University of Calcutta

Department of English
M.A. Part 1 Syllabus
ABOUT THE COURSE
Each paper (100 marks) consists of three units. The first unit is divided into three subunits
and the second and third units are divided into four sub-units each. The first units of each paper
comprise 20 marks and the two other units 40 marks each. A mid-term internal assessment will
be made on the first unit of each paper and the examination on the other two units will be held at
the end of the term. Students will have to write a long answer consisting of 15 marks and a short
answer of 5 marks for the internal assessment. The remaining 80 marks per paper will be
assessed at the end of the academic year where students will have to write two long answers of
15 marks each in each unit of the paper along with two short questions of 5 marks each.
The internal assessment will be held on the first unit of each paper (i.e., a total of 80
marks in Part I and a total of 80 marks in Part II) and the final examinations will be held
on Units 2 and 3 only(i.e., a total of 320 marks in Part I and 320 marks in Part II).

PAPER 1
UNIT I
• Pre-Elizabethan Theatre
• Elizabethan Theatre
•Prologue to ‘Wife of Bath’
UNIT II
• Chaucer: Prologue to Canterbury Tales
• The Nun’s Priest’s Tale
• The Knight’s Tale
• Sir Gawain and the Greene Knight

UNIT III
Plays of William Shakespeare
• Hamlet/King Lear
• Troilus and Cressida/ Measure for Measure
• Tempest/ The Winter’s Tale
• Richard II/ Henry IV Parts 1 and 2
PAPER 2
UNIT I-
• Elizabethan Poetry other than Shakespeare (Selections)
• Bacon’s Essays (Selections)
• Elizabethan Prose (Selections)
UNIT II
• Marlowe: Dr Faustus /Kyd: The Spanish Tragedy
• Webster: The Duchess of Malfi /Massinger: A New Way to Pay Old Debts
• Ben Jonson: Volpone
• Metaphysical Poetry:
Donne- On His Mistris, The Flea, The Apparition, The Canonization, The
Extasie, Twickenham Garden, A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day 1-7, The Three
Herbert- The Collar, Easter-wings, The Pulley, Jordan (1) and (2), Redemption,
Denial, Love
Marvell- The Definition of Love, On a Drop of Dew, The Garden
Vaughan- Regeneration, Peace, The World, Man
UNIT III
• John Milton- Samson Agonistes / Paradise Lost Bk IV
• John Dryden: Absalom and Achitophel Part I/ Congreve: The Way of the World
• Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels/ Pope: Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot
• Defoe: Moll Flanders/ Sterne: Tristram Shandy
PAPER 3
UNIT I
• William Blake: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience
• S.T.Coleridge: Christabel, Frost at Midnight, France: An Ode
• John Keats: The Eve of St. Agnes, Hyperion, Lamia, Sonnets: The Human Seasons,
When I have Fears that I may cease to be, On the sea, On Death, Why Did I
Laugh Tonight?, Bards of passion and of Mirth
UNIT II
• William Wordsworth: The Prelude Bks- I & XIII (1805 version)
• P. B. Shelley: Prometheus Unbound
• Mary Shelley: Frankenstein
• Elizabeth Gaskell: Mary Barton
UNIT III
• Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights/ Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre,
• Alfred Tennyson: In Memoriam/ Dickens: Dombey and Son
• Mathew Arnold: Culture and Anarchy/George Eliot: Middlemarch
• Robert Browning: Childe Roland, Fra Lippo Lippi, Andrea Del Sarto, The Bishop
Orders His tomb At St. Praxed’s Church, Caliban upon Setebos
PAPER 4
UNIT I
• Edward Bond: Lear/ The Pope’s Wedding
• Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory /Huxley: Brave New World
• 20th Century Poetry: Faber Book of Modern Verse (Selections)
4
UNIT II
• Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness/ E.M. Forster: A Passage to India
• James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as an Young Man/ Dubliners
• W. B. Yeats: Poems, selected with notes by A.N.Jeffares ( Macmillan & Co.). The
following pieces only- No Second Troy, September 1913, The Wild Swans at
Coole, Leda and the Swan, A Coat, Easter 1916, A Prayer for my daughter,
Sailing to Byzantium, The Tower, Among School Children, Mohini Chatterjee,
Byzantium, The Circus Animal’s Deserton, The Municipal Gallery Revisited
• Eliot: Murder in the Cathedral/ The Family Reunion
UNIT III
• Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot /Malone Dies
• Tom Stoppard: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead/ Caryl Phillips: A Distant
Shore
• Zadie Smith/Fay Weldon/A.S.Byatt*
• Kingsley Amis /Carol Duffy/Sheamus Heaney*
* Texts/ Selections to be announced in the beginning of the session
 New Syllabus (Revised)
M.A. English
PART-II
Department of English University of Calcutta
PAPER- V
Unit I (20 marks)
Literary Terms (4 terms x 5 marks each) [At least 12 Literary Terms to be covered]

Unit II (40 marks)

Aristotle Poetics
Longinus On The Sublime
Dryden/Sidney Essay on Dramatic Poesy/ The Defence of Poesy
Coleridge/Wordsworth Romantic literary theory with special reference to Biographia Literaria, Chapters
XIII, XIV and XVIII / Preface to Lyrical Ballads.

Unit III (40 marks)

The following pieces from Modern Literary Theory: A Reader 2nd ed. Ed. Rice and Waugh
Jacques Derrida Deconstruction with reference to “Structure, Sign and Play” in the
Discourse of the Human Sciences
Roland Barthes Post- modernism with reference to “The Death of the Author”
Louis Althusser Marxist literary theory with reference to Ideology and the State
Apparatuses
(extract)
Mitchel Foucault Post- structuralism with reference to The Order of Discourse
(extract)
Aijaz Ahmad In Theory (selections).

Recommended Reading
1. Cuddon. A Dictionary of Literary terms and Theories (Penguin)
2. Wimsatt and Brooks eds. Literary Criticism: A Short History (Indian ed., Oxford Book Company)
3. Selden, Widdowson and Brooker eds, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, 5th Edition
(Indian ed. Cambridge University Press)

PAPER- VI Special Authors

1. T. S. Eliot
2. R.K. Narayan
3. Harold Pinter
4. Virginia Woolf

UNIT I: (20 marks)

1. T.S.Eliot: Criticism
2. R.K.Narayan: Short stories
3. Pinter: Dramarturgy
4. Virginia Woolf: Non-Fictional Prose.

UNIT II: (40 marks)

1. T.S.Eliot: Poetry and Drama
2. R.K.Narayan: Novels
3. Pinter: Plays
4. Virginia Woolf: Novels

UNIT III: (40 marks)

1. Essay

PAPER- VII(a) Humanism and Literature

Unit I (20 Marks)
Machiavelli The Prince
Castiglione : The Courtier
Thomas More: Utopia

Unit II (40 Marks)

Petrarch: Poems
Vasari: Michaelangelo from Lives
Erasmus: The Praise of Folly
Benvenoto Cellini: Autobiography

Unit III (40 Marks)

Sebastian Brandt: The Ship of Fools
Calderon: Life is a Dream
Pico della Mirandola: An Oration on the Dignity of Man.
Montaigne: Essays
Francois Rabelais: Pantagruel

Recommended Reading:
1. Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism
2. The Renaissance in Italy, Jakob Burckhardt; Autobiography. Benvenuto Cellini; Rennaissance
Humanism, (Philadelphia, 1988) A. Rabil Jr. ed.

PAPER- VII(b) Modernism and Postmodernism

Unit I (20 marks)
Virginia Woolf Modern Fiction
Georg Lukacs The Ideology of Modernism
Iser Interaction between Text and Reader
Baudrillard Introduction and “The Divine Irreference of Images‟ from Simulations

Unit II (40 marks)

Ezra Pound Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
James Joyce Ulysses
Albert Camus The Outsider
Luigi Pirandello Six Characters in Search of an Author

Unit III (40 marks)

John Fowles The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Gabriel Garcia Marquez One Hundred Years of Solitude
Samuel Beckett Endgame
Eigene Ionesco Rhinoceros
Italo Calvino If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller
 Recommended Reading
1. Bradbury and McFarlane Modernism: A Guide to
eds. European Literature 1890-`
1930 (Penguin)
2. Peter Childs Modernism (Routledge:
The New Critical Idiom
Series)
3. Patricia Waugh ed. Postmodernism: A Reader
(Edward Arnold)
4. S. Best and D. Kellner Postmodern Theory:
Critical Interrogations
(Guilford Press)

PAPER- VII(c) Gender and Literature UNIT-I (20 marks)

1. Christina Rossetti- Goblin Market
2. Kate Chpoin – The Awakening
3. Charlotte Perkins Gilman- The Yellow Wall Paper

UNIT-II (40 marks)

1. Mary Wollstonecraft- A Vindication of the Rights Of Women
2. Kate Millet- Sexual Politics
3. Simone de Beauvoir- The Second Sex
4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak- Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism/ Can the Subaltern
Speak?
5. Judith Butler: Gender Trouble

UNIT-III (40 marks)

1. Thomas Hardy- Jude the Obscure
2. Henrick Ibsen- A Doll’s House
3. Virginia Woolf- A Room of One’s Own
4. Sylvia Plath- The Bell Jar
4. Miles Franklin- My Brilliant Career
5. Shashi Deshpande- That Long Silence

PAPER- VII(d) Colonialism and Post-colonialism Unit-I: (20 Marks) \

1. Tagore: Nationalism
2. Aphra Behn: Oroonoko
3. Edward Said: From Orientalism

Unit-II: (40 Marks)

1. Partha Chatterjee: Selections from Partha Chatterjee Omnibus
2. Dipesh Chakrabarty: Provincialising Europe
3. Franz Fanon: Wretched of The Earth
4. Ngugi wa Thiongo: Decolonising The Mind
5. Selections from The Post Colonial Studies Reader

Unit-III: (40 Marks)

1. Doris Lessing: The Grass Is Singing/ Martha Quest
2. J. M. Coetzee: Foe/ Waiting for the Barbarians/ Nadine Gordimer – July’s People

3. Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea

4. Rudyard Kipling: Kim/ John Masters – Bhowani Junction
5. Amitav Ghosh: Sea of Poppies

Paper VIII(a) Ancient European Classics Unit-I (20 Marks)

1. Plautus: The Ghost
2. Plato: The Symposium
3. Sappho: Poems

Unit-II (40 Marks)

1. Homer: The Illiad
2. Aeschylus: Agamemnon
3. Sophocles: King Oedipus
4. Euripedes: Medea
5. Aristophanes: The Frogs

Unit-III (40 Marks)

1. Virgil: The Aeneid
2. Horace: Odes
3. Seneca: Thyestes
4. Tenth Satire of Juvenal
5. Ovid: Selections

PAPER- VIII(b) Modern European Classics Unit-I (20 Marks)

1. Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies
2. Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina
3. Andre Gide: Strait Is The Gate

Unit – II (40 Marks)

1. FranzKafka: The Castle
2. Federico Garcia Lorca: Blood Wedding
3. Jean PaulSartre: The Flies
4. Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment

Unit- III (40 Marks)

1. Thomas Mann: Death in Venice
2. Bertolt Brecht: The Life of Galileo
3. Charles Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du Mal

PAPER- VIII(c) American Literature Unit-I (20 Marks)

1. Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman
2. Poetry – The Poems of Robert Frost, William Carlos Willams, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson,
Sylvia Plath from The Penguin Book of American Verse.
3. Eugene O’ Neill: Mourning Becomes Electra
Unit-II (40 Marks)
1. Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
2. Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie
3. Melville: Moby Dick
4. Whitman: Leaves of Grass (Selections)
5. Hemingway: A Farewell To Arms
6. Stephen Crane: The Red Badge of Courage

Unit-III (40 Marks)

1. Jhumpa Lahiri: The Namesake
2. Amy Tan: Joy Luck Club
3. Alice Walker: Colour Purple/ Toni Morrison: Beloved
4. Leslie Marmon Silko: Ceremony/ Louise Endrich: Tracks
5. Rudolpho Anaya- Bless Me, Ultima.

PAPER- VIII(d) Indian Writing in English and in English Translation Unit-I (20 Marks)
1. N.C. Chaudhuri – The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian.
2. Raja Rao – Kanthapura.
3. Twelve Modern Indian Poets ed. Arvind Mehrotra

Unit-II (40 Marks)

1. Bankimchandra – Rajmohan’s Wife.
2. Amitav Ghosh: The Hungry Tide
3. Nayantara Sehgal: Rich Like Us
4. Girish Karnad: The Fire and the Rain
5. Salman Rushdie: Shame

Unit-III (40 Marks)

1. Indira Goswami: The Moth Eaten Howdah of a Tusker
2. Bhisham Sahni: Tamas
3. Badal Sarkar: Ebong Indrajit (English Translation)
4. Bama: Karukku (English Translation)
5. Tagore: Gora ( EnglishTrans: Radha Chakravarty)
6. Mahesh Dattani: Final Solutions/ Tara

PAPER- VIII(e) Language Studies Unit I (20 marks) Phonetics and Spoken English
1. Definition and Scope of Phonetics
2. Mechanism of Speech Production
3. Classification of Sounds- Description of English Consonants and Vowels
4. Syllable- Structure and types of the syllable
5. Word Stress
6. Stress and Rhythm in Connected Speech
7. Intonation
8. Features of Connected Speech

A.C. Gimson: An Introduction to Pronunciation of English (ELBS)

R.K. Bansal and J.B. Harrison: Spoken English for India (Orient Longman)
J.Kenworthy: Teaching English Pronunciation (Orient Longman)

Unit II (40 marks) Linguistics and Structure of Modern English AND Stylistics
1. Definition and Scope of Linguistics
2. Language: its Features and Functions
3. Language Variations- Language varieties, Languages in Contact, Language Change
4. Introduction to various Schools of Linguistics- Traditional, Structural and Transformational Generative
5. Structure of Modern English- Structure of NP, VG, patterns of other Sentential Constituents, Surface
and Deep Structure inter-relations, Ambiguities.
6. Stylistics- Styles, Features, Purpose and Effect, Style and Context.
7. Various Approaches to Stylistic Analysis- Literary Stylistics, Linguistics Stylistics, Discourse
Analysis, Stylostatistics.
8. Stylistic Markers and Conventions.
9. Practical Stylistic Interpretation of Unseen Poem(s) or Prose passages

H.A. Gleason: Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics (OUP/IBH)

V. A. Fromkin & R. Rodman: An Introduction to Language (Rinchart & Winsten)
S.K. Verma and N.Krishnaswamy: Modern Linguistics: An Introduction (OUP)
William O‟Grady et al: Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction (St. Martin‟s Press)
R.A.Hudson: Sociolinguistics (CUP)
F.Palmer: Grammar (Penguin)
A.Radford: Transforamational Grammar (OUP)
H.G. Widdowson: Stylistics and Teaching of Literature (Longman)
Richard Bradford: Stylistics (Routledge)
G.N. Leech: A Linguistics Guide to English Poetry (Longman)
Brown and Yule: Discourse Analysis (CUP)

Unit III (40 marks)

1. Language Acquisition versus language learning
2. Language Learning theories- Behaviourist and Cognitivist Schools
3. Various Approaches and Methods of Language Teaching- Grammar Translation method, Reading
method, Direct method, Audiolingual method, Situational method, Communicative method, Lexical
Approach.
4. Testing and Evaluation- Principles of Evaluation, Types of Tests 5. ELT in contemporary India-
Alternative methodology to suit Indian Contexts
W.Klein: Second language Acquisition (CUP)
H.G.Widdowson: Aspects of Language Teaching (OUP)
Jack c. Richards & Theodore S. Rodgers: Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching (CUP)
Brumfit Broughton, et al: Teaching English as a Foreign Language (Routledge)
Alan Davies: Principles of Language Testing (Basil Blackwell)
N. Krishnasmamy & T. Shriraman: English Teaching in India (T.R. Publications)
R.K. Agnihotri & A.L. Khannna: Problematizing English in India (Sage)

PAPER- VIII(f) New Literatures Unit I-(20 Marks) Australia

1. Jack Davis: No Sugar (play)
2. Selected Poems and Short Stories

Canada
1. Michael Ondaatje: The English Patient
2. Selected Poems and Short Stories

Africa
1. Wole Soyinka: A Dance of the Forests (play)
2. Selected Poems and Short Stories
Caribbean
1. Lamming: Pleasures of Exile
2. Selected Poems and Short Stories

Unit II- (40 marks) Australia

1. David Malouf: An Imaginary Life
2. Patrick White: A Fringe of Leaves
3. Selected poems and short stories

Canada
1. Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale
2. Joy Kogawa: Obasan
3. Selected Poems and Short stories

Africa
1. Nadine Gordimer: A Guest of Honour
2. Chinua Achebe : No Longer at Ease
3. Selected poems and short stories

Caribbean
1. V.S. Naipaul: A House for Mr. Biswas
2. Marle Hodge: Crick Crack Monkey
3. Selected poems and short stories

Unit-III (40 Marks) Australian

1. Sally Morgan: My Place
2. Jean Devanny: Sugar Heaven
3. Peter Carey: Oscar and Lucinda

Canada
1 Leonard Cohen : Beautiful Losers
2 Ian Adams; Agent of Influence
3 Dianne Warren: Club Chernobyl (play)

Africa 1 Ben Okri : Tales of freedom

2 Damon Galgut : The Good Doctor
3 Donald Woods : Cry Freedom ( Biography )

Caribbean 1 Jamaica Kincaid : A Small Place

2 Andrea Levy : Small Island
3 Derek Walcott : Walker and the Ghost Dance (play)

Recommended reading:
 The Cambridge history of African and Caribbean Literature 2 Vols. Cambridge History of Australian
Literature ed. Peter Pierce

 The Oxford Literary History of Australia ed Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Strauss The Penguin Book of
Australian Verse ed Harry Hesel Tine
 New Oxford Book of Australian Verse ed Les Murray
 Anthology of Australian Aboriginal Literature ed. Anita Hiess and Peter Minter
 Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry ed. Gerald Moore and Uili Beier
 Poems of Black Africa ed. Wole Soyinka
 A Selection of African Poetry ed. K.E. Senau and T. Vincent
 Penguin Book of South African Stories ed. Steven Gray.
 The Arnold Anthology of Postcolonial Literatures in English: ed. John Thieme
 Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English ed. Paula Burnett Hinterland Caribbean Poetry ed. E. A
Markham
 Caribbean New Wave Anthology: Contemporary Short Stories selected by Stewart Brown Heinemann

 The Arnold Anthology of Postcolonial Literatures in English: ed. John Thieme