English Honours · Semester 6

English Major, Semester 6

University of Kalyani B.A. English NEP 2020 syllabus. Each Major paper below is six credits and lists 60 end-semester marks.

MAJ601 · English Drama: Sixteenth to Eighteenth Century

1. Unit I, sixteenth century: Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday.
2. Unit II, seventeenth century: William Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Ben Jonson’s Volpone.
3. Unit III, eighteenth century: Richard Steele’s The Conscious Lovers and Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer. Relevant literary history is also listed.

MAJ602 · English Drama from 1800 to the Present

1. Unit I, nineteenth century: Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and George Bernard Shaw’s Candida.
2. Unit II, before 1950: J. M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
3. Unit III, after 1950: John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Relevant literary history is also listed.

MAJ603 · English Poetry from 1800 to the Present

1. Unit I, nineteenth century: prescribed poems by Alfred Tennyson, William Wordsworth, S. T. Coleridge, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Matthew Arnold, Henry Louis Derozio, P. B. Shelley and John Keats.
2. Unit II, before 1950: prescribed poems by W. B. Yeats, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas.
3. Unit III, after 1950: prescribed poems by Arun Kolatkar, Ted Hughes, David Malouf, Philip Larkin, Jayanta Mahapatra, Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott.

These are topic and text summaries. Consult your registered combination for any Minor or other paper.

Study suggestions

Original prompts for the listed Major papers; they do not predict an exam.

1. Compare: Choose two texts from different units of one paper. How does their genre or period shape their treatment of a shared idea?
   Answer guide

   Name both prescribed texts and the shared idea; ground each point in a specific passage. Explain a difference instead of making a list of themes.

2. Close reading: Select a short passage from a prescribed text and explain how two choices of language or form shape its meaning.
   Answer guide

   Quote a small passage, identify two concrete features such as imagery, dialogue, metre or narrative voice, then connect each to an interpretation that the passage supports.

3. Context: Place one prescribed work in the literary or language history named in its unit.
   Answer guide

   State the relevant period and a precise historical or literary context. Show how it helps illuminate the work without treating background as a substitute for reading the text.