Department of English

The course on English engages with literatures and cultures in English or translated into English and interprets and formulates cultural theories. The subject is also a study of not only how language is used in literature but also of the (a) intimate connection between language and culture; (b) the displacement of language by hegemonic structures; (c) the significance of language in formulating, spreading and continuing ideas; (d) the imperial-colonial debates centred on language. In its concerns with literature, the subject engages with (a) processes of creativity and of appreciation i.e., poetics and aesthetics; (b) comparative literature across languages and cultures; (c) the act of literary representation and of methodologies, traditions and schools of interpretation; (d) the connection between visual representation, verbal image building and the nature of the mimetic act; and (e) with the politics of language.

Language is multi-functional and is used in multiple contexts – communication, diplomacy, power, art and ideas amongst many others. The human being is a language animal and both memory and time (in the sense of past, present and future) are dependent on it as a medium. It is used for rhetoric, political persuasion, assertion and media.