Topics in South Asian Literature and Culture

Women in brightly colored saris.

Women walking in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India. (Photo courtesy of Shreyans Bhansali thebigdurian on Flickr.)

Instructor(s)

MIT Course Number

21F.041

As Taught In

Fall 2004

Level

Undergraduate

Cite This Course

Course Description

This subject aims to provide an overview of contemporary texts in regional languages in South Asian Literature and Cinema. We will cover major authors and film makers, writing from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Within India, we will look at authors and directors working in different regional languages and as we examine their different socio-cultural, political and historical contexts we will attempt to understand what it means to study them under the all-unifying category of "South Asian Literature and Culture". Some of the major issues we shall explore include caste, gender, globalization and social change. We will end with exploring some of the newer, younger writers and directors and try to analyze some of the thematic and formal shifts in their work. Authors include Ashapurna Devi, Manto, Vijayan, Premchand, Mohanty, and Nasreen and film makers will include Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Satyajit Ray, Shyam Benegal, Aparna Sen and Rituporno Ghosh.

Banerjee, Arundhati. 21F.041 Topics in South Asian Literature and Culture, Fall 2004. (MIT OpenCourseWare: Massachusetts Institute of Technology), http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/foreign-languages-and-literatures/21f-041-topics-in-south-asian-literature-and-culture-fall-2004 (Accessed). License: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA


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