Subsections
[Cr:2, Lc:2, Tt:0, Lb:0]
This course aims at making students better readers, writers and speakers. It will also try to inject in them a sense of understanding for other areas of knowledge other than science. The aim is to make it more than just a course in composition or English as a foreign language.
The course revolves around three distinct thematic areas:
- Area 1: Words as archives of changing human sensibilities: An introduction to Google Ngram Viewer: A set of very common words are chosen to track their etymological migration. The stories of these words reveal some genealogies of our ‘present’.
- Area 2: Language of power and the power of language: A set of essays dealing with the emergence of English as a global ‘public language’ are taught. By means of these essays, students learn the relationship between a language and global political and economic forces such as imperialism, colonialism, religion and warfare.
- Area 3: Writing Science: A set of essays by prominent science writers/journalists are discussed in class for students to learn how to disseminate scientific research and thinking to the larger ‘reading public’ of India.
- Eric Hand, Culturomics: Word play, Nature, 474, 436-440, 2011
- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
- Bertrand Russell How I write
- Roy Peter Clark, 50 Writing Tools
- Thomas Ricento (ed), Language Policy and Political Economy: English in a Global Context, OUP,2015
- Partha Chatterjee (ed), Texts of Power: Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal, University of Minnesota Press, 1995
- Björkman, B. , English as an academic lingua franca, Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton
- Ball, P. Molecules, A very Short Introduction, 2003 (select sections).
- Ball, P., H2O: A Biography of Water, 1999 (select chapters).
- Majumdar, Siddhartha, The Emperor of Maladies: a biography of cancer
- Bhargava P M and Chakrabarti C. Angels, Devil and Science: A Collection of Articles on Scientific Temper, National Book Trust, New Delhi, India, 2010 (select essays).
- Haksar, P.N., Ramanna, R. and Bhargava, P.M., A Statement on Scientific Temper, 1981.
- Djerassi, K. and R. Hoffmann, Oxygen (Play).
- Emma, Gender Wars and Household Chores
- The UGC Saksham Guidelines (excerpts from various chapters)
- Satish Deshpande: Caste and castelessness: Towards a biography of the 'general category', EPW, 48 (15), 2013
- Ajantha Subramanian, Making merit: The Indian Institute of Technology and the social life of caste, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 57 (2), 2015, 291-322
- Rabindranath Tagore: Nationalism Essays (select essays)
- Ram Chandra Guha, The Idea of India (Interview)
- Mahabharata (select sections from Sabha Parva and Vana Parva)
- Mahasweta Devi, (select stories)
- Saadat Hasan Manto, Collection of Short Stories (select stories)
- Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince
- Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis and Other Stories (select short stories)
- Films and videos will be used as appropriate
