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Ashoka University’s undergraduate course curriculum is taught across three semesters: Spring, Summer and Monsoon (Fall). Courses are broadly divided into three categories – Foundation Courses (core curriculum), Major & Minor Courses and Co-Curricular Courses.
You may search courses offered at Ashoka here. Please use the drop down menu to choose the specific semester and subject to see the full list of courses under each department. Foundation courses are offered in all semesters and do not have prerequisites. Offerings in other categories differ in each semester. Some higher level major/minor courses may have prerequisites.
To view Summer Semester Courses-2024: Click here
This class begins with the premise that every story is a migrant. A story migrates in a variety of ways – from the teller to the audience or reader; but also from reader to reader, place to place, and culture to culture, as the story gets told and retold (or written and rewritten) over space and time.
We live in a capitalist age when ideas of private property have subtly colonized how we think about stories. It is assumed that a story is always BY someone, and is therefore their possession. But if stories migrate, can a single author really claim full ownership of the story she has written? How is every story a re-imagining of another story, or many stories, that have become before?
The notion that a story is an author’s private intellectual property also inhibits how we read. Readers become potential trespassers; they must pay the price of admission, and then act respectfully when they enter the property, making sure not to damage or alter it. If you are a student of literature, it’s likely that the command to respect an author’s private property will be accompanied by the assumption that the objective of literary analysis is simply to understand what the author intended, and to submit to that deferentially. But if stories migrate from teller to reader, and from reader to reader and culture to culture, maybe the act of reading should not be thought of just as a respectful encounter with an author’s private property. Every act of reading instead becomes a creative re-imagining of the story, in conversation with new potential readers and audiences.
If stories are migrants, then they are no longer individual property by authors who command their readers. They are collective artefacts that invite us to respond creatively and re-imagine them anew.
If you doubt what I am saying, think this. Do any two readers respond exactly the same way to a story? Each reader, when asked about a story and what it meant, will retell it slightly differently. Recognizing that reading is a form of creative re-imagining is one of this course’s most important themes.
As stories migrate across space, time, and languages, they are re-imagined by the world across many genres and media – poems, plays, novels, essays, films, graphic novels. These re-imaginings might prove that, in literature, there is nothing original under the sun. Yet how literature reimagines earlier stories also tells us a lot about the extraordinarily diverse ways in which different cultures have understood the world: relations between men and women, relations between diverse ethnicities and religions, the nature of political and social power, humans’ relations to the animal and plant world, the agonies and ecstasies of love, and the nature of imagination itself.
How, for example, is a Roman re-imagining of an old Greek story about an Asian witch re-imagined by an English playwright in an “American” drama that has itself been re-imagined in very different ways by writers and artists from the Caribbean, Sierra Leone, Mauritius, and Samoa? How is a Roman re-imagining of a Babylonian (ie Iraqi) love story reworked by the same English playwright in a Greek mythic tale with an Asian subtext that gets in turn re-imagined by a Bombay director in Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu and English as well as by an English graphic novelist in a reworking of an American comic-book hero’s saga based on a character from a German short story? And how is an antique Persian story about an African migrant re-imagined in an Arab novel and then re-imagined by the same English playwright, whose play is then diversely re-imagined by a Sudanese novelist and a Hindi film-maker from Uttar Pradesh?
