Department of English, Dhaka University,Syllabus
Semester I
Course No. | Course Title |
Developing English Language Skills | |
Introduction to Literature (Critical Appreciation) | |
Introduction to Poetry |
Semester II
Course No. | Course Title |
Advanced Composition | |
Introduction to Prose and Drama | |
Introduction to Bangla Literature | |
Second Year
Semester I
Course No. | Course Title |
Introduction to Linguistics | |
Romantic Poetry | |
English Novel from Defoe to Hardy |
Semester II
Course No. | Course Title |
Academic Writing | |
English Drama from Marlowe to Congreve | |
Victorian Poetry and Prose |
Third Year
Semester I
Course No. | Course Title |
Introduction to English Language Teaching | |
Poetry from Spenser to Pope | |
History of |
Semester II
Course No. | Course Title |
English for Professional Purpose | |
English Prose from Bacon to Burke | |
History of Western Ideas |
Fourth Year
Semester I
Course No. | Course Title |
Teaching Second Language Skills | |
20th Century literature (Poetry and Drama) | |
Classics in Translation | |
Language and Society | |
American Literature |
Semester II
Course No. | Course Title |
20th Century Fiction | |
Critical Theory | |
Shakespeare | |
Language Through Literature | |
Structure of English | |
Language and Media |
First Year: Semester I
Course Eng.
Listening:
- listening for main ideas/ key information
- listening for specific details
- listening and understanding both implicit and explicit messages
- Listening and responding to texts (i.e., following instructions, answering questions, reacting to texts, etc.)
- Listening and note-taking
Speaking:
- Understanding social conventions (i.e., formal/ informal speech, turn taking etc.)
- Guided conversations (involving different functions and situations, e.g., greetings, requesting, apologizing etc.)
- Two-minute impromptu talks
- Reading news item and reporting
- Role-plays and simulations
- Preparing and presenting talks on a given theme
- Interviews
- Story telling
- Informal debates and group discussions
- Public speaking
- Reading strategies (skimming, scanning, predicting, inferencing, etc.)
- speed reading
- active reading (highlighting, getting information from text quickly finding your way around texts noting key words, following main arguments, interacting with the text and summarizing)
- reading to improve linguistic skills and expand vocabulary, understanding overall discourse to relate structure and meaning to the analysis and comprehension of the text
- critical reading (make judgments about how a text is argued, reflecting and making personal response as well as close scrutiny of language to understand writer’s attitude ad perspective)
- extensive reading (reading outside class books selected by teachers; at least two books will be read)
- Reading journal articles and literary criticisms.
- Writing books reviews (reviews of the books read during the course)
Writings:
Developing sentence structures to build language awareness:
a. Extending basic sentence construction with vocabulary
b. Use of word combinations and collocations
c. Use of complex sentence constructions with connectives also fragments, run-ons
- Paraphrasing
- Summarizing
- Organizing a paragraph: topic sentence, detailed sentences, logical order and conclusions
- Paragraph writing focusing on the characteristics of pattering, cohesion, coherence and unity in the paragraph, paragraph analysis, development, outlining
- Writing paragraph following different modes of writing: definition, description, classification, cause and effect, comparison and contrast
Course Eng.
- Using different genres to introduce figurative language (image, simile, metaphors, connotation, denotation, personification, allusion, symbol, hyperbole, irony, paradox, oxymoron and apostrophe)
- Understanding sound patterns (alliteration, consonance, assonance, internal, end rhyme, blank verse, free verse, free verse, heroic couplet, rhythm) and scansion.
- Understanding aspects of style and structure (mood, tone, setting, character and theme)
- Understanding overall discourse to relate structure and meaning to the analysis and comprehension of the text.
- Reading critically to make judgements about how a text is argued and to make personal responses as well as close scrutiny of language to understand writer’s attitude, and perspective and point of view (speaker, narrator)
Course Eng.
Shakespeare : “shall I Compare Thee to a summer’s Day”; “My Mistress’s Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun”
Herrick : “Delight in Disorder”; “Upon Julia’s Clothes”
Donne : “The Sun Rising”; “Batter my heart”
Gray : “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
Keats : “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”
E.B. Browning : Sonnets from the Portuguese, No. 43
Eliot : “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
Dylan Thomas : “Fern Hill”
Ted Hughes : “Pike”; “Jaguar”
Adrienne Rich : “Living in Sin”; “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers”
Archibald Macleish : “Ars Poetica”
Seamus Heaney : “Digging”
First Year: Semester II
Course Eng.
The course will comprise the following:
- Prewriting strategies: free-writing, brainstorming, mind mapping/ clustering, narrowing the focus etc.
- Writing with purpose and for specific audience
- Writing effective thesis statements
- Organizing/ structuring the essay: outlining, writing appropriate introductions, supporting details and conclusions
- Writing the firsts draft
- Revising and editing
- Writing the final draft
- Writing different types of essays: narrative/ descriptive, exploratory, argumentative
- Writing biographies
- Writing response papers
- Mechanics of writing: grammar, punctuation and spelling
Course Eng.
Prose:
Bacon : “Of Studies”
Lamb : “Witches and Other Night Fears”
Newman : From “The Idea of a New University”
Woolf : “Women and Fiction”
Orwell : “Shooting an Elephant”
O’Connor : “My Oedipus Complex”
Desai : “Games at Twilight”
Drama:
Oedipus
Merchant of Venice
Arms and the Man
Course Eng.
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Course Eng. Bangladesh
(For foreign students and those who have not studied Bangla at any level)
Introduction to Bangla Language, History and Culture
History of Bangladesh since 1905
Ethnology and Culture
Literary Heritage
Second Year: Semester I
Course Eng.
- Definition and characteristics of language
- Origins of language
- Subfields/branches of linguistics: phonetics and phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, discourse analysis and pragmatics
Course Eng.
Blake : Songs of Innocence and Experience
Wordsworth : “Tintern Abbey”; “Michael”;
“Ode on Intimations of Immortality”;
“The Prelude” Book 1
Coleridge : “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; “Kubla Khan”;
“Dejection: An Ode”
Byron : Don Juan 1
Shelley : “Ode to a Skylark”; “Adonais”
Keats : “Odes”
Course Eng.
Defoe : Robinson Crusoe
Austen : Pride and Prejudice
Charlotte Bronte : Jane Eyre
Charles Dickens : Oliver Twist
Hardy : Tess of the D’ Urbervilles
Second Year: Semester II
Course Eng.
The various components of the course will include:
- Synthesizing diverse information and making commections
- Thinking critically and analytically on a given theme/issue
- Organizing and prioritizing the information into a thematic pattern
- Arguing with convincing evidence
- Setting the tome of formal writing
- Diction/word choice in academic writing
- Transitions and cohesion
- Acknowledging source and incorporating direct and indirect quotes
- Writing literary essays on character, theme, style plot structure, imagery, symbolism, etc.
- Understanding examination questions and key terms in questions
Course Eng.
Marlowe : Dr. Faustus
Shakespeare : Macbeth
Jonson : Volpone
Webster : The Duchess of Malfi
Congreve : The Way of the World
Course Eng.
Poetry:
Tennyson : “Lotos Eaters”; “Ulysses”; “Tithonus”; “Locksley Hall”
Browning : “Porphyria’s Lover”; “Fra Lippo Lippi”; “Andrea del Sarto”;
“My Last Duchess”; “Rabbi Ben Ezra”;
Prose
Mill : Selections from On Liberty and Autobiography (as in Norton)
Walter Pater : (As in Norton)
Third Year: Semester I
Course Eng.
- Brief history of English language teaching
- The Grammar-Translation Method
- The Direct Method
- The Audio-Lingual Method
- The Natural approach
- Alternative Approaches and Methods:
- Communicative Language Teaching
- Learner-centred Approaches
- Issues in ELT Methodology: Classroom interaction, authenticity, fluency, accuracy, accuracy and appropriacy, usage of L1 and L2, error correction
Course Eng.
Spenser : The Faerie Queene Book 1, Canto 1
Donne : “Good Morrow”; “Canonization”;
“Song: Sweetest Love I do not goe……”;
“Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”;
“Nocturnal upon St. Lucie’s Day”;
“The Relic”; “The Extasie”; “The Flea”; “Batter My Heart”;
“Thou Hast Made Me”;
Herbert : “The Altar”; “Easter Wings”; “Collar”
Marvell : “To His Coy Mistress”; “Bermudas”; “The Definition of Love”
Pope : The Rape of the Lock
Course Eng.
The Tudors and the Stuarts – Renaissance and Reformation England
The Civil War
The Restoration of 1660
The Glorious Revolution of 1688
The Rise of Political Parties
Industrial Revolution
The English Empire
Victorian England
The First World War in England
Third Year: Semester II
Course Eng.
- Business Reports
- Business Letters
- Job Applications
- Internal Memoranda
- Minutes
- Editing
- Developing Press Copies
- Oral Presentation
Course Eng.
Bacon : Essays: “Of Truth”; “Of Marriage and Single Life”;
“Of Great Place ”; “Of Plantations”; “Of Studies”;
“Of Friendship”
Swift : Gulliver’s Travels
“The Aims of the Spectator”; “Wit: True, False, Mixed”
Samuel Johnson : “Life of Cowley”
E. Burke : “Speech on the East India Bill”
Course Eng.
The Greeks and the Romans: the Pre-Socratics, Plato, Aristotle, Stoics, Epicureans, Cynics, Skeptics.
The Medieval World War
The Renaissance: Eramus, More, Machiavelli, Bacon.
The Reformation and the Counter-Reformation.
The Rise of Modern Science: Copernicus, Galileo, Newton .
The Rise of Modern Philosophy: Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke.
The Enlightenment and 18th Century Thought: The Philosophes,
Berkeley, Hume, Burke, Adam Smith, Malthus, Rousseau, Kant.
Romanticism and the French Revolution.
Mary Wollstonecraft and the birth of Feminism
The American War of Independence and Democracy
19th Century Thought: Hegel, Marx and Socialism, Utilitarianism, Darwin and the Theory of Evolution, Positivism (Comte), Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Feminism.
20th Century Thought: Bergson and Creative Evolution, Pragmatism, Modern Analytical Philosophy and the Scientific World-View, Modern Psychology (Freud, Jung and Psychoanalysis, Behaviourism, Gestalt Psychology), Existentialism, Feminism.
Fourth Year: Semester I
Course Eng.
- Teaching the receptive and productive skills: theory and classroom application
- Integration of the four skills
- Teaching Grammar
- Teaching Vocabulary
- Teaching Pronunciation
Course Eng.
Poetry:
Yeats : “The Lake Isle
“The Man Who Dream of Faerie Land
“Second Coming”; “Sailing to Byzantium ”;
“The Wild Swans at Crole”; “Leda and the Swan”;
“Among School Children”; “Byzantium ”;
“Circus Animal’s Desertion”; “A Prayer for My Daughter”
Eliot : The Waste Land
Auden : “Musee de Beaux Arts”; “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”;
“Shield of Achillies”; “In Praise of Limestone”
Larkin : “Church Going”; “MCMXIV”; “Aubade”; “Mr. Bleaney”;
“The Building”; “Ambulances”; “The Whitsun Weddings”
Drama:
Osborn : Look Back in Anger
Beckett : Waiting for Godot
Pinter : The Birthday Party
Course Eng.
Homer : The Iliad
Virgil : The Aeneid
Aeschylus : Agamemnon
Sophocles : Electra
Euripides : Alcestis
Aristophanes : Lysistrata
Anonymous : Beowulf
Course Eng.
- Language and Dialect: Regional and Social Dialects, Variation Studies, Standard Language
- Register
- Diglossia
- Code-switching
- Borrowing
- Pidgins
- Creoles
- Theories of the origins of pidgins and Creoles
- World Englishes, Language and Culture
Course Eng.
Emerson : “The American Scholar”
H. Melville : “Bartleby”
Thoreau : “Economy” (from Walden)
Walt Whitman : “When Lilacs Last…..”
Emily Dickinson : Selections
Henry James : Daisy Miller: A Study
Frost : Selections
Eugene O’Neill : The Hairy Ape
J.D. Salinger : Catcher in the Rye
Toni Morrison : The Bluest Eye
Allen Ginsberg : “A Supermarket in California ”; “Jessore Road ”
Edward Albee : The Zoo Story
Fourth Year: Semester II
Course Eng.
Conrad : Lord Jim
Woolf : Mrs. Dalloway
Joyce : Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Golding : Lord of the Flies
Mauriel Spark : The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Course Eng.
Dryden : “Preface to the Fables”
Johnson : “Preface to Shakespeare”
Wordsworth : “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads”
Coleridge : “Biographia Literaria (Chapters xiii, xiv, xv,xvii)
Eliot : “Tradition and the Individual Talent”; “The Metaphysical Poets”
Woolf : A Room of One’s Own
Eagleton : “The Rise of English”
Said : Introduction to Orientalism
Course Eng.
Twelfth Night
Hamlet
Measure for Measure
King Lear
Tempest
Richard II
Henry IV
Course Eng.
- Using Literature in the Language Classroom
- Literature and the Language Learner
- Reading Literature Cross-Culturally
- Literature and Language Skills: using short stories, novels, poetry and plays in teaching the language skills (reading, writing, listening, speaking, vocabulary and grammar)
- Stylistics: Aims and Perspective
- Linguistic Description of Literary Texts: Analysis at Word Level; Analysis at Clause Level; Analysis at Sentence Level
Course Eng.
- Nouns: Position and Function; Noun Classes: count, non-count, proper nouns; Determinatives: pre-determiners, central determiners, post determiners. The use of Articles.
- Verb: Major verb classes – time, tense and the verb.
- Sequence of Tenses: Conditional.
- Adverbs: Characteristics of the adverb – the adverb as a clause element – the adverb and other word classes – syntactic functions of adverbs – correspondence between adjectives and adverbs – comparison of adjectives and adverbs.
- Adjectives: Characteristics of the adjective – central and peripheral adjectives – the adjective in relation to other word classes – syntactic function of adjectives – syntactic and semantic sub-classification of adjectives.
- Adverbial Phrases – Adjectival phrases – Prepositional phrases – Verb phrases.
- Tensed, Non-Tensed and Verbless Clauses.
- Voice: Principles of Passivization – Voice Constraints.
- Operators and traditional interpretation of the use and usage of modals.
Course Eng.
- History of Media Technology – special focus on the development of print media
- Theory and Aesthetics of Audio-Visual Media – central theories/ philosophy and its impact of media
- Feminist Media Studies – critical analysis of gender and sexuality in print media, film, photography
- Discourse Analysis of Media – critical analysis of language: examination of ideology; politics of representation
- Reception and Use of Media – critical theory of Jean Baudrilliard etc.
- Writing for the Media – examine the form and content of popular genres; prepare “copies” of media texts
General Reading List
Although the course teachers will provide lists of recommended books (both texts and criticism), it is advisable to procure copies of the following books which will come in handy for the study of literature and language.
- M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms.
- J.A. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory.
- Ifor Evans, A Short History of English Literature.
- David Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature.
- David Crystal, A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics.
- Kalyan Pandey, Rhetoric and Prosody.
- A.S. Hornby,
- Zaman, Alam & Hossain, An English Anthology.
- Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vols. I & II.