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In this course, we will address the question "What is sexuality" by reading some of the many books that have shaped our current ideas of the subject. These books will range across chronologies, cultures, and disciplines, starting with classical and medieval Indic texts -- the Kamasutra, Sufi poetry -- to ancient Greek and Roman classics -- the Symposium, the Metamorphoses. We will also read philosophical texts like the Discourse on Method, biological texts like The Origin of Species, psychoanalytical texts like The Interpretation of Dreams, and literary texts like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Together, these "great books" will allow us to trace threads that have gone into our current ways of thinking about sexuality.
Amrita Narayanan
Department: English| Semester: Spring 2025
Our own biography, realistically put, is confining. Literature allows us more wide-ranging lives and selves. In this class we will think about how the self is experienced and narrated in great works of literature. Using the experiences of the literary characters, we will ask pressing questions that might also apply to ourselves. How does desire drive the way the self is imagined? Is the self that is evoked in nature different from the self that is evoked in the city? How does age affect the experience of the self? Do literary characters know themselves? What do they do when they feel oppressed by themselves? To explore these questions, we will read literary works from a range of time periods and cultures including the works of Lewis Carrol, Kalidasa, D.H. Lawrence, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jose Saramago.
Department: English| Semester: Spring 2025
Literature is an art of storytelling. But can storytelling bring about revolutions? Is it possible for stories to stand up against colonial abuse, fight prejudices, bring social change, impact public policy? In this course, we will talk about stories that did exactly that and did it so spectacularly that generations have remained in awe of them. We will read novels, short stories, memoirs and essays to discover that each of these works of art were responsible for protesting against the injustices of their times. And in doing so, they highlighted and gave voice to the wrongs and discriminations of today. At the heart of each of these stories, we will encounter a fierce rejection of dogma and a stubborn insistence to speak out.
Semester: Monsoon 2024
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?
Semester: Monsoon 2024
What is literature? And what does it teach us about who we are, the world we live in, and where we are going? Does literature help us make better sense of the lives of others or the necessary strife involved in the human condition? Does literature put us more genuinely in touch with ourselves and one another? What is the relation between literature and politics? Or literature and religion? In this course, we will search for answers to some of these questions by reading modern literature from all over the world. We will be studying literary texts by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Franz Kafka, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, V.S. Naipaul, Han Kang, Toni Morrison, J.M.Coetzee and Flannery O’Connor among others.
Semester: Monsoon 2024
What is liberal arts education? Is it identified with particular subjects, or a certain style of teaching and learning? This course will offer an introduction to liberal arts education as it might be practiced in a literature classroom for non-specialists, including students who may major in any subject at Ashoka – be it literature, economics, or biology. Our focus will be on English as a world language, and particularly one of global literature. How did the British Empire shape a global terrain of colonial modernity? How did that modernity merge with Anglo-American globalization of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? How did this create the English-speaking and English-reading worlds, and how did it turn English into a language of world literature? We will examine the transnational trajectory of this diverse and diffuse body of writing, including work from spaces with vastly different histories – the colonies in sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia, and the hard-to-classify context of South Africa.
Faculty Name: S Satish Kumar
Semester: Monsoon 2024
“Often defined as the totality of all things in existence, the “world” as a category and as a concept is unique within histories of human thought. For example, in contexts such as “World Affairs,” “World Commerce,” or “World Literature,” we encounter the “world” almost as an adjective that points to a sense of vastness or universality. This sense of immensity is also conveyed in expressions like such and such or so and so, “means the world to me.” Such a usage relates to yet another sense in which one may understand the “world,” and that is as a horizon or locus of one’s individual and shared perceptions and experiences. Extending from such a personal sense of the word and contrary to universality or immensity, an expression like, “You and I come from very different worlds,” expresses a seeming incommensurability across individual and subjective experiences.
In this course we will be working towards understanding this unique and exceptional elasticity of the “world” as an idea or a concept, and as a lived reality through its representations in literature. We will be reading a wide sampling of texts such as Banarasidas’ Ardhakathanak, Albert Camus’ The Outsider, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Vaikom Muhammad Basheer’s Me Grandad ‘ad an Elephant. As we encounter and navigate these fictive and literary worlds, we will also be reflecting on ways in which we understand our place and the place of others in the world(s) that we live in”.
subhasree.chakravarty@ashoka.edu.in