NET English Syllabus

IDrama

Greek and Roman drama; English drama from miracle and morality plays through Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson and Webster; Restoration comedy; Ibsen and Shaw; modern and post-war drama, including Beckett, Pinter and Osborne; and Indian English playwrights such as Karnad and Tendulkar.

IIPoetry

Chaucer and medieval poetry, the sonnet tradition, Spenser, the Metaphysicals, Milton, the Augustans, the Romantics, the Victorians, the Modernists and the Movement poets, alongside Indian, American and postcolonial poetry in English.

IIIFiction, short story

The rise of the novel, nineteenth-century realism, Victorian and modernist fiction, stream of consciousness, postmodern and postcolonial novels, Indian English fiction, and the short story as a distinct form.

IVNon-Fictional Prose

Essays, biography, autobiography, travel writing, letters, journals and polemical prose, including Bacon, Addison and Steele, Lamb, Hazlitt, Ruskin, Arnold, Orwell and Woolf.

VLanguage: Basic concepts, theories and pedagogy. English in Use.

Phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, varieties of English, error analysis, English language teaching and practical English usage.

VIEnglish in India: history, evolution and futures

Colonial education and Macaulay’s Minute, the growth of English studies in India, Indian English, translation, the relationship between English and Indian languages, and debates about English in education.

VIICultural Studies

The Birmingham school, ideology and hegemony, popular culture, media, subculture, gender, identity, diaspora and globalisation, including Williams, Hoggart, Hall, Gramsci and Bourdieu.

VIIILiterary Criticism

Classical, Renaissance and Neoclassical criticism; Dryden, Johnson, Wordsworth and Coleridge; Arnold and Eliot; I. A. Richards, Leavis and the New Critics.

IXLiterary Theory post World War II

Structuralism, semiotics, poststructuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, reader-response theory, New Historicism, postcolonialism, queer theory and ecocriticism.

XResearch Methods and Materials in English

Research design, the thesis and dissertation, citation and documentation, MLA style, plagiarism, academic ethics, bibliography, reference tools, archives and digital resources.