Literature, Language, and the Classroom : Essays for Promodini Varma

This book is a Festschrift dedicated to Promodini Varma, a meticulous scholar, teacher, and administrator of extraordinary rigour, grit, and perception. It presents reflections on researching and teaching English literatures and languages in India. It concerns itself broadly with literary modernism and English language teaching and classroom pedagogy, some of the core concerns of the literary fraternity today. The volume examines how the literary and cultural manifestations of modernity have pervasively informed not just much of our disciplinary framework but many of the key issues—decolonisation, globalisation, development—our society grapples with.

With essays on William Butler Yeats, Arthur Conan Doyle, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, and Rudyard Kipling, the volume presents fresh insights on familiar canonical ground. It discusses ELT and classroom pedagogy and provides grounded appraisals of teaching and translating for multilingual classroom audiences given the demands of employability and the hierarchical dynamics of educational institutions. An interview on feminist pedagogy and theatre and an essay on urban nostalgia and redevelopment act as pertinent outliers, reflecting the ongoing transition to more multi-sited and interdisciplinary research and praxis.

An engaging read on some of the most pressing concerns in the field, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature and literary criticism, English language studies, and education.