English Honours · Semester 8

English Major, Semester 8

University of Kalyani B.A. English NEP 2020 syllabus. Check your registered combination and route.

MAJ801 · Literary Theory after 1950

1. Unit I, up to 2000: essays by Lionel Trilling, Roland Barthes and Aijaz Ahmad.
2. Unit II: essays by Stanley Fish and C. D. Narasimhaiah.
3. Unit III: poststructuralism and deconstruction, postmodernism, Marxist criticism and stylistics.

MAJ802 · World Literature in Translation

1. Unit I, fiction: The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa; stories including “The Library of Babel” (the source table attributes it to Gabriel García Márquez, but that attribution appears incorrect), plus work by Guy de Maupassant, Anton Chekhov and Haruki Murakami. Check the assigned edition for the correct author and translation before study.
2. Unit II, poetry: selected work by Ovid, Li Bai, Mirza Ghalib, Charles Baudelaire, Pablo Neruda, Rainer Maria Rilke, C. P. Cavafy and Vladimir Mayakovsky.
3. Unit III, drama: Oedipus Rex by Sophocles and Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello.

MAJ803–805 · Honours without dissertation option

The syllabus summary marks these three 4-credit papers with an asterisk “for honours without dissertation.” Their applicability depends on your route.

1. MAJ803, Women’s Writing: prose, poetry and drama by Mary Wollstonecraft, Ramabai Ranade, Eliza Haywood, Virginia Woolf, Hanan al-Shaykh, Mahasweta Devi, Emily Brontë, Mary Leapor, Emily Dickinson, Kamala Das and Henrik Ibsen.
2. MAJ804, Literature and Other Arts: visual narrative, cinema, text and performance.
3. MAJ805, Literature and Environment: prose by Rabindranath Tagore, Sumana Roy, A. K. Ramanujan and Helon Habila; poetry on nature and Girish Karnad’s The Fire and the Rain.

Study suggestions

1. Close reading: Choose a prescribed text. How do two choices of language or form shape an idea in it?
   Answer guide

   Use a short quotation and identify two precise features. Explain each feature’s effect and consider an alternative interpretation supported by the passage.

2. Compare: Choose two prescribed texts or theories from different units. Where do they agree and disagree?
   Answer guide

   Define a shared question first. Make one point of agreement and one of difference, with a specific example from each text rather than generalising about periods.