"Half a Day" by Naguib Mahfouz - Litmosphere - Calicut University First Semester UG Common Course Poem

Because I could not stop for Death by Emily Dickinson

Because I could not stop for Death –

He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun –

Or rather – He passed Us –
The Dews drew quivering and Chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle –

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground –

Since then – ’tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity –

Kerala PSC HSA English Examination Syllabus 2021

 PART A

Module     I : Renaissance and freedom movement Module 

                 II: General Knowledge and current affairs Module 

                III: Methodology of teaching the subject 

♦ History/conceptual development. Need and Significance, Meaning Nature and Scope of the Subject. 

♦ Correlation with other subjects and life situations. 

♦ Aims, Objectives, and Values of Teaching - Taxonomy of Educational Objectives - Old and revised 

♦ Pedagogic analysis- Need, Significance and Principles. 

♦ Planning of instruction at Secondary level- Need and importance. Psychological bases of Teaching the subject - Implications of Piaget, Bruner, Gagne, Vygotsky, Ausubel and Gardener - Individual difference, Motivation, Maxims of teaching. 

♦ Methods and Strategies of teaching the subject- Models of Teaching, Techniques of individualising instruction. 

♦ Curriculum - Definition, Principles, Modern trends and organizational approaches, Curriculum reforms - NCF/KCF. 

♦ Instructional resources- Laboratory, Library, Club, Museum- Visual and Audio-Visual aids - Community based resources - e-resources - Text book, Work book and Hand book. 

♦ Assessment; Evaluation- Concepts, Purpose, Types, Principles, Modern techniques - CCE and Grading- Tools and techniques - Qualities of a good test - Types of test items- Evaluation of projects, Seminars and Assignments - Achievement test, Diagnostic test – Construction, Characteristics, interpretation and remediation. 

♦ Teacher - Qualities and Competencies - different roles - Personal Qualities - Essential teaching skills - Microteaching - Action research. 

PART B

Module 1. Poetry 

Shakespeare              Sonnet 121 

Donne                       A Valediction Forbidding Mourning 

Milton                       On His Blindness 

Gray                          Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard 

Wordsworth              Tintern Abbey 

Shelley                     To A Skylark 

Keats                        Ode On A Grecian Urn 

Tennyson                  Ulysses 

Browning                 My Last Duchess 

Arnold                      Dover Beach 

W.B.Yeats                A Prayer For My Daughter 

Sylvia Plath             Daddy 

Tagore                     Where The Mind Is Without Fear 

Nissim Ezekiel        Night Of The Scorpion 

Kamala Das             An Introduction 

A.K.Ramanujan       Obituary 

Robert Frost             Home Burial 

Emily Dickinson      Because I Could Not Stop For Death 

Wole Soyinka           A Telephone Conversation 

Meena Alexander     House Of A Thousand Doors 

Margaret Atwood     This Is A Photograph Of Me 

David Diop               Africa 

Jack Davis                Aboriginal Australia 

Module 2. Drama

Shakespeare             Macbeth 

Sheridan                   School For Scandal 

Oscar Wilde              The Importance Of Being Ernest 

Ibsen                         A Doll's House 

Shaw                         Pygmalion 

J.M.Synge                 Riders To The Sea 

Samuel Beckett         Waiting For Godot 

Arthur Miller             Death Of A Salesman 

Tennessee Williams   The Glass Menagerie 

Girish Karnad            Nagamandala 

 

Module 3: Prose and Fiction

Francis Bacon               Of Studies 

Steele                            The Trumpet Club 

A.G. Gardiner               On The Rule Of The Road 

E.M. Forster                 On Tolerance 

Bertrand Russel            Functions Of A Teacher 

Dr.Radhakrishnan         Humanities vs Science 

Emily Bronte                Wuthering Heights 

George Orwell              Animal Farm 

Hemingway                  The Old Man And The Sea 

Shashi Deshpande        Roots and Shadows 

Arundati Roy               The God Of Small Things 

Toni Morrison              The Bluest Eye 

Module 4: .Literary Criticism/ Terms

1.Rasa 

2.Dhwani 

3.Aristotle: Poetics 

4.Wordsworth: Preface To Lyrical Ballads 

5.Coleridege: Biographia Litereria Chapter 14 

6.Arnold: Study of Poetry 

7.Eliot:Tradition And The Individual Talent 

8.Saussure: Nature Of The Linguistic Sign 

                    Terms and Movements ( Based on the latest edition of M.H.Abrams-A Glossary Of Literary Terms Classicism, Neo-Classicism, Romanticism, Humanism, Realism, Magical Realism, Naturalism, Symbolism, Russian Formalism, Marxism, Structuralism, Post Structuralism, Deconstruction, Psychoanalytical Criticism, Feminism, Post Colonialism, Modernism and Post Modernism 

Module 5: Linguistics, Phonetics and History of Language

                    1.Phonology 

                    2. Morphology 

                    3.Syntax                                                                                                             

                    4.Semantics 

                    5.Langue and Parole; Competence and Performance 

                    6.Organs of Speech 

                    7.Classification Of Speech Sounds 

                    8.Stress, Rhythm, Intonation 

                    9.Transcription 

                    10.Indo-European Family of languages 

                    11.Loan Words-Latin, Scandinavian, French, Indian 

                    12.Englishes-American, Australian, Indian, and African 

                    

 Module 6: Modern English Usage

                    1.Sentence Correction 

                    2.Vocabulary 

                    3.Synonyms and Antonyms 

                    4.Give one word 

                    5.Commonly confused words 

                    6.Language Functions such as agreeing, complaining etc. 

                    7.Appropriate word order 

                    8.Appropriate sentence order 

                    9.Idioms 

                    10.Passage for comprehension 

Module 7: Basic Grammar

                    1.Article 

                    2.Prepositions 

                    3.Clauses 

                    4.Tenses 

                    5.Phrasal Verbs 

                    6.Conjunctions 

                    7.Reported Speech 

                    8.Voice 

                    9.Question Tag 

                    10.Transformation of sentences 

            

 Module 8: Teaching of English

                    1.Schools-Behaviourism, Cognitivism, Constructivism 

                    2.Skills and subskills of Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing 

                    3.Language Acquisition and Learning, Krashen 

                    4.Methods and Approaches: Grammar Translation; Audio-lingual; Direct Method;                                     Structural-OralSituational Approach; Communicative Approach; Bilingual Method;                                 Humanistic Approaches 

                    5.Use of AV aids and ICT 

                    6.Teaching of Prose, Poetry and Grammar 

                    7.Testing and Evaluation 

                    8.Learner Types 

                    9.Teaching learners with disability 

                    10.NCF, KCF on teaching of English 

Listen to the Poem "To Posterity" by Louise Mac Neice (Calicut University UG First Semester Common Course English Litmosphere Poem)

 Hello all

Here is the audio of the poem To Posterity by Louise MacNeice. 

To read a short summary of the poem, please click here

Summary and Analysis of the Poem 'In The Country Cottage' by Nissim Ezekiel

 Introduction to the Author

Nissin Ezekiel (1924-2004) is a pioneer in modern Indian English poetry. His role as translator, editor, playwright and reviewer has contributed significantly in shaping modernist poetry in India. The modernist movement of the 1950s and 60s was known for its precise use of language, well crafted images, ironic stance, treatment of sexuality and male-female relationship. Ezekiel is often described as the father of the modernist movement and he writes introspective, ironic and humorous poems of self exploration and self formation. He has brought out seven collections of poetry; they are A Time to Change and Other Poems (1952), Sixty Poems (1953), The Unfinished Man (1960), The Exact Name (1965), Hymns in Darkness (1976), and the Sahitya Akademy award-winning Latter-day Psalms (1982).

Text of the Poem

The night the lizard came

our indolence was great; 

we went to bed before

our eyes were heavy, limbs

prepared to stretch or love.

Immobile, tense and grey,

he taught us patience as 

he waited for the dark.

From time to time we could

not help but glance at him

and learn again that he 

was more alive than us

in silent energy,

though his aim was only 

the death of cockroaches.

When we awoke the next

morning we found as we

expected that the job

was done, clean and complete,

and the stout lizard gone.

Outline of the Poem

The speaker of the poem comments that their idleness was great on the day the lizard came out. They went to bed early even though they were not physically exhausted. A sense of purposelessness keeps them inert and passive. In the second stanza, the speaker offers a detailed description of the lizard. It is described as ’immobile’, ‘tense’ and ‘grey’ and its patient waiting for the dark is highlighted. It seems that it explicitly resembles the humans in the poem as they are also immobile. Later on, the humans in the cottage realise that the lizard is far more alive than them. It possesses silent energy which humans lack, though its aim is only the death of cockroaches. The next day, they wake up to realise that the lizard has eaten up all the cockroaches neatly and disappeared. 

Analysis of the Poem

In the poem, the poet contrasts animal and human worlds. The humans in the poem are idle and purposeless and they seek refuge from the toils of existence. It is common in modernist literature to have characters who fail to identify the meaning of their lives and resort to inactivity. The humans in the poem do not have any noble notions on the greatness of man and also fail to connect with their animal instincts. Cut off from the roots of tradition, modern man is caught between purposelessness of modern life and absence of instincts. These render humans helpless and passive and they resemble the Lotos-Eaters.

Interestingly, the lizard is presented in similar terms in the second stanza. It is described as ‘immobile’ like the humans, ‘tense’, ‘grey’ and ‘patient’. It waits for the prey in the dark and teaches humans patience. Though the lizard resembles the humans in its immobility and patient waiting, the humans gradually realise that its movements are directed by instincts. The ‘silent energy’ refers to the animal instincts the lizard possesses and its actions emerge from the primal forces whereas humans are separated from their instincts. Though the poet acknowledges the limits of instincts to ‘the death of cockroaches’, the humans in the poem grope in the dark and fail to perform any task neatly. The poem underscores the utter lack of convictions human beings are endowed with and the resultant inactivity. This is contrasted with neat and complete actions carried out by the lizard. In short, the poem contrasts  the instinctive and energetic life of the lizard with  that of the inactive lives of the humans.

Nissim Ezekiel has effectively featured many animals and birds such as scorpion, crows, cats, squirrels, monkeys, crocodiles etc.. in his poems. The introduction of Indian flora and fauna has strengthened his articulations of Indian life with an exquisite indian idiom. The comparison of a lizard with a human is also very striking as both the animals can leave their tails and survive!. It is also interesting that lizards are associated with somany superstitious stories in India.

Calicut University BA/B.Sc/B.Com Common Course English First Semester- LITMOSPHERE: THE WORLD OF LITERATURE prescribed texts

MODULE 1: Literature- Initiation 

1.To Posterity (poem)- Louis MacNeice

To read the text, please click here 

2.The Rocking Horse Winner (Short Story) -D H Lawrence 

To read the text, please click here 

3.”Memoirs of A Mad Man (Prose excerpts from Autobiography)-Gustave

MODULE 2: Creative Thinking and Writing 

1. The Thought Fox (poem)-Ted Hughes 

To read the text, please click here 

2. Poetry (poem)-Marianne Moore 

To read the text, please click here 

3. Excerpt from An Autobiography(Prose)-Agatha Christie 

4. Half a Day (Short story)-Naguib Mahfouz 

To read the text, please click here

MODULE 3: Critical Thinking 

1. To a Reason (Poem)- Arthur Rimbaud 

To read the text, please click here

2. The Adventures of the Retired Colourman-Short Story-Conan Doyle

To read the text, please click here

3. Trifles (One-Act Play)-Susan Glaspe

To read the text, please click here

MODULE 4: Perspectives 

1.Body Without the “d” (Poem)-Justice Ameer 

To read the text, please click here

2. Sleeping Fool (Poem)-Suniti Namjoshi 

To read the text, please click here

3.The Cockroach (Short Story)-Luis Fernando Verissimo; translated by Anna Vilner

To read the text, please click here

4.About Dalit Literature” (Prose)-Sharankumar Limbale 

5. Purl (Short Film)-Kristen Lester