Other links:
Other links:
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.
Code: FC-0701-1 | Semester: Monsoon 2026
FC Section: First Year
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, Amton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, V.S. Naipaul, Tayeb Salih, Toni Morrison, Jorge Luis Borges and Flannery O’Connor among others.
Code: FC-0701-2 | Semester: Monsoon 2026
FC Section: First Year
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 colonised 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. Recognising 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 filmmaker from Uttar Pradesh?
Code: FC-0701-3 | Semester: Monsoon 2026
FC Section: First Year
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 practised in a literature classroom for non-specialists, including students who may major in any subject at Ashoka– a 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 globalisation 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.
Code: FC-0701-4 | Semester: Monsoon 2026
FC Section: First Year
Literature lives in a strange place where the word meets the world: here, the fantastical can seem familiar and the mundane may seem bizarre. The act of reading allows us to imagine the strange worlds of others as if we lived in them, and, equally, to reimagine our everyday worlds as if we viewed them through unfamiliar eyes. This imaginative encounter with otherness—other people, other perspectives, other places, and other worlds—lies at the heart of the literary experience.
In South Asia, the literary encounter with otherness is inextricable from the worldly encounters of caste. The aesthetics of caste inform our literary sensibilities, the social experiences of caste frame the world we inhabit, and the everyday performances of caste shape our bodies. In short, the encounters that create our aesthetic, social, and embodied experiences—between the word and the world, between the self and the other, and between the real and the imagined—are all entangled with caste.
This course will examine the relationship between literature and the world by focusing on the aesthetic, social, and embodied experiences of caste. We will ask: What can caste and literature tell us about each other? What do the intersections of caste and literature tell us about the world? How does our experience of the world inform and inflect our responses to literary representations of caste? And, perhaps most important, how will this kind of literary experience help us inhabit the world? We will read fiction, nonfiction, poems, and plays to explore what literature can reveal about others, ourselves, and a world organised by caste.
Code: FC-0701-5 | Semester: Monsoon 2026
FC Section: Senior Year
Families shape us, form us, for better or worse. How does literature talk about this institution? Does the world of imagination tell us deeper truths about the family—its potential to define, destroy, and heal? This course takes texts from across the world and focuses on this relation between the individual and the family; the joy and burden of kinship; the networks of relations that bind and set us free. In the process, we also hope to gain an understanding of literature as an institution, and its role in telling stories that are both real and imaginary.
Primary Texts:
Secondary Texts (excerpts):
Course Philosophy:
A key to a robust and fulfilling class experience is that the instructor and students have a common understanding on what the course is about, i.e., not only what it will do, but
also what it will not include or focus upon. The instructor will make sure that this understanding of the course, as a whole and in parts, is communicated. However, feel free to approach us in case of any questions and discussions that may arise in your mind. Do note that the course will proceed sequentially so that you have time to read all the texts; however, the duration spent on each text may sometimes vary depending upon the nature of interest and involvement we feel. Students are expected to procure and read all the primary texts. Secondary text excerpts and articles will be made available to the class. They will inform our reading of the primary texts, but we may not have the time to discuss each and every piece in class. The instructor likes to be interrupted; so please do not wait for cues to participate in class—instead, view the classroom experience as an adda (without food, of course!). Allow room for both focused and meaningful digressions.
Code: FC-0701-6 | Semester: Monsoon 2026
FC Section: Senior Year
Literature is the 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, and 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 was 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.
abir.bazaz@ashoka.edu.in