BA Major English, Humanities & Social Science Syllabus

Humanities and Social Sciences Four- Years' BA Major English Syllabus 2019 

Major English courses for the four-year BA in English aim at developing students’ foundational knowledge of English literature, critical tradition, and interpretive practices. These courses will help inculcate in them a spirit of inquiry, critical thinking, and a taste for appreciating literature, besides improving their communicative, analytical, research, and writing skills. The syllabus, by thus consolidating and strengthening the base, looks forward to the specialized study of literature at the  Master’s and levels thereafter.

Objectives 

The syllabus, which incorporates current global trends in English Studies while remaining attentive to the national/ local needs, envisages the following broad objectives or outcomes. Upon the completion of BA  Major English courses, students will be able— 

• to provide a broad understanding of English literature, including the heuristics for reading and  writing critically about it, 

• to embrace and appreciate the core humanistic values—integrity, empathy, and respect to  differences, 

• to comprehend and appreciate literature belonging to different cultural and national traditions,  ∙ to acquire necessary knowledge and skills to undertake serious literary and cultural studies  independently,  

• to recognize the historical formation of ideas, traditions, and social practices, 

• to analyze and understand an issue from multiple perspectives, and   to develop competency in researching, communicating, and problem-solving 

Eligibility 

To be eligible for admission to four-year BA Major English, students will have completed and received a  higher secondary certificate (10-plus 2) or equivalent degree in any discipline or stream from any institution recognized by Tribhuvan University.  

Structure of the Courses 

The four-year Major English programme at Tribhuvan University consists of seven papers and one elective course (optional elective for non-English majors). 

Evaluation Scheme 

Each course carries 100 full marks. Students have to score at least 40 marks to pass the course. Of the total 100 marks, 30 marks will be based on continuous/ internal evaluation and the rest of the 70 marks will be awarded based on the students’ performance in the final examination taken at the end of the academic year. Students must pass both internal and final examinations. However, ENG 427 has a practicum component (part of the internal evaluation) that carries 50% course weight.

Paper: I  Reading, Writing, and Thinking

Course Code: ENG 421  

Course Description 

This course concentrates on the major elements of literature and provides practical guidelines on reading closely and writing analytically. While the first two units give an exclusive coverage of the genres with a  demonstration of the skills needed for successful reading of and writing about literature with critical thinking, the last two units incorporate some of the well-known topics with wide-ranging tools to help entry level students respond critically to literature at the college level. 

Unit 1: Study of Literature and Its Close Reading

Thinking about Literature  

1. Discussed Text: “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” (Emily Dickinson) 

2. Discussed Text: “The Sacred” (Stephen Dunn) 

3. Activity Text: “When my love swears that she is made of truth” (William Shakespeare)

Why Study Literature?  

1. Discussed Text: “Praise Song for the Day” (Elizabeth Alexander) 

2. Discussed Text: “Peanuts” (Charles Schulz) 

Approaching Literature 

1. Discussed Text: “Out, Out—” (Robert Frost) 

2. Activity Text: “Snow” (Julia Alvarez) 

Close Reading 

1. Discussed Text: from My Antonia (Willa Cather) 

2. Activity Text: “To an Athlete Dying Young” (A. E. Housman) 

Elements of Style 

1. Activity Text: Re-reading “To an Athlete Dying Young” (A. E. Housman) 

2. Discussed Text: from “Old Mr. Marblehall” (Eudora Welty) 

3. Activity Text: from The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) 

Special Considerations for Reading Poetry Closely 

1. Discussed Text: from “The Red Wheelbarrow” (William Carlos Williams) 

2. Activity Text: “Bright Star, would I were steadfast as thou art—“(John Keats) 15. Discussed Text: “Delight in Disorder” (Robert Herrick) 

3. Activity Text: “My Father’s Song” (Simon Ortiz) 

Talking with the Text 

1. Activity Text: “Promises are like pie-crust, made to be broken” (Christina Georgina Rossetti)

2. Discussed Text: “When, in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes” (William Shakespeare)

Graphic Designer 

1. Discussed Text: from The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne) 

From Analysis to Essay: Writing a Close Analysis Essay 

1. Discussed Text: from “Slam, Dunk, & Hook” (Yusef Komunyakaa) 

2. Activity Text: “Fast Break” (Edward Hirsch) 

3. Activity Text: “Travelling through the Dark” (William Stafford) 

4. Activity Text: “Woodchucks” (Maxine Kumin)

Unit 2: Elements of Fiction & Drama

Elements of Fiction 

24. Discussed Text: “One of These Days” (Gabriel García Márquez) 

25. Discussed Text: from Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) 

26. Activity Text: from Hard Times (Charles Dickens) 

27. Discussed Text: from “The Masque of the Red Death” (Edgar Allan Poe) 

28. Discussed Text: from The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck) 

29. Discussed Text: from “Call it Sleep”(Henry Roth) 

30. Discussed Text: from 1984(George Orwell) 

31. Activity Text: from Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy) 

32. Discussed Text: from The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Dinaw Mengestu) 

33. Discussed Text: from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain) 

34. Discussed Text: from “Miss Brill”(Katherine Mansfield) 

35. Discussed Text: from “The Lottery”(Shirley Jackson) 

36. Discussed Text: from Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf) 

37. Activity Text: “Seeing Eye”(Brad Watson) 

38. Discussed Text: from A Crime in the Neighborhood (Suzanne Berne) 

39. Discussed Text: from Frankenstein (Mary Shelley) 

40. Activity Text: from Brooklyn (Colm Tóibín) 

41. Discussed Text: “The First Day”(Edward P. Jones) 

42. Activity Text: “Girl”(Jamaica Kincaid) 

Special Considerations for Analyzing Drama 

43. Discussed Text: from Pygmalion (George Bernard Shaw) 

44. Discussed Text: from Othello, the Moor of Venice (William Shakespeare) 

45. Discussed Text: from A Doll’s House (Henrik Ibsen) 

46. Activity Text: from A Raisin in the Sun (Lorraine Hansberry) 

47. Discussed Text: from The Gin Game (D. L. Coburn) 

48. Activity Text: Andre’s Mother (Terrence McNally) 

From Analysis to Essay: Writing an Interpretive Essay 

49. Discussed Text: Trifles(Susan Glaspell) 

Unit 3General Topics in Literature Family, Culture and Love

Home & Family 

50. Activity Text: “The Dead”(James Joyce) 

51. Activity Text: “I Stand Here Ironing” (Tillie Olsen) 

52. Activity Text: “A Prayer for My Daughter” (William Butler Yeats) 

53. Activity Text: “My Papa’s Waltz” (Theodore Roethke) 

54. Activity Text: “Those Winter Sundays” (Robert Hayden) 

Home & Family—Student Writing: Comparison and Contrast 

The Writer’s Craft —Close Reading (Connotation) 

Identity & Culture 

55. Activity Text: Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) 

56. Activity Text: “Interpreter of Maladies”(Jhumpa Lahiri) 

57. Activity Text: “We Real Cool” (Gwendolyn Brooks) 

58. Activity Text: “The White Man’s Burden” (Rudyard Kipling) 

59. Activity Text: “The Black Man’s Burden” (H. T. Johnson) 

Home & Family—Student Writing: Close Reading Fiction 

The Writer’s Craft —Close Reading (Specialized, Archaic, and Unfamiliar Diction)

Love & Relationships

60. Activity Text: The Importance of Being Ernest (Oscar Wilde) 

61. Activity Text: “To His Coy Mistress” (Andrew Marvell) 

62. Activity Text: “Coy Mistress” (Anne Finch) 

63. Activity Text: “Is Arranged Marriage Really Any Worse than Craigslist?” (Anita Jain) 

64. Activity Text: “Boyfriend” (Randall Munroe) 

Love & Relationships—Student Writing: Analyzing Irony in Drama 

The Writer’s Craft —Close Reading (Irony) 

Unit 4: Binary Topics in Literature 

Conformity & Rebellion 

65. Activity Text: Hamlet (William Shakespeare) 

66. Activity Text: “The Book of the Dead”(Edwidge Danticat) 

67. Activity Text: “anyone lived in a pretty how town” (E. E. Cummings) 

68. Activity Text: “An Epitaph” (Matthew Prior) 

69. Activity Text: “The Unknown Citizen” (W. H. Auden) 

Conformity & Rebellion—Student Writing: Close Reading Drama 

The Writer’s Craft —Close Reading (Tone) 

Tradition & Progress 

70. Activity Text: Daisy Miller (Henry James) 

71. Activity Text: “Everyday Use” (Alice Walker) 

72. Activity Text: “Dover Beach” (Matthew Arnold) 

73. Activity Text: “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (Langston Hughes) 

74. Activity Text: from Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral (Jessie Redmon Fauset) 

Conformity & Rebellion—Student Writing: Working with Sources 

The Writer’s Craft —Close Reading (Syntax) 

War & Peace 

75. Activity Text: Antigone (Sophocles) 

76. Activity Text: “The Shawl” (Cynthia Ozick) 

77. Activity Text: “The Management of Grief” (Bharati Mukherjee) 

78. Activity Text: “Dulce et Decorum Est” (Wilfred Owen) 

79. Activity Text: “Soldier’s Home” (Ernest Hemingway) 

War & Peace—Student Writing: Analyzing Theme in Drama 

The Writer’s Craft —Close Reading (Imagery) 

Paper: II - History of English Literature and Criticism Course

Code: ENG 422 

Course Description 

This course covers the key developments in the history of British literature and the history of literary criticism. It emphasizes the growth of English literature, its traditions, conventions and changing characteristics, and includes an overview of the major movements in its literary-critical tradition. The course is divided into two segments. The first deals with the history of English literature. In this segment,  students will be introduced to the different time periods of English literature, their fundamental concerns,  representative writers of those times, and the nature of creative writing. The second segment will familiarize students with the art of criticism from the ancient classical world to the twentieth century. This engagement with the ideas and beliefs, essential for critiquing a piece of a literary text, will improve their skill for literary appreciation. 

Unit 1: Old English Literature to Renaissance and Restoration Drama

Old English Literature 

1. Beowulf 

2. “The Seafarer and the Wanderer” 

3. Battle Poems and “The Dream of the Rood” 

4. Old English Language 

5. Middle English Literature 

6. Norman Conquest to Chaucer 

7. Julian Of Norwich, Margery Kempe, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 

8. Geoffrey Chaucer, William Dunbar, Robert Henryson 

9. William Langland, Medieval Drama, Thomas Malory 

10. Sixteenth-Century Poetry and Prose 

11. Sir Thomas Wyatt 

12. Sixteenth-Century Prose and the Reformation 

13. The Sonnet: Sir Philip Sidney and William Shakespeare 

14. Edmund Spenser 

15. Shakespeare 

16. Shakespeare in Context 

17. Shakespeare’s Comedies and Histories 

18. Shakespeare’s Tragedies 

19. Shakespeare’s Late Plays 

20.  Renaissance and Restoration Drama 

21. Renaissance Drama and Christopher Marlowe 

22. Elizabethan and Jacobean Revenge Tragedy 

23. Ben Jonson and the Masque 

Unit 2: Seventeenth-century Poetry and Prose to the Romantic Period

Seventeenth-Century Poetry and Prose 

1. John Donne 

2. Ben Jonson to John Bunyan and Andrew Marvell 

3. John Milton 

4. John Dryden 

5. The Eighteenth Century 

6. Alexander Pope 

7. The Augustan Age 

8. Edward Gibbon and Samuel Johnson 

9. Sensibility 

10. The Novel: The First Hundred Years 

11. Daniel Defoe 

12. Aphra Behn, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Lawrence Sterne, Tobias Smollett Eliza Haywood to Mary Shelly 

13. Walter Scott and Jane Austen 

14. The Romantic Period 

15. The Age of Revolution 

16. William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge 

17. Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelly, John Keats 

18. Radical Voices 

Unit 3: Victorian Literature to the Twentieth Century

Victorian Literature: 1837-1857 

1. Charles Dickens 

2. Charlotte and Emily Bronte 

3. William Makepeace Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell 

4. Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning  

5. Victorian Literature: 1857-1876 

6. Victorian Thinkers 

7. George Eliot 

8. Wilkie Collins and the Sensation Novel 

9. Anthony Trollope, Christina Rossetti 

10. Victorian Literature: 1876-1901 

11. Thomas Hardy 

12. George Gissing, George Moore, Samuel Butler, Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson Rudyard Kipling 

13. George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Late Victorian Poetry 

14. The Twentieth Century: The Early Years

15. Joseph Conrad 

16. Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, E. M. Foster, Katherine Mansfield 

17. D. H. Lawrence 

18. Georgian Poetry, War Poetry, W. B. Yeats 

19. The Twentieth Century: Between The Wars 

20. T. S. Eliot 

21. James Joyce 

22. Virginia Woolf 

23. The 1930s 

24. The Twentieth Century: The Second World War to the 

25. End of the Millennium 

26. Wartime and Post-war Britain 

27. Drama 

28. Novels 

29. Poetry 

30. Postscript 

31. The Twenty-First Century 

Unit 4: Classical to the Seventeenth Century

The Classical Age 

1. Plato 

2. Aristotle 

3. Horace 

4. Longinus 

5. Rhetoric: Cicero, Quintilian, Seneca, Petronius, Martianus, Capella 

6. The Renaissance 

7. The Complete Man: Elyot, Ascham 

8. The Art of Poetry: Gascoigne, James VI, Puttenham, Webbe 

9. The Defence of Poetry: Gosson, Lodge, Sidney, Harington 

10. The Seventeenth Century 

11. The Gentleman and the Christian: Peach, Drayton, Reynolds, Milton 

12. The Debate about Drama: Flecknoe, Howard, Shadwell 

13. John Dryden 

14. The Ancients and the Moderns: Temple, Wotton 

15. The Moral Debate: Mulgrave, Wolseley, Blackmore, Collier, Vanbrugh, Congreve 

Unit 5: The Eighteenth Century 

Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century

1. Joseph Addison 

2. The Battle of the Books: Swift, Farquhar 

3. Alexander Pope and his Victims

4. Dr. Johnson 

5. The Romantic Age 

6. William Wordsworth 

7. Samuel Taylor Coleridge 

8. Romanticism at Bay: Peacock, Shelley, Blake, Keats  

9. The Victorian Age 

10. Mathew Arnold 

11. Aestheticism: Pater, Swinburne, Wilde 

12. The Twentieth Century 

13. The Modernist Movement: Yeats, Hulme, Pound, Ford 

14. Bloomsbury and Eastwood: Woolf, Forster, Lawrence, Murray 

15. T. S. Eliot 

16. Cambridge Influences: Richards, Empson, Leavis