HS 305 – Reading Literature (2021)
Course offered in:
Autumn 2021
Instructors:
Prof. Paulomi Chakraborty, Prof. Ratheesh Radhakrishnan, Prof. Sudha Shastri
Prerequisites:
None that I know of, but being fluent in English definitely helps.
Difficulty:
Easy(2/5)
Course Content:
- Prof Paulomi:
Arthur Conan Doyle – The Sign of Four, Adventure of the speckled band
Suniti Namajoshi – The Princess
Nadine Gordimer – Once upon a time
Susan Sontag – excerpts from AIDS and Its Metaphors(Chapters 1, 2, 5 and 8)
Mahmoud Darwish – A River Dies of Thirst: Journals
Evan Boland – _In a Time of Violence(_1994)
- Prof Ratheesh:
Mary Oliver – Breakage, Angels, Wild Geese
Muhammad Basheer – walls
Kuzhali Manickavel – Items that have gone missing from the Lucy Tumerlin Institute for broken shape shifters containment room
Charlotte Perkins Gilman – Yellow Wallpaper
Catherine Malibu – To quarantine from quarantine
- Prof Shastri:
Poems by: John Keats, Lewis Carroll, Robert Browning, Ted Huges
excerpts from The Tempest
While this might seem like a lot, since there was no midsem/endsem, for someone who just wants to complete the course, reading the content relevant to the questions asked in the assignments should suffice.
Feedback on Lectures (Online):
Profs expected the students to be interactive; to do some self-reading of the content in advance and add their own interpretations during class. The attendance dwindled to a handful of students towards the end.
Feedback on Evaluations:
Evaluations were based on 8 assignments each having 2/3 questions on the assigned literature. The word limit for each question was ~ 300 words. We were given about a week to solve each assignment. Spelling mistakes and grammatical errors were penalised. No Midsem! No Endsem!
Study Material:
PDFs of the texts mentioned above, which were provided by the Profs
Follow up courses:
¯_(ツ)_/¯
Final Takeaways:
The assignment-based evaluation meant that the course required some attention during the semester but kept you free in the Midsem and Endsem weeks.
Review by: Darin Jeff, 2023 (BTech)