Paper IX (Option d): Modern European Drama

This course focuses on a selection of late 19th and 20th century European theatre texts in order to examine a variety of performance modes, theatre practices and dramatic theories.

It aims to introduce students to significant developments in theatrical theory and practice from the onset of realism to the 1960s. The emphasis is on developing appropriate methods of analyzing specific texts, which manifest significant differences in theatrical method and examine how drama serves as a means of mediating the social/cultural/historical discourse of a given time.

The students are expected to demonstrate knowledge of the relation between reading and the viewing of modernist theatre texts of the period to broader historical developments of performance modes

(Realism/Naturalism, Expressionism/Surrealism, Epic/Political Theatre and Existentialism/ Theatre of the Absurd) They should be able to participate in debates (written and oral) about the relationship between theatrical theory and praxis and critically read dramatic texts as indicators of complex socio-cultural, political and theatrical events. In doing so, assess the possible impact of European theatre tradition on the contemporary global stage.

Paper IX (Option b): Literary Theory

This course in Literary Theory introduces students to seminal texts by literary theorists and philosophers that have shaped the study of literature in recent times. Classified under broad rubrics such as Marxism, Feminism, Postcolonialism, Postmodernism and Culture Studies, the course aims to instruct students in analysing theoretical texts, in addition to the pragmatic use of understanding literary texts by means of contemporary critical thought. Through this process, students learn how the body of criticism around literary texts is constituted. A diachronic/historically consequent dimension to the course is provided by the background texts that cover critical frameworks such as Formalism, Structuralism and Psychoanalysis which are antecedent to the debates in the main texts and influence their bearing. The readings also challenge the category of literature, philosophy, psychology, history and art as exclusive and separate from theory. Thus, the course is a broad but, at the same time, focused threshold to literary theory for those who wish to continue literary studies at the postgraduate level as also a platform for students who wish to move on to disciplines outside literature such as sociology and culture studies.

er VIII: Contemporary Literature

The all-inclusive title of this course specifically entails the ‘discovery’ and ‘exploration’ of non-Eurocentric literature covering the Novel, Poetry and Drama from Africa, Latin America, Canada and a volcanic Italian counter-culture. The central problematic of the course is how this literature radically deploys the tropes of ‘discovery’ and ‘exploration,’ which undermine the violence of such tropes used in the colonialist project. During the period of study indicated above, we will go through the poetry of Margaret Atwood, Derek Walcott and Pablo Neruda, together with novels by Chinua Achebe, Marquez and Nadine Gordimer. Two plays by Ngugi and Dario Fo complete our main focus of study. Our more literary reading of their work will be supported by prescribed prose excerpts, mainly drawn from writings on colonial and post-colonial issues.

Co-curricular prose writings considered will include, among others, extensive references to contemporary classics like George Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile, Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, Neruda’s Memoirs. Theoretical issues to be discussed with reference to the work of Walter Benjamin, Foucault, Roland Barthes, Theodor Adorno, Mary L. Pratt and Edward Said will address the following topics: the novel and traditional storytelling, oral and print culture, Nature and the (post)colonial gaze, the concept of the author.

Paper VII: English Literature 5

This course introduces the students to select texts of British literary modernism covering the first 60 years of the 20th Century. It encompasses drama, poetry and the novel as genres, and includes major English, Irish and expatriate writers such as D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, John Osborne, W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot and Joseph Conrad. Chronologically, the course follows up on the 1st Year study of Victorian literature course but also laterally connects with Paper IX, and partly Paper VIII, which are described below. Framed by the political context of the two world wars, the rise of socialism, suffrage movements, the last moments of colonial glory and the rise of other Literatures in English, this course simultaneously introduces us to High Modernism through experiments in literary form that elaborate broad philosophical and social movements. From free verse to the stream of consciousness novel, the texts and genres covered are thus to be fully experienced using an interdisciplinary approach referring to the plastic and visual arts, the scientific and semi-scientific advances that, in this period, informed public and philosophical discourse in their interpretation of the various ‘realities’ of human experience. Consequently, co-curricular readings will drawn on sociology, psychology, aesthetics and philosophy to comprehend movements like Existentialism, Surrealism, Impressionism, Imagism, Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Structuralism and early Postmodernism, among others, in order to bring alive the broadest significance of what we call Modernism.

Paper VI: English Literature 3

This course explores the literature of the Neo-classical and Romantic Periods in order give the student a substantial foundation in the literature and cultural history of one the most vibrant epochs in English literature (from 1720 to 1824). It examines the major literary genres and forms used by the Augustans, the late Augustans and the Romantics while also considering the major themes and ideas dominating these ages. We will follow the literature as it unfolds during this crucial period, reading it chronologically using modern and, in some instances, contemporary philosophical and critical paradigms and notions. The Augustans and the mid-eighteenth century poets/writers will be read in the context of the Enlightenment as also the rise of Industrial revolution. The Romantics’ participation in and, in some instances, witness to the great social, intellectual, and political upheavals in European history (Bastille, the Reign of Terror, Napoleon, Holy Alliance) will also be discussed in order to come to terms with the radically visionary poetics they were articulating.

The course situates the canonical poets/writers in the context of the broad conventions and traditions in which they wrote. We will consider in detail the writings of Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Gray, Oliver Goldsmith, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, P.B. Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats and Lord Byron in order to identify, analyse and evaluate each poet/writer’s distinguishing formal, aesthetic and ethical characteristics and preoccupations.