Departmental profile Department of englishscbcc.org.in/doc/deptt_profile_english.pdf · 2017-06-04 · Subhas chandra bose centenary college Lalbagh, murshidabad. The Department of

Departmental profile

Department of [email protected]

Subhas chandra bose centenary collegeLalbagh, murshidabad

The Department of English @ Cossimbazar Rajbari

Brief Introduction The Department of English was established in 2006 with B.A.

General Programme initially and B.A. Honours was introduced in2007 with a limited number of seats: 30. Gradually the intakecapacity for 1st year B.A. (hons.) has increased and is currently85. However, there has been a persistent staff shortage since theinitiation of the Department. Currently, we are a dedicated andenergetic group of seven faculty members with varied academicinterests and contributions. The Department stands focussed on thewholistic development of the students and promotes LiberalHumanities to empower students to venture out into cross-disciplinary practices beyond the college.

The strengths of the Department are the vibrancy of the regularstudent community, collaborative engagements with variousinstitutions, informal discussion groups and innovativepedagogical practices. We do not endorse private guidance andguide books which we believe intellectually disables a candidate.So individual authority over the language and literature is whatwe are trying to inculcate here.

Faculty Members

Sudipto Mukhopadhyay, HOD, Assistant Professor, M.Phil, M.A.

Rimpa Roy, Assistant Professor, M.A.

Rajarshee Gupta, Assistant Professor, M.Phil, M.A.

Habibur Rehman, Govt.Approved PTT, M.A.

Anushua Chatterjee, Guest Faculty, M.A.

sabia parvin, Guest Faculty, M.A.

THE BRICOLEURS:ENGLISH LITERARY SOCIETY

French anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss, popularised the concept ofBricolage, a kind of a creative assemblage of things available,predominantly improvised. Thus, one who improvises could be called aBricoleur.

So here we have borrowed one more French word to define the fraternity.

The Bricoleurs is thus a collective platform which engages with thecross disciplinary ventures to connect literature with allied artformsand open up possibilities of a wholistic development of a student. Itbridges the hierarchical gap between a student and a teacher andpromotes a participation oriented appreciation. The English LiterarySociety organises various innovative events in the department and isrun by a few dedicated enthusiasts.

Infrastructural Facilities available to the students

Departmental Room : It gives a priviledge for us to share a commonplatform at a more informal level. It bridges the gap between theteachers and the students who avail the facilities of the Department.The facilities include:

Departmental Library- The Book Club, a unit of The Bricoleurs, isassigned to maintain the library. One could issue books regularly.Most often the students are expected to provide a brief report ontheir readings.

Reference Section- Regular reading handouts are given to studentswhich allow them to explore the texts from multiple perspectives. Thisyear a course module has been prepared for each unit of the syllabus

Computer for accessing the Digital Library- This session would have anew facility in terms of digital library where they would have anaccess to journals/articles from across the globe.

Language Lab

ICT Classroom

BOOK CLUB

The department has initiated a book club for the students (current andthe pass outs). The objective of the Book Club is to strengthen thoseinterested in the world of academics. The book club has books rangingfrom simple story books for beginners to theoretical books and asection which is specifically built for those who would be interestedinto research work in the long run.

The book club organises Departmental student seminars each year onissues pertaining to the syllabus and beyond. In the session 2015-16,we have had two students’ seminar:

1. World literature

2. Indian literature

In the session 2016-17, we have had one students’ seminar

1. The Polyphony of World Literatures: Literature in English other thanBritish

DEPARTMENTAL STUDENT SEMINAR

Session 2015-16

World literature: The students and faculty members presentedpapers including Henrik Ibsen’s Dolls House and Ghosts,Frantz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, anIntroductory Lecture on Russian Literature, Roland Barthes’Mythologies.

India writing in English: With an Introductory lecture onIndian Writings in English, students & faculty memberspresented on Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchables, Khuswant Singh’sTrain to Pakistan, Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, andTamil Epic, Cilappatikāram.

Session 2016-17

The Polyphony of World Literatures: The students presentedpapers on literature in English other than British. FromAfrican literature, Spanish, French, Russian to IndianLiterature, the students presented on Ngugi wa thiong’o,Lorca, Moliere, Gay, Pushkin to Vijaya Tendulkar and alsogave PowerPoint presentation for selected papers.

These papers are mentored by departmental teachers and we havezero tolerance for plagiarism. The best articles/papersgathered over the span of two years are in process for adepartmental newsletter to be published soon.

Student Seminar:

The Polyphony of World Literatures

INTER-DISCIPLINARY SEMINARS

We are at the crossroads of an assemblage of multiple disciplineswhen we study literature. So it is imperative to bring otherdisciplines into the foray and broaden the perspectives of the younglearners. It is with this view that we have been able to organise twoInterdisciplinary Seminars in the last two sessions, 2015-16 & 2016-17:

Saadat Hasan Manto and Ismat Chugtai: The authors of resistances inUrdu Literature: The scholars from Department of Urdu of ourinstitution, Dr. Shakil Ahmed Khan (Teacher-in-Charge) and Md.Mustaq, introduced the two authors and positioned them within thetrajectory of literatures of resistances.

Oral Histories: It’s Trajectories and Possibilities: Jointly withIQAC, Faculty Development Programme, the Department organised thisevent where Mr. Sudipto Mukhopadhyay gave an overview of the topic inconcern referencing on the field experiences of Tribal oralnarratives. The other presenter, Md. Dilwar Hossain, gave an audio-visual presentation on partition narratives based on his fieldexperiences while working for Partition Archives. The students wereintroduced to a new segment of academia of oral history anddocumentation.

LECTURE-DEMONSTRATION

The Department has organised four lecture-demonstrations in the past twosessions. The initiative of the Department is to indulge the studentsbeyond the curricula and ensure a wholistic growth of literary minds.

French Revolution & the Emergence of Bourgeois Ethics: Mr.SudiptoMukhopadhyay, along with the visual indexes, showed how the concepts of‘progress’ and ‘freedom’ created various resistive forces around the newfounded Bourgeoisie in the 18th/19th century and the counter narratives ofethics created by the Bourgeoisie thereafter to combat these nodes ofresistances.

On Photography: Mr.Nabhonil Basu, a professional photographer, introducedthe ways of seeing through the camera. This was the first academicengagement with camera for all the students. The aim of such an event is tobuild a sensibility among the students community and initiate a newdepartment of Media Studies in our institution in the near future.

Modern Bengali Poetry: Dr. Dipan Das, Department of Bengali, surfacedthrough the trajectories of Modern Bengali Poetry and discussed the ongoingdebates between centre and the margin.

Rabindranath and his short stories: Dr. Dipan Das, Department of Bengali,contexualised the contemporaneity and the significance of Tagore’s shortstories.

Lecture Demonstration on Photography

conducted by Nabhonil Basu

WORKSHOPSThe Department allows a collective platform for the chosen studentsto participate in various workshops beyond the curriculum. In thesession 2016-17, the Department has organized three workshops:

Workshop on Elementary Linguistics and Training on LanguageDocumentation- It was a joint venture with Jadavpur University,Kolkata, where Dr. Atanu Saha, Assistant Professor, from theDepartment for Linguistics, JU, conducted a two-days event whichcarried both theoretical and practical components of LanguageDocumentation and was attended by our students and groups of studententhusiasts and faculty members from neighbouring colleges ofMurshidabad. One objective of this workshop was to promote a newdiscipline within the students community of this district.

Workshop on English Proficiency and Communicative Skills: The facultymembers of the Department conducted this day-long event to make thestudents work in smaller groups. This was targeted at the first andthe second year students. The participants carried various activitiesin groups and presented at the end of the workshop. This workshopshowed that English could be fun when the participants are indulgedbeyond the books.

Snippets of Workshop on Elementary Linguistics

conducted by Dr.Atanu Saha, Deptt of Linguistics, JU

Workshop on Digital News: How an Online News Agency Works: The one-dayevent was organised by The Bricoleurs, English Literary Society, and wasconducted by Arnab Nandy from THE TELEGRAPH. It was primarily a practicaloriented workshop where participants created their own news feeds and got alive in-hand experience of working in the world of Digital Media. Thiscould be an upcoming career option for a few enthusiastic participants.

The Department and IQAC of the college have jointly organised a FacultyDevelopment Workshop on Teacher Skill Development Programme for ESLLearners where Rituparna Mukherjee, Department-in-charge, Department ofCommunicative English, Jogmaya Devi College, Kolkata, conducted the day-long event where faculty members from six neighbouring collegesparticipated along with the faculty members of this department. It wasrather a small group in which we had intense discussions regarding theproblems we face in teaching the students of Murshidabad. One outcome ofthe workshop was an agreement to build up a network between colleges tocombat the problems. This is in process of getting materialised in the nearfuture.

Snippets of

Digital News

Workshop

conducted by

Arnab Nandy,

The Telegraph

FILM SCREENINGS

Our generation is integrally connected to Visual Culture. Film,thereby, becomes an essential mode of pedagogy for thisdepartment. The range of films screened since 2015 include:

Macbeth, 1948, dir. Orson Welles

Twelfth Night, 1996, dir. Trevor Nunn

Mrs. Dalloway, 1997, dir. Marleen Gorris

A Tale of Two Cities, 1958, dir. Ralph Thomas

Modern Times, 1936, dir. Charles Chaplin

Gupi Gain Bagha Bain, 1969, dir. Satyajit Ray

Hirak Rajar Deshe, (“In the kingdom of Raja Hirak”), 1980

Pather Panchali (“The Song of the Roads”), 1955

DOCUMENTARIES

Sukumar Ray, 1987, dir. Satyajit Ray

RabindraNath Tagore, 1961, dir. Satyajit Ray

Each screening is followed by an immediate or series of discussions onthe mise-en-scène, the diegetic world, the genres and stylistics ofcinema and most importantly on the politics of representation. Thestudents will soon be introduced to auteurs across the globe to have abroader knowledge of cinema and it’s ethics. This part of pedagogy isaimed also for students who could opt for Film Studies or Media Studies,Journalism & Mass Communication, Visual Art & Aesthetics and even thinkof making films and/or documentaries as a part of their career. Thisalternative career option is one area that we are trying to cultivate inthis part of Bengal.

REMEDIAL CLASSES The Department stands firm on the anomalies practiced in Bengal in the

name of private tution and bazaar note culture. Here we offer thosestudents who fail to secure pass marks or feel less empowered due tothe burden of an acquired tongue, English, an option of RemedialClasses. This initiative has started in the session 2016-17 with a fewstudents agreeing to participate for their betterment. As many as 10such classes have been conducted by the faculty members to completethe syllabus of a session. Each day includes two classes, one houreach, a written test (30minutes) and a formative evaluation at the endof the day showing the result of the outcome based on the lecturesdelivered on that very day. These students are thoroughly counselledduring evaluation and are grouped according to their performances.However, this formative evaluation method is still at its initiallevel and the faculty members are working together to uphold thepractice and empower the weaker section of the student community to beat par with the more advanced section. The last session we improvisedour lectures as we moved on, however, this session we have a coursemodule to sustain this innovative and participatory project.

Remedial Class in progress

CELEBRATIONS/TRIBUTES

The Department paid tribute to DR. BHIM RAO AMBEDKAR on hisdeath anniversary through a lecture-demonstration by Md.Dilwar Hossain on his life, ideas and works. It was anaudio-visual event which brought his oeuvre into life.

World Theatre Day: The Bricoleurs, English Literary Societyof the Department collectively remembered the theatreactivists of the world to celebrate this day. A lecture-demonstration on the trajectory of theatre activism in theEast and the West was delivered by Mr. Sudipto Mukhopadhyayon this occasion.

INNOVATIVE PEDAGOGY The Department has been able to generate a dialogic space within

the classroom. Participatory based activities like Extempore,Debates, Quiz and Group Discussions are frequently used to breakthe monologic lecture-oriented classrooms. It has bore fruitssince in the session 2016-17 , one of our regular students, TaniaRoy, won the first prize for Extempore in the State-levelcompetition organised by the State Government. Many of ourstudents actively participate in Extempore, Debates and Quizacross the state.

Two major components of Innovate Pedagogy that the Department hasinitiated are:

1. ICT CLASSROOM TEACHING- With growing advancement in teaching-learning proceses an audio-visual interation becomes imperative.

2. LANGUAGE LAB- This is going to be a new addition to our teaching-learning method this session where in a student would be empoweredto speak, listen and read in English.

ANNUAL EDUCATIONAL TRIP

In the session 2015-16, the entire departmentvisited the abode of peace, Santiniketan and gota glimpse of Tagore’s innovative teaching praxis.

In the session 2016-17, the students and thefaculty members visited the Cossimbazar Rajbariand the local Dutch Cemetery at Cossimbazar.

Annual Educational Trip

Shantiniketan

&

Cossimbazar Rajbari

&

Departmental Reunion

This year we were able to provide a link with the old students andthe current batches in the form of a Departmental Reunion. Thestudents alumni of previous years participated in the event andthe best performers from every batch were felicitated with booksrelevant to their career goals.

The students perfomed at various levels with songs, dances,recitions.

The faculty members too added to the event with a surpriseimprovised performance of a short skit, Refund, an adapation ofthe one-act play by Fritz Karinthy.

Outgoing

batch

2015-16

Outgoing

batch

2016-17

Snippets of Departmental Reunion

Other institutioinal facilities WOMEN’S DEVELOPMENT CELL (Pratyayee): Pratyayee, as the name

suggests, provides a collective platform for students toempower them through multiple methods of skill development andawareness.

STUDENTS’ COUNSELING CELL- The students are regularly counselledby the Department. However beyond the department a studentcould take additional support from this specialized unit runby the Department of Philosophy.

CAREER COUNSELING & PLACEMENT CELL: This unit is acollaborative body along with Sripat Singh College, CareerDevelopment Cell. The unit has a major component whereprofessional guidance is given to students for CompetitiveExaminations. The first session begins from July, 2017.

ECO CLUB (Arcadia): The Eco Club provides an environmentalconsciousness through various small scale group projects.

NSS: The NSS of our college has been working under theguidance of Dr. Supam Mukherjee and Mr. Sudhin Chakraborty. Inthe last few years they have become a backbone of the collegefor their collective efforts, innovative approach and socialactivism.