The course introduces the objects, methods, debates and critical frames of literary studies. The course will centre for study: • a selection of texts in a range of forms and genres (fiction, poetry, prose, songs, travel- writing, graphic novels, life writing, plays, and so on) • various constituents of studying the literary (Author, Reader, Text, World) and the changing relations between them • methods of reading within the discipline (close reading, critical reading, surface reading, distant reading, and so on) Through these, the course also hopes to open out several of the conversations and debates within literary studies and sometimes in its interface with other disciplines. These may include, but need not be confined to: • The contours of the literary • Canons and counter-canons • Modes of contextualization • Historical shaping of the discipline • Critical approaches of framing and studying literature (new critical, structuralist, new historical, adaptation studies, feminist, psychoanalyst, Marxist, narratological) • Interdisciplinarity: crossover with ethnographic, archival, historical, stylistic approaches • Literary studies and Human Sciences • Socio-historical-cultural-intellectual contexts of the “literary” (institutions, infrastructures, media, ideologies, circulations-translations-adaptations).