History of Literature, taking English as an example, may be taken up for study in order to understand how the history of English Literature is related to canon-formation. Standard texts on this subject, observe trajectories of tracing the evolution of British literary history. This course will interrogate the trajectory, in ways ranging from accommodating more women authors in the literary history, to re-imagining the conventional subdivision of the writers of each age as major and minor. The course may also look at alternative modes of structuring histories of literature, following departures from diachronic, national-language models, to synchronic models that look at interrelations between different literatures produced in different languages, in which connections emerge because of a multitude of factors (e.g. colonialism, solidarity movements connecting different disenfranchised groups, and so on).
For example: 1. European drama—its development seen in synchronic developments across different languages in different nodal points in time (e.g. the Early Modern Period; 19th-century drama, often termed as “Victorian” in the context of English literature; 20th-century interrelations between Indian and European drama); Or, Metaphysical poetry (connected in numerous ways with continental European poetry; with religious emblem books, etc.) Such an approach leads us to reconsider the terms of literary periodisation itself, both in English and in other languages. Questions of periodisation and the social-historical-political are ingrained in how the course examines what ‘literature’ or the ‘literary’ has been imagined to be, how it has been studied in specific points in history, or how nature of such study has shifted over time and space. In this last endeavour, the course is expected to converse with other common courses offered from other disciplines.
Topics include:
1.Study of literature by conventional national divisions and periodisation though ‘age’ model: alternative approaches
2The making of the English canon, rethinking the canon, canon formation and values such as questions of literary taste
3 Notions of minor authors and minor literatures, ‘minority voices’
4 The ways the same text has been read in different places, spaces, and time, sometimes reflexively/relationally/revisionally: for example, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World, Premchand’s “Sadgati,” U. R. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara
5 Synchronic and diachronic literary exchanges that have reinforced or disrupted canons and canonicity: translations, adaptations, appropriations, collaborations