaissance to Modern

Unit I (Any three)

Unit II (Any three)

William Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads, S. T. Coleridge: BiographiaLiteraria(xiii, xiv,

J.H.W. Atkins. Literary Criticism in Antiquity (2 vols.)

Paper 301: Modern English Literature till 1950

Unit I (Any two playwrights and two poets)

Unit II (Any three)

Paper 302: Post-1950s English Literature

Unit I (Any two plays & two poets)

Unit II (Any three)

Paper 303 & 304: Literary Theory

Paper 303: Literary Theory and Contemporary Thoughts I

Essays/Chapters for Detailed Studies (Any four/three):

Paper 304: Literary Theory and Contemporary Thoughts II

Essays/Chapters for Detail Studies (Any four/three):

Recommended Reading for paper 303 and 304:

305.i: Popular Culture

Section A (Any two)

Section B (Any two)

Chick Lit - Sophie Kinsella: Mini Shopaholic, Rajashree: Trust Me

305. ii: Indian Literatures in English Translation

Unit I (Any three)

Unit II: (Two plays and two poets)

Paper 401: Major Elective (Any one of the following options)

401.i: Indian English Literature

Unit I (Any two plays and three poets)

Unit II (Any three)

William Walsh. Commonwealth Literature.

401.ii: American Literature

Unit I (Any two plays and three poets)

Unit II (Any three)

401.iii: Australian Literature

Unit I(Any two poets and two novelists)

Unit II(Any two poets and two authors)

Robert J. Merritt: The Cake Man, Jack Davis: No Sugar

402: Major Elective (Any one of the following options)

402.i: Translation Studies

Susan Bassnett. Translation Studies

Mary-Snell Hornby. Translation Studies: An integrated approach