Scheme of Examination and Courses

of Reading for B.A. (Hons.) English

SEMESTER-V

SCHOOL OF OPEN LEARNING

University of Delhi

Syllabus Applicable for the students seeking admission to

B.A.(Hons.) English Course from 2019-2020 onwards
 B.A. (HONS.) ENGLISH SEMESTER-V

CORE COURSE

Paper XI – Women's Writing

Paper XII – British Literature : The Early 20th Century

DISCIPLINE SPECIFIC ELECTIVE (DSE)

1. Literature for Children and Young Adults

2. Modern Indian Writing in English Translation
 Core Course
PAPER XI : WOMEN’S WRITING

Course Statement

This paper focuses on writings by women, about women. Since women are always defined in
relation to men in a structurally patriarchal society, women writing about their experiences and
identities are almost always writing about their community, since they do not have the privilege to
write about themselves as individuals inhabiting a certain position in society. This paper focuses on
those stories, poems, plays, novels, autobiographies, and theoretical writings that most clearly
articulate the struggle to define experiences, and challenge patriarchal constructs. The texts in this
paper focus on gender and sexuality as related to women, their bodies, their desires, and their
aspirations. However, women do not form a homogenous group and their oppressions and acts of
resistance need to be understood in all their complexities. Therefore, the intersectionality of the
position of womanhood with caste, class, race, disability, education, slavery, etc., need to be
studied with attention to the socio-economic historical location.

Course Objectives

This course aims to

● help students understand the social construction of woman by patriarchy;
● examine feminism’s concerns of equality with men;
● highlight the structural oppression of women;
● foreground resistance by women;
● discuss women’s writing as an act of resistance and of grasping agency;
● facilitate an understanding of the body of woman and its lived experience; and
● help students engage with the heterogeneity of the oppression of women in different places,
historically and socially.

Facilitating the Achievement of Course Learning Outcomes

Unit Course Learning Outcomes Teaching and Assessment Tasks

No. Learning Activity

1. Understanding concepts Interactive Reading material together in

discussions in small groups, initiating
small groups in discussion topics, participation
Tutorial classes in discussions

1
 2. Expressing concepts How to think Writing essay length
through writing critically and write assignments
with clarity

3. Demonstrating conceptual Discussing exam Class tests

and textual understanding questions and
in tests and exams answering
techniques

Course Contents

Unit 1
Novel

Alice Walker The Color Purple

Unit 2
Short Stories

a) Charlotte Perkins Gilman ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’

b) Begum Rokeya ‘Sultana’s Dream’, Tara Publishing Ltd, India, 2005.
Drama

Maria Irene Fornes, Fefu and Her Friends.

Unit 3
Poetry
a) Emily Dickinson, (i) ‘I cannot live with you’(ii) ‘I’m wife; I’ve finished that’
b) Simin Behbahani, (i) ‘It’s Time to Mow the Flowers’.
c) Sylvia Plath, (i) ‘Lady Lazarus’ (ii) Daddy
d) Eunice De Souza, (i) ‘Advice to Women’, (ii) ‘Bequest’
Unit 4
Autobiography

a) Mary Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (New York: Norton, 1988)
chap.1, pp. 11–19; chap. 2, pp. 19–38.
b) Pandita Ramabai ‘A Testimony of our Inexhaustible Treasures’, in Pandita Ramabai
Through Her Own Words: Selected Works, tr. Meera Kosambi (New Delhi: OUP, 2000) pp.
295–324.

2
 c) Rassundari Debi Excerpts from Amar Jiban in Susie Tharu and K. Lalita, eds., Women’s
Writing in India, vol. 1 (New Delhi: OUP, 1989) pp. 192–202
Unit 5
Readings

● Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (New York: Harcourt, 1957) chaps. 1 and 6.
● Elaine Showalter, ‘Introduction’, in A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists
from Bronte to Lessing (1977).
● Simone de Beauvoir, ‘Introduction’, in The Second Sex.
● Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, ‘Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory’, in
The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis, 2nd edition (London and New York:
Routledge, 2006) pp. 257-73.
● Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid, ‘Introduction’, in Recasting Women: Essays in
Colonial History
Essential reading

Note: This is a literature-based course, and therefore, all these texts are to be considered essential
reading.

Keywords

Women writers
Women poets
Women’s confessional poetry Women novelists
Women playwrights Women's autobiography Women theorists
Feminist writers
Gender
Patriarchy

3
 Core Course
PAPER XII : BRITISH LITERATURE: THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY

Course Statement

This paper provides a broad view of 20th century British literature, both in terms of time and genre.
The transition from 19th century literary and artistic methods and forms to the growth of modernism
in England cannot be understood without referring to similar developments on the continent. The
course is also designed to include critical perspectives on questions of war, the nature of art, and
the relationship between individuals and the State in the 20th century. Finally the course also
addresses questions relating to peculiarly modern forms of subjectivity and selfhood without which
our existence within the modern world cannot be understood or analysed.

Course objectives

This course aims to

● develop an understanding among students of the various forms of critique of modernity that
evolved in England (and Europe) in the course of the 20th century;
● help students comprehend the path-breaking and avant-garde forms of literary expression
and their departures from earlier forms of representations;
● facilitate an understanding of the impact of the two world wars on literary expression and
the various political/ideological positions of the European intelligentsia vis-à-vis the
phenomenon; and
● create an awareness of new disciplines/areas of inquiry that decisively influenced European
art and literature in the 20th century.

Facilitating the Achievement of Course Learning Outcomes

Unit Course Learning Outcomes Teaching and Assessment Tasks

No. Learning Activity

1. Understanding concepts Interactive Reading material together in

discussions in small groups, initiating
small groups in discussion topics, participation
Tutorial classes in discussions

4
 2. Expressing concepts How to think Writing essay length
through writing critically and write assignments
with clarity

3. Demonstrating conceptual Discussing exam Class tests

and textual understanding questions and
in tests and exams answering
techniques

Course Contents
Unit 1
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (London: Penguin, 2007)
.
Unit 2
Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (London: Penguin, 2000)

Unit 3

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 2011).

Unit 4

a) W. B. Yeats, (i) ‘Sailing to Byzantium; (ii) ‘The Second Coming’ (iii) ‘Leda and the Swan’ (iv)
‘No Second Troy’
b) T. S. Eliot, (i) ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’; (ii) ‘The Hollow Men’; both
in T. S. Eliot: Selected Poems (London: Faber, 2015).
c) Wilfred Owen, ‘Strange Meeting’, in Wilfred Owen: Collected Poems (N.Y.: New
Directions, 2013).
Unit 5
Readings

● Sigmund Freud, ‘The Structure of the Unconscious, the Id, the Ego and the Superego’, in
Background Prose Readings (Delhi: Worldview, 2001) pp. 97-104.
● Albert Camus, (i) ‘Absurdity and Suicide’; (ii) ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, trans. Justin
O’Brien, in The Myth of Sisyphus (London: Vintage, 1991) pp. 13-17; 79-82.

5
 ● Virginia Woolf , “On Being Ill” in Virginia Woolf : Selected Essays ed. David Bradshaw
(Oxford University Press 2008).
● D.H. Lawrence, ‘Morality and the Novel’, in The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds Of
Modern Literature, eds. Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, Jr (Oxford University
Press, 1965).
● Raymond Williams, ‘Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism’, in
Raymond Williams. The Politics of Modernism (London: Verso, 1996) pp. 37-48.

Essential reading

Note: This is a literature-based course, and therefore, all these texts are to be considered essential
reading.

6
 Discipline Specific Elective (DSE)
1. LITERATURE FOR CHILDREN AND YOUNG ADULTS

Course Statement

This paper explores the many forms and genres found in writing for children and young adults. The
texts in this course cover a vast range from picture books to writings for children and young adults.
Through the readings students can explore the construction of childhood as well as the emergence
of children’s literature as a genre. The course explores the cultural importance of genres aimed
at young readership and simultaneously engages with the theoretical frameworks by which such
texts can be read.

Course Objectives

This course aims to

● help students trace the emergence of the genre termed Children’s Fiction and link it to the
emergence of other genres as print culture has grown;
● familiarize students with the idea of visual literacy, illustrations, etc., and their application
and use in children’s picture books; and
● facilitate an engagement with the concept of Young Adult Literature and issues associated
with it.

Facilitating the Achievement of Course Learning Outcomes

Unit Course Learning Outcomes Teaching and Assessment Tasks

No. Learning Activity

1. Understanding concepts Interactive Reading material together in

discussions in small groups initiating
small groups in discussion topics participation in
Tutorial classes discussions

2. Expressing concepts How to think Writing essay length

through writing critically and write assignments
with clarity

3. Demonstrating conceptual Discussing exam Class tests

and textual understanding questions and
in tests and exams answering
techniques

7
Course Contents

Unit 1

a) Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Little Prince (New Delhi: Pigeon Books, 2008).

b) Oliver Jeffers, Heart in a Bottle (New York: Harper Collins, 2011).
c) bell hooks and Chris Raschka, Happy to be Nappy (New York: Jump at the Sun,
2017).
d) Mahasweta Devi, The Why Why Girl (New Delhi: Tulika Publishers, 2012).

Unit 2

a) Upendra Kishore Roychowdhury, Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne (New Delhi: Puffin
Books, 2004) pp. 3-27.
b) Sulaiman Ahmed, Amar Ayyar: King of Tricksters, Chapters 1-6, 51, 67-68 (New
Delhi: Hachette India, 2012).
c) Paro Anand, No Guns at My Son’s Funeral (New Delhi: India Ink, 2005).

Unit 3

Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (London: Vintage,
2012).
Unit 4
M.T. Anderson, Feed (Somerville: Candlewick Press, 2002).
Unit 5
Readings

a) Molly Bang, ‘Building the Emotional Content of Pictures’, in Picture This: How
Pictures Work (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2018) pp. 1-50, with illustrations.
b) Perry Nodelman, ‘Defining Children’s Literature’, in The Hidden Adult: Defining
Children's Literature (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008) pp. 133-37.
c) John Holt, ‘Escape from Childhood’. Available online at
https://canopy.uc.edu/bbcswebdav/pid-14529539-dt-content-rid-
39705338_1/courses/16SS_EDST1001005/16SS_EDST1001005_ImportedContent_201511
17021819/Course%20Readings/Escape%20from%20Childhood.pdf
d) Rachel Falconer, ‘Young Adult Fiction and the Crossover Phenomena’, in The
Routledge Companion to Children's Literature, ed. David Rudd (New York: Routledge,
2010) pp. 87-97

8
Essential reading

Note: This is a literature-based course, and therefore, all these texts are to be considered essential
reading.

Keywords

Children's literature
Picture books
Young adult fiction
Childhood
Visual literacy
Nonsense verse
Readership

9
 Discipline Specific Elective (DSE)
2. MODERN INDIAN WRITING IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION

Course Statement

Striving to transcend a nativist rejection of Indian writing in English and a Rushdie-esque denial of
the strength and value of Indian writing in languages other than English, the need of the hour is to
study the varied contributions of modern Indian writing through their translations into English, free
from the anxiety or the hegemony of authenticity.

Course Objectives

This paper aims to

● give students a glimpse of the vast diversity of modern Indian writing in bhasha traditions;
● show students the polyphonic tumultuous richness of the 19th and 20th centuries, from
peasant life in colonial India in Fakir Mohan Senapati’s novel to the mythical reality of
O.V. Vijayan’s novel, from the reworking of a Mahabharata story in Girish Karnad’s play
to the myriad life-worlds of the poems and stories; and
● encourage, through the carefully selected poems, stories and prose selections, a deeper
engagement with and a nuanced discussion of issues of history, memory, caste, gender and
resistance.
Facilitating the Achievement of Course Learning Outcomes

Unit Course Learning Outcomes Teaching and Assessment Tasks

No. Learning Activity

1. Understanding concepts Interactive Reading material together in

discussions in small groups initiating
small groups in discussion topics participation in
Tutorial classes discussions

2. Expressing concepts How to think Writing essay length

through writing critically and write assignments
with clarity

3. Demonstrating conceptual Discussing exam Class tests

and textual understanding questions and
in tests and exams answering
techniques

10
Course Contents
Unit 1
Novel

Fakir Mohan Senapati, Six Acres and a Third, trans. Rabi Shankar Mishra, Satya P.
Mohanty, Jatindra K. Nayak, and Paul St-Pierre (Penguin, 2006).
Unit 2
Novel
O. V. Vijayan, The Legends of Khasak, translated by the author (Penguin, 2008).
Unit 3
Drama

Girish Karnad, The Fire and the Rain translated by the author (OUP 2004).
Unit 4
Short Stories
,
a) Premchand, ‘Kafan’, (The Shroud) trans. M. Asaduddin.
b) Perumal Murugan, ‘The Well’, trans. N. Kalyan Raman.
c) Arupa Patangia Kalita, ‘Doiboki’s Day’, trans. Bonita Baruah.

Poems

a) Rabindranath Tagore, (i) ‘Where the mind is without fear’, trans. William Radice;
(ii) ‘It hasn’t rained in my heart’, trans. FakrulAlam.
b) G. M. Muktibodh, ‘Brahmarakshas’, trans. Nikhil Govind.
c) Thangjam Ibopishak, (i) ‘The Land of the Half-Humans’; (ii) ‘I want to be killed
by an Indian Bullet’, trans. Robin S. Ngangom.
Unit 5
Readings

a) Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Nationalism in India’, in Nationalism (Delhi: Penguin

Books, 2009) pp. 63-83.
b) U. R. Ananthamurthy, ‘Being a Writer in India’, in Tender Ironies, ed. Dilip Chitre
et al. pp 127-46
c) Namvar Singh, ‘Decolonizing the Indian Mind’, Indian Literature Vol. 35 No. 5

11
 (151) (Sept.-Oct. 1992) pp. 145-56.
d) Vinay Dharwadker, ‘Some Contexts of Modern Indian Poetry’, Chicago Review 38
(1992): 218-31.
e) Aparna Dharwadker, ‘Modern Indian Theatre’, in Routledge Handbook of Asian
Theatre, ed. Siyuan Liu (London: Routledge 2016) pp. 243-67.

Essential Reading

Note: This is a literature-based course, and students will be examined on all the texts prescribed in
Units 1 through 5. Therefore, all those texts are to be considered essential reading.

Keywords

Colonialism
Post-colonial
Decolonization
Translation
History
Memory
Caste
Class
Gender
Resistance

12