English Teachers’ Accounts: Essays on the Teacher, the Text and the Indian Classroom

This book looks at the figure of the English teacher in Indian classrooms and examines the practice and relevance of English and India’s colonial legacy, many decades after independence. The book is an account of the varied experiences of teaching English in universities in different parts of the country. It highlights the changes in curriculum and teaching practices and how the discipline lent itself to a study of culture, historical contexts, the fashioning of identities or reform over the years. The volume presents the dramatic changes in the composition of the English classroom in terms of gender, class, caste and indigenous communities in recent decades, as well as the shifts in teaching strategies and curriculum which the new diversity necessitated. The essays in the collection also examine the distinctiveness of English practice in India through classroom accounts which explore themes like post-coloniality, feminism and human rights through the study of texts by Shakespeare, Beckett, Doris Lessing and poetry from the Northeast. This book will be of interest to academics, researchers, students and practitioners of English Studies, education, colonial studies, cultural studies and South Asian studies, as well as those concerned with the history of higher education and the establishment of disciplines and institutions.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Acknowledgments 1. The Haunted Classroom: The Afterlife of Allusions 2. Teaching Cymbeline During India’s #MeToo Moment 3. English, Human Rights and Literature in the Postcolonial Classroom 4. Critical Pedagogy: Theorizing the Literatures of Northeast India 5. The Fissured Surface of the Text: Reading the Gaps and Silences in A Passage to India 6. Cultural Intersections and Nature Writing: Teaching Nature Poetry 7. Traversing Distances and Differences: Teaching Kanthapura 8. Pedagogy, Performance and Transgression: Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot 9. Teaching postcoloniality through The Grass is Singing 10. Uncomfortable Questions and Answers: Teaching Death in Venice 11. A Portrait of the Researcher as a Young Teacher: James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the Classroom

About the Author :
Nandana Dutta is Professor of English at the University of Gauhati, India. Her teaching and research interests are in American studies, gender, postcolonial theory and literature, travel writing and the discipline of English in India. Her publications include Questions of Identity in Assam: Location, Migration, Hybridity (2012), American Literature (in the ‘Literary Contexts’ series, 2016) and Mothers, Daughters and Others: Representation of Women in the Folk Narratives of Assam (edited with an Introduction, 2013), among others.