About

The Master of Arts programme in English and Cultural Studies aims to provide an interdisciplinary grounding in Cultural Studies and allied disciplines, including literature. The courses offered provide a range of perspectives for understanding ‘culture’ and ‘cultural practices’ in all their nuances through relevant theoretical frameworks as well as through a practice-based component that includes field-work, internships, and other forms of engaging with contexts beyond ‘texts’ alone.

The curriculum aims to create discursive spaces within as well as outside the classroom, encouraging learners to actively engage with the social world. The programme places an emphasis on rigorous scholarly work as well as with more creative forms of shaping research outputs. In keeping with Christ University’s emphasis on academic excellence, the programme is up-to-date with contemporary pedagogies as well as curricular content.

Folklore scholarship in earlier times derived from antiquarian and philological backgrounds, which formulates folklore as a collectible object. Scholars in the last fifty years have moved to a re conceptualisation of folklore, from collecting, examining and comparing texts to analysing the concontextstexts in which it is being performed. Following such contemporary reorientation, this course traces the evolution of the ‘folk’ from an outdated or obsolete entity of the past to a contemporary evolving and dynamic field. It introduces learners to various theoretical concepts and genres of folklore and emphasises its local and regional specific peculiarities across the globe. Following Bauman (1977) and other scholars, this course enables students to understand folklore in communicative interaction and study it in living situations, attending to factors such as participant’s roles, audiences, styles, identities and performance contexts. The course also explores how changing cultural contexts generate countless variants of folk narratives in local, regional and national contexts. It gives an overview of the methodology, skills, professional ethics and techniques related to folkloristic research. Through this course, students will be equipped to offer insider interpretations of local folk traditions and practices through the lenses of global, theoretical and methodological frameworks. 

• to demonstrate a general understanding of the concepts, genres and theories of folkloristics that leads to a particular field of expertise in folkloristics through in-class seminars, discussions and field-based pilot studies.

• to explore the conceptual resources adequate to comprehend and investigate diverse folk practices by collecting, documenting and analysing the local, regional and national folk practices in India.

• to evaluate the frameworks in interpreting folklore in the contemporary cultural contexts through discussions and research outputs based on popular media representations of the folk texts.

• to curate folklore archives and digital repositories of cultural content  through project-based ethnographic research