Thursday 21 August 2014

Movie screening: Drums Along the Mohawk for Paper 6


The Department of English,
Bharati College

invites you to
a
screening of

Drums Along the Mohawk
on Friday, 22nd August 2014
from 2:00 PM onwards
in
the college Seminar Room.

The screening will be accompanied by a discussion on the racial and economic faultlines of the American War of Independence.

All are invited.


For more details, please contact Ms. Yashi Bansal at 09958496942.

Wednesday 6 August 2014

Poetry reading session by Keki N. Daruwalla

The Department of English,
Bharati College
presents

a

reading session
by 
Keki N. Daruwalla
on his poetic works

on
Tuesday, 26th of August 2014
from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM
in the Seminar Room.

All are invited.

Wednesday 30 April 2014

CFP: Yeats and Kipling: Retrospectives, Perspectives

A three-day international conference at Bharati College, University of Delhi, Delhi. 
(10, 11, 12 March 2015) 

Call for abstracts of papers 

In postcolonial societies, pressures of assimilating into the pre-existing, colonised mainstream integrally inform issues of identity and erasure. It thus becomes essential to engage with, as Patrick Chabal says, those perspectives of and on the colonised which were instrumental in the colonisers’ self-fashioning. These perspectives were, as Franz Fanon suggested in Black Skin, White Masks, viewed in opposition to the values supposedly exclusive to the coloniser, the colonised being “elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards”. Hence, the questions which are vital for literary practitioners and scholars in such societies are those of the marginalisation of the indigenous vernaculars and literatures, along with the internalisation of the coloniser’s language and of its growing acceptance as the language of literary expression. 

Given this, it is important to re-examine in the subcontinental context our perspectives on writers who constructed and deconstructed the Raj and its imperialism in their works. Rudyard Kipling and William Butler Yeats are two such figures, for even though as contemporaries their lives and works took variant paths, they shared a commonality of interest in India, and contributed in their own ways towards the construction of, as Peter Childs terms it, a “masculine national culture” in the context of the colonial experience. Kipling, born in Bombay, grew up into, ostensibly, the prototypical champion of Empire and its civilising mission, whereas Yeats, Irish by descent and politics but semi-English by literary proclivities, found in India a potent, regenerative force which informed his vision of a pervasive, near-spiritual collectivism. Both authors codified the subcontinent as a series of metaphors which reflected a vast reality comprehensible only to those equipped with the necessary tools of, in Kipling’s case, imperial superiority, and, in Yeats’ case, psychic symbolism, and thus reduced in their own ways the subcontinent to various symbols. However, their interest in and engagement with politics and aesthetics provides, to those interested in questions of re-presentation, representation and reconfiguration, important signposts to orient contemporary scholarship from. 

Hence, as post-colonial studies inch towards interrogative doubt and as their own tools of re-visiting and re-writing are applied to them, and as neo-imperialism becomes increasingly apparent, it will be relevant to commemorate the 150th birth anniversaries of these two seminal figures from the heyday of colonial imperialism by considering the corpus of their works and their varied legacies, together or individually. Accordingly, this conference proposes to locate Kipling and Yeats as contemporaries, re-contextualising them, and examining the former’s literary internationalism, his successful and popular vision of benevolent imperialism, and the varied, various legacies of that vision, along with the almost sacred position which Yeats occupies in the canons of Modernity, his symbolism, politics and aesthetics of rebellion, and the subcontinent as an informative metaphor for these last. It will also be interested in debating the academic inclinations which have ruptured Kipling’s and Yeats’ contemporaneity and closeted them in different, divergent domains with their differing scholarly legacies: Kipling as a writer for children, a populist and a propagandist still popular with publishers as a bestseller, and Yeats as the doyen of an esoteric idiom little known in his own day and age and even less understood today, and as the champion of subversive self-determination on an individual and communal scale. 

Abstracts, not exceeding 500 words, for academic papers of 20 to 30 minutes reading time pertaining to these, and other relevant aspects of Kipling’s and Yeats’ oeuvre, are invited for this three-day international conference to be held in March 2015 in Bharati College, University of Delhi. Papers may be around, but not necessarily limited to, the above, and following pointers: 

• Kipling: Indian/Anglo-Indian/English/Internationalist? 
• Yeats: revival; success – the Irishness of ‘literary’ Irish. 
• Kipling: beauty, and nostalgia. 
• Yeats: aesthetics and philosophy. 
• Kipling: Empire and Humanity 
• Yeats: Empire and Humanity 
• Kipling: of wolves, children and men. 
• Yeats: legends; myths; dreams. 
• Kipling: wars, the Great War, and the English. 
• Yeats: the Easter Uprising, the Great War, heroic implosions. 
• Kipling: travel, journalism, and the art of realism. 
• Yeats: cyclical history, time, and para-realism. 

Contributors are encouraged to erase the apparent dichotomies which these pointers seem to generate. Please mail abstracts to conf.eng.bc@gmail.com by 30th June, 2014. Also note that apart from conference proceedings, a collection of some selected papers presented will also be published after the conference.

Wednesday 26 March 2014

Shakespearean adaptations in the Indian subcontinent

The Department of English,
Bharati College

invites you to
a lecture
on
Shakespearean adaptations in the Indian subcontinent
to be delivered
by
Dr. Anuradha Ghosh,
Assistant Professor, Department of English, Jamia Millia Islamia
in the
college Seminar Room
on Thursday, 3rd of April, 2014
from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM.

The movie Gnomeo and Juliet will also be screened in
the Seminar Room from
12:00 PM onwards.



For more details, feel free to contact Ms. Rashmi Singh at 8527667519.

Tuesday 18 February 2014

Film screenings on detective fiction

The Department of English,
Bharati College

invites you to
screenings of various texts of
detective fiction
on the following dates
in the college Seminar Room.

Day, Date

Text
Time
Wednesday, 26th of February
Sherlock Holmes
The Bruce Partington Plans
3:00 PM to 4:00 PM




Friday, 28th of February
Hercule Poirot
Dead Man’s Mirror
1:45 PM to 2:45 PM

The Famous Five
Five get into trouble
3:00 PM to 4:00PM
Saturday, 1st of March
Perry Mason
The Case of the Mythical Monkeys
1:00 PM to 2:00 PM

Byomkesh Bakshi
Satyanveshi
3:00 PM to 4:00 PM


For more details, contact Ms. Sonali Singh at 9953546702.

Film screening for DC 1, Paper 3: Doctor Faustus

 Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That Time may cease and midnight never come.
Fair nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul.”

The Department of English,
Bharati College

invites you to
a screening
Doctor Faustus
on Thursday, 27th of February
from 12:00 PM onwards
in the college Seminar Room.


For more details, contact Ms. Rashmi at 8527667519.

Tuesday 14 January 2014

Film screening + lecture for DC 1, Paper 4

The Department of English
Bharati College

invites you to the college seminar room for
a screening
of
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011)
on
Wednesday, 22nd of January 2014, at 2:30 PM.
The screening will be preceded by a
brief lecture (2:00 PM),
titled,
“Modernity, Mass, Man: Militarisation and the Geist of Modernity.”

All students of B.A. (Hons.) English, Semester 2, interested students from other semesters and courses, as well as faculty, are invited.


For more details, feel free to contact at 9999105003.

Tuesday 7 January 2014

Film screenings on various aspects of Medieval England

The Department of English
Bharati College

invites you to the college seminar room for
screenings
of
cinematic texts on various aspects of Medieval England.

Each screening shall be preceded or followed by a brief lecture on relevant topics.
Schedule is as follows:

Thursday, 16th of January 2014, from 12:30 PM: Robin Hood (2010).
Lecture on: “Robin Hood and Geoffrey Chaucer – Crusades, Black Death, and the Peasants’ Revolt.”

Thursday, 23rd of January 2014, from 12:10 PM: Black Death (2010); The Mystery of the Black Death.
Lecture on: “Notes on the afterlife – Divina Commedia, and life and plague in Medieval England.”

Saturday, 25th of January 2014, from 12:10 PM: A Knight’s Tale (2001).
Lecture on: “Chivalry – probabilities, possibilities, legacies.”

All students of B.A. (Hons.) English, Semester 2, interested students from other semesters and courses, as well as faculty, are invited.


For more details, feel free to contact at 9999105003.